The key to a Covid-secure Christmas? Just follow any government’s advice but this one

One of the more convenient aspects of a truly global pandemic is the range of public health advice available for people whose own governments are failing them.

If, for example, your government, in the form of Matt Hancock, is telling you the evidence in favour of wearing a mask on public transport is “weak”, as it was back in April, you have a clear choice. You can either listen to him, and try not to notice comparatively non-existent infection rates in Asian countries where face masks are widely worn. Or you can instead listen to, say, Germany and Spain, where mask-wearing in public places had been mandatory for some time, and wait for the inevitable UK U-turn, which came a few weeks later.

Or, if it’s early March and all over Europe, stringent lockdowns are being introduced. You’re not altogether too sure whether you really believe your government’s little plan, of trying to land the peak of the pandemic in the short window before people won’t have tired of lockdown, like a hobo trying to leap on to a moving train in an old spaghetti western, is going to work. But that’s fine, because you can just choose, en masse, as a nation to lock yourself down anyway, as the British public did, before their prime minister came along a few days later and, inevitably again, brought in a lockdown.

Or if Christmas is just around the corner, and you really can’t help noticing some extremely dire statistics. Like, for example, London moving into tier 3, at the very same time the transport secretary Grant Shapps is announcing 80,000 extra coach seats to take Londoners out of their giant Covid hotspot and back to their families all around the country.

If you’ve noticed the worrying statistics that make clear that the virus is currently most prevalent among schoolchildren, so prevalent in fact that in some parts of the capital and the surrounding areas, eight of every nine schools have shut down completely, it may be that you’re having doubts about whether it’s really wise to have your own school age children sharing the Christmas turkey with grandma and grandpa this year.

What is really rather fortunate is you don’t have to listen to the complete silence on the subject from your own prime minister, you can just pop online and find a number of now viral videos from Angela Merkel.

Last week, Germany recorded 590 deaths in a single day, which is a lot by their standards, though fairly normal by ours. This, she said, was “unacceptable.”

“We are in a decisive, perhaps the decisive, phase of fighting the pandemic,” she said. “If it’s our last Christmas with our grandparents, then we will have been negligent.”

Germany, and Italy too, have shelved plans for a Covid Christmas amnesty, at least partially based on the understanding that Covid itself is unlikely to follow the rules.

It does not appear to have affected either leader’s general public popularity. It is only over here that the prime minister must be asked, from about September onwards, whether he intends to “cancel Christmas”.

It is only over here that it seems the government must conclude that there is no point seeking to introduce rules stopping people from seeing family members at Christmas because they will only break them anyway.

It’s not merely that, by that logic, why bother having, for example, speed limits on motorways. It’s that, you know, every little helps. If we are told, as a country, sorry, you’ll have to stay put for Christmas, just this year, it may very well be that 20 per cent of people will take no notice, but the other 80 per cent will abide by the rules. And in the world of slowing down the spread of a highly contagious disease, that counts for rather a lot.

Asked in private about whether the five day Christmas amnesty should be cancelled, one “senior government source” told The Guardian it was only the “sneering media elite” that wanted to cancel Christmas. That people can be trusted to make their own decisions for themselves.

Which they can, but, you know, people also not merely elect but also pay for a government to take the necessary decisions, and to set the necessary parameters to uphold public health.

There’s no other way. People can’t do it by and for themselves. They do have a right to be led by people who aren’t too superficially afraid of their own superficial popularity to tell them something they might not want to hear.