The virtual parliament was a complete success, so of course it must be ended at once

The virtual parliament has been a resounding success so it should come as a surprise to no one that it will be brought to an end in three days' time.

As things stand, the House of Commons will rise on Thursday, then return to its normal ways after the whitsun recess at the start of June.

“Parliament must set an example,” was how Jacob Rees-Mogg justified the decision, falling agonisingly short of the nanoscopic levels of self-awareness required to realise that if you want to “set an example” you could potentially start by not having a “whitsun recess”.

“It is vital that when we are asking other people to work and go to their places of work if they cannot do so from home we should not be the ones who are exempt from that,” Mr Rees-Mogg explained.

Now, you or I might think, having perhaps watched a bit of the virtual parliament on TV over the last few weeks, that it’s abundantly clear that they absolutely can do their jobs from home.

And that if they choose to rush back to the House of Commons for no reason whatsoever beyond their own insatiable lust for their own sense of self-importance, what they’re very, very obviously doing is making themselves exempt from the rules they expect everybody else to follow. That the example they set is the same as always, which is unchanged in hundreds of years – namely, "do as we say, not as we do".

But it’s not simple as that. Senior Tories will freely admit in private that the main reason the virtual parliament isn’t working is because it is becoming a bit awkward to watch Boris Johnson having his arse handed to him at prime minister’s questions every week to a backdrop of deafening silence, and that it is vital that the traditional backbench baboon chorus be summoned at once.

And in that sense, and absolutely no other, the government is at least adhering to their own advice. Large numbers of Tory MPs know that their job involves precious little beyond emitting low level growling noises at noon on Wednesdays to provide a sort of aural white noise masking effect for the blindingly obvious uselessness of the man they chose to be their leader.

Whether tens of thousands of avoidable deaths really can ever be brayed away is doubtful, but it certainly can’t be done from home.

Last week Plymouth MP and absolute top boy legend Johnny Mercer gleefully posted pictures of himself about to take ministerial questions from home while wearing his suit jacket, tie, trousers and boxer shorts.

Over the coming weeks, the government will have to face questions about why it forcibly sent people out of hospitals and into care homes without testing them for coronavirus, setting forth what appears to have been a tsunami of Covid-19 deaths among those most vulnerable to it. At least now the public can be certain no minister will be facing up to the horrifying consequences of those decisions with their trousers secretly off for lols.

It will mean, of course, that the very large number of MPs who are over 70, and have demonstrated that they very easily can work from home, will no longer be able to, and will instead have to risk their lives for no greater reason than to spare the prime minister’s blushes, whatever party they’re from.

(Naturally, over the last few weeks, not all septuagenarian MPs have worked from home where possible as per government guidance. For reasons that only he and therefore no one can know, Jeremy Corbyn has regularly appeared in person, and can also often be found striking up entirely unsocially distanced and indeed unwanted chats in the Commons canteen. This, you will not need reminding, is a man whose entire world view is based on the certain knowledge that all people are equal, it’s just that he personally happens to float above the trivialities of medical science.)

All this does make it a touch awkward, yet again, for Boris Johnson, who last week claimed on three separate occasions that “employers must be understanding” when forcing people to return to work if it isn’t safe or practical for them to do so.

One of the delightful "quirks" of the largely HR department-free Westminster parliamentary system is that all 650 MPs count as employers. Should any of their staff not be altogether happy at having to go back into the office for precious little reason, it's fair to conclude some might be more understanding than others. After all, there was that official independent inquiry into MPs bullying their staff last year, which concluded much the same.

For Jacob Rees-Mogg to claim that "parliament must set an example" intimates he thinks the public can't manage without being shown by their MPs how to behave, which in turn intimates he has lived all his life not merely as a PG Wodehouse cosplay character, but actually underground.

Where would we all be without the example set by our MPs? You know, the ones whose job it is to make the laws, yet seven of whom have still managed to get themselves jailed for a fairly wide variety of crimes in only the last ten years.

We have all known it for a long time. The only example they set is that their work is simply more important than yours, and that the nation just cannot function without their coming together to whinny in one another’s faces and waggle bits of paper about in the air as a displacement activity for their own staggeringly unignorable failures.

Unfortunately for them, they made the mistake of briefly allowing everyone to see through it, and that transparency must be brought to an end at once, whatever the cost for others.