Shades of 1976 drought as a new national emergency looms – David Behrens

Where they were headed, no ne knows. I hear Barnard Castle is nice at this time of year.

It was not surprising that patience with the quarantine restrictions was wearing thin. After more than two months of them we’ve gone stir crazy, and if one person could rewrite the rules to suit himself, or so it seemed, so could everyone else.

That was certainly the view of David Jamieson, Police Commissioner in the West Midlands, who reported that those suspected of being somewhere they shouldn’t have been were telling officers that they were merely following Dominic Cummings’ example.

But if ever there was a week for looking forward instead of back, this is it. At last, the prospect of seeing our families again, of going shopping and sending the children back to school is on the horizon. It is a time for caution certainly, but above all a time to rejoice and count our blessings.

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Yet even as the clock ticked towards the moment when the sock counter at Marks & Spencer could once more be declared open, the seeds of another national emergency were being sown.

There was no need to panic, implied the water companies in the same, unconvincing tone adopted by Boris Johnson during his “business as usual” phase in early March – but they thought we ought to know that there had been barely any rainfall for three months and unless we did something about it, it might be 1976 all over again.

Their advice is the very opposite of the PM’s recommendation to wash our hands as often as possible. They would rather we turned the taps off, not on.

Yorkshire Water assured us that it was adept at moving the stuff around its “underground grid network” – that’s pipes, to you and me – but warned that we would all have to play our part in saving it. There was talk elsewhere of people subversively filling their paddling pools during the nice weather, watering their lawns and pressure washing their driveways.

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Those are three of the only pleasures we’ve had left, but also three more that we can no longer take for granted. If reservoir levels continue to fall, there will be a ramping-up of the rhetoric, just as there was from Downing Street in March, and eventually someone will invoke the dreaded word ‘standpipe’, to frighten us into believing that we will have to queue for a bucket of water if we fail to obey another new set of rules.

No one told us not to pressure wash our driveways in 1976 because half the country didn’t have washing machines for their pants, let alone their patios, but hosepipes were quickly outlawed. We were supposed to share a bath and put a brick in the cistern, too.

But as far as I remember, that hot summer had not been preceded by one of the wettest winters on record, with unprecedented floods that cost hundreds their homes. The victims of the one just passed will have little truck with anyone who tells them that there is not now enough water to go around.

And they are not the only ones to feel disenfranchised. Those police incidents in Leeds and the Dales were not isolated cases of civil disobedience, but the manifestation of a simmering mistrust of officialdom that has boiled over in the last few days.

It was a mood also felt at the seaside, where hundreds flocked to enjoy temperatures that rose in inverse proportion to the Prime Minister’s approval rating, and at Ruislip Lido in London, where police had to disperse a large group. They’d have probably used water cannons if they had any water.

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These breaches of the quarantine dam occurred because people had lost faith in the Government’s ability to manage their expectations by communicating with them honestly and openly. When it seemed that the man in charge of communications had taken them for fools, their patience ran out. And then so did they.

The question for the administration, as it looks forward with the rest of us, is what possible service can be rendered to it by a man so transparently out of touch with the public mood.

It is serendipitous that in this moment of renewed relationships, Mr Cummings should expect to be spending a lot more time with his family.

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