Lay off Matt Hancock, Covid rule breaches no worse than exceeding speed limit - Yorkshire Post Letters

I am not a natural defender for Matt Hancock, but a couple of things strike me about the current furore. One is the lesson for Rishi Sunak: if you want your colleagues to stay on-side, don’t publicly snub them.

Another is the all too common effect whereby some relatively few members of a much larger group, generally the more belligerent, appoint themselves as spokespeople for the rest and are promptly anointed in this role by the media. This, I suspect, is a source of much ill-will between communities, who form their impressions of each other via their ‘representatives’ rather than their rank-and-file.

Thus it was that we could be told instantly that the ‘Covid bereaved’, surely a diverse group of more than a million people, were outraged at Mr Hancock’s entry to the jungle.

We recognise anger as a natural part of the bereavement process. When a substantial number die in what may be regarded as the same event, we show exaggerated respect for the feelings of their bereaved, or rather a heightened fear of them finding some opportunity to take offense.

They are given carte blanche to act out their anger and weaponise their bereavement.

We forget that bereavement is no less painful for those whose loved one died in isolated circumstances. This is an experience which almost everyone has suffered or will do, excepting only those with the alternative fate of their own early demise.

As for the sense of being wronged and of injustice, I would put the much trumpeted Covid rule breaches on a par with marginally exceeding the speed limit. How many drivers have not done this and how must that feel to anyone whose relative has been run-over?

I suspect that the eagerly awaited enquiry, if objective, will find that Covid policy tended with some exceptions to be an overreaction to the problem.

That may in part be to say that some measures taken had little effect. But it also says, bluntly, that in a better run country more people rather than fewer would have died.