Boris Johnson is right – we’re all wrong for failing to predict the government’s knee-jerk coronavirus rules

At last, the advice from the prime minister is clear. In his big speech on Tuesday, he announced: “It’s YOUR fault it’s going wrong again. When we said ‘GO TO PUBS,’ we didn’t mean you should go to pubs, you idiots. And when we said, ‘You ABSOLUTELY MUST go back to work, we’re not funding you any more while you loaf around getting furloughed, you fat, lazy, bastards,’ we didn’t mean you should go back to work.”

Then came a heart-warming moment, when he said: “While the vast majority have complied with the rules, there have been TOO MANY BREACHES.” This was a record-breaking sentence in British history, causing the greatest number of people ever to say one person’s name at once. From the crofts of Shetland to the tower blocks of east London, the entire country shouted: “Oh, like Dominic Cummings.” It was a touching moment that brought us together as a nation.

The need to understand the changing rules has become more urgent now that the army is involved. They’ll be halfway through carrying out an instruction to fire at groups of more than six teenagers sat in the park drinking cider, when the rules will change to “everyone MUST drink four tins of cider an hour to save the apple industry”, and in the confusion, there will be 20,000 killed in an incident known as the “Great Strongbow Massacre”.

It means you need to listen to the news at all times, as you could be on the way to work to save the economy when the rules change and you have to stay at home to save the elderly. To stay within the law, some people will have to drive round and round the interchange as you come off the M1 – until they’re airlifted out of Brent Cross by a helicopter.

Similarly, it seems you MUST continue to buy Pret a Manger beetroot salad to keep them going, but MUST NOT travel to Pret a Manger. Instead, you MUST MOVE HOUSE and live in Pret a Manger, so you can buy all their five-berry Bircher yoghurt pots without going anywhere.

Occasionally, it seems that Johnson’s Etonian entitlement might slip out, and he’ll say: “You should try and work from one of your homes, such as your holiday apartment in Portugal.”

But the main change was that pubs will be subject to a 10pm curfew, because the one thing we know for certain about this virus is that it stays in between 7 and 10pm, watching the football, then goes out for a pint and causes all the trouble.

Boris Johnson was even more coherent when he was asked why the number of cases in Britain has been higher than anywhere else in Europe. He answered that we have more cases because we’re a “freedom-loving country”.

He insists that we’ve been “following the science”, so there must have been a report from scientists that this virus hates freedom, which is why it attacks us most.

He should tell us more about this theory, as it hasn’t been mentioned before. It was believed that to stay safe from catching the virus, you had to wash your hands and keep two metres away from people. But it turns out the best way to make sure you don’t catch it is through belief in the state’s attempts to control more sections of society. Following that, the virus will piss off and infect free people in America.

This is our trouble: we are supposed to wear face masks to the Co-op, but it makes our British liberty-loving gene kick in, so instead we drive 200 miles to cough over some strangers in a park because freedom is IN OUR BLOOD.

This must also be why the virus started in China, another freedom-loving nation. It must have been furious with them as well.

Johnson went on: “And if you look at the history of this country over the last 300 years, virtually every advance from free speech to democracy has come from this country.” So the reason we’ve had more deaths in care homes than any other country is that we invented the steam engine. It’s obvious once you think about it.

To complete his mastery of the situation, he declared that questions about the government’s failure to deliver the test and trace system they promised are irrelevant because test and trace “has nothing to do with the spread of the disease”.

Various people tried to respond to this, but the only meaningful retort is “WHAT? DO F****** WHAT? AAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!!!!!”

They said their test and trace would be a “world beater”, a “game changer”, ready in May, then June, then July, now never ready, but it doesn’t matter.

If the law worked this way, a defendant could say: “I couldn’t have robbed the post office in Ipswich that day, as I was in Nepal on a retreat where we care for injured yaks.” Then CCTV footage would emerge of them buying a shotgun from Ipswich’s premier arms dealer, and the judge would say: “Oh well, let’s draw a line under it, as it’s been a difficult time for all of us.”

In reality, if a bus driver said to their manager: “I will take the 159 to Marble Arch,” then six weeks later, the passengers were still waiting by the side of the road – and when the driver was questioned, he said, “I am a world-beating bus driver. I won the Brazilian Grand Prix on this thing, AND I took everyone’s fares while overtaking Sebastian Vettel on a notorious hairpin bend. In any case, whether or not I drive my bus makes no difference as to whether the bus goes anywhere” – he may face disciplinary action.

But this lot make up whatever they want and it doesn’t seem to matter. So the question scientists must now answer, more urgently than how we make a vaccine, is: “How do these ***** get away with it?”