March

Womxn? Bullshixt

SUNDAY 1 MARCH

The ridiculous government ban on ministers coming on GMB remains in force, so when I saw Matt Hancock appearing on Andrew Marr’s BBC One show this morning, I tweeted him some forceful words of encouragement. ‘Will you be coming on GMB tomorrow to inform our viewers of the latest situation, or will you be snubbing us as the entire cabinet has done since the election? Our viewers pay your salary, you have a duty in times of crisis to address their concerns. Snub us & you snub them.’

We were later informed he would indeed be snubbing us, and our viewers, so I told the GMB team to book his Labour shadow counterpart Jon Ashworth instead. Naturally, Ashworth agreed faster than a greyhound flies out of a trap. I announced this on Twitter: ‘We’ll have him [Ashworth] on every day he wants to appear during the coronavirus crisis, as Fridge-Hider Boris Johnson & his cowardly cabinet continue to snub our viewers.’ Ashworth was thrilled. ‘If you’re offering,’ he tweeted back, ‘I’m more than happy to come on every day, let’s book it in!’

Based on 25 years of dealing with governments since I first became editor of the News of the World in 1994, my guess is that this little exchange will finally force Hancock’s hand. It’s one thing to boycott a show, it’s quite another to see your rival taking up all the airtime you have surrendered, especially during a crisis. It’s pathetically gutless and a dereliction of ministerial duty to be accountable to the electorate. It’s also breathtakingly hypocritical.

Aside from the fact Boris Johnson used to be a journalist who banged on ad nauseam about the vital importance of democracy and freedom of speech, the man behind the ban is Number 10’s Director of Communications Lee Cain, who previously worked for the Daily Mirror, where he used to dress up as a giant yellow chicken and harangue Conservative politicians in the street for avoiding TV debates.

MONDAY 2 MARCH

In the USA, Senator Amy Klobuchar has quit the Democratic presidential candidate race – which means the remaining candidates are Elizabeth Warren, aged 70, Bernie Sanders, 78, Michael Bloomberg, 78, and Joe Biden, 77. The party of diversity will now likely choose a candidate from three old white guys to take on a 73-year-old white guy. It’s one thing to talk the talk on liberal values, it’s another to actually walk it. If wokies spent less time shrieking about Donald Trump and more time focusing on their own liberal backyard, they might have found a more inspiring, diverse and less hypocritical line-up.

TUESDAY 3 MARCH

NHS England today declared coronavirus a ‘Level 4 incident’ – its highest level of emergency. Britain hasn’t yet suffered a death on her own soil from the disease, but we’ve now had 30 reported cases, and we’ve all seen what carnage it’s already caused in many other countries. Covid-19, the most dangerous threat to public health since the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago, is here and wreaking its havoc.

Matt Hancock, who as I predicted, finally agreed to be interviewed on GMB after we handed airtime to his opposite number, appeared down the line from Westminster. ‘These circumstances are very concerning,’ he said, ‘and we have a clear plan for how the country can get through this as well as possible. We’re still in the phase where we’re trying to contain this disease, working internationally, and trying to stop it from becoming widespread right across the country as it has in some other places. But we’re also setting out today the sorts of measures we might have to take if it becomes more widespread. We’re not saying these are things we will definitely do, and lots of them are things I’m reluctant to do, but we will do them if the scientists tell us they will help to keep people safe.’

‘Health Secretary,’ I replied, ‘the truth is it’s going to be when, not if, isn’t it? SARS in its entire duration infected just over 8,000 people and killed 770 or so. We’re already at 89,000 coronavirus infections and over 3,000 deaths. We know the rate of transmission is massively faster than anything we’ve seen or that I can remember. So surely it is now time for the government to accept this and to start getting ahead of this by taking dramatic action. What surprises me is there’s a lot of talk about what we might do, but what we’re not doing is what the Chinese did, which is go into effective lockdown. Why are we not doing that, and what will it take for the government to take us into similar territory?’

‘We’ll follow the scientific advice on what works,’ Hancock replied.

He then said people should carry on flying, schools should stay open and mass gatherings should continue, including big football matches, which he said ‘would not be appropriate’ to cancel. None of this makes any sense to me. Why is it OK for large groups of people to be mingling together if this is such a virulently transmissible virus?

‘Should people be shaking hands?’ I asked.

‘I’ve taken the medical advice on that and the medical advice is that the impact of shaking hands is actually very small. What matters is that you wash your hands more regularly than usual and, as the prime minister said, sing “Happy Birthday” while you’re doing it.’

Again, I was baffled. This answer was totally at odds with current WHO advice, which states that people should ‘avoid shaking hands’ to protect themselves and others from Covid-19, and warns, ‘Respiratory viruses can be passed by shaking hands and touching your eyes, nose and/or mouth.’

Shaking hands as a lethal virus spreads is obviously not a good idea. Common sense seems to have been abandoned. I ended by asking Hancock the most burning question. ‘Given the rate of expansion of coronavirus now into 80 countries, whereas SARS only got into 29 countries, and given the rate of transmission, what are the chances of this developing into a global pandemic?’

‘We do think that is a very serious possibility,’ he said. ‘But we haven’t given up on containing it yet.’ What I don’t understand is how we intend to contain it, if our only weapon appears to be handwashing.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan appeared later in the programme and declared, ‘There is no risk in using the tube or buses or other forms of public transport.’

I was incredulous.

‘How do you know that, Mr Mayor?’ I retorted. ‘No disrespect, but how on earth can you say that in a city of 12 million people there is no risk given that we now know it’s here and it’s beginning to spread here and we know that in other countries the spread has been ferocious, places like Italy and Iran. How can you say as Mayor of London there is no risk to people using public transport?’

‘Because I rely upon the advice I receive from Public Health England and the Chief Medical Officer,’ he replied, ‘and the advice is you’re not going to catch it if you wash your hands regularly and if you use public transport … on the tube on a daily basis there are five million journeys, on our buses six million journeys. The evidence we have so far is it’s possible to contain it.’ As with Hancock’s responses, this sounded extraordinarily complacent.

‘You seem remarkably relaxed about big numbers of people being in close proximity to big numbers of other people,’ I persisted, ‘when in Italy they’ve now cancelled big football matches … and when the evidence from other places is that once this thing starts in a country it moves very fast.’

‘It’s really important we take the advice we’re given,’ he replied. ‘We’ve had no fatalities in our country, and I would say to GMB viewers to have confidence in our experts.’

‘Are you shaking people’s hands?’ I asked.

‘I’m not,’ Khan replied.

What?! My incredulity returned. ‘You say there’s no risk to people using public transport in confined areas around lots of people,’ I snapped, ‘yet here’s you, the London Mayor, saying you’re no longer shaking people’s hands because you’ve taken a view that there is a risk.’

‘The advice is that it’s perfectly safe to use the tube and public transport,’ the mayoral parrot replied. Again, where does common sense come into it?

Boris Johnson later hosted the daily government coronavirus news briefing and warned we need to prepare against ‘a possible, very significant expansion of coronavirus in the UK population’. Asked if he was still shaking hands, he boasted, ‘I can tell you I’m shaking hands continuously! I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands, and it’s very important that people should make up their own minds but our judgement is that washing your hands is the crucial thing.’

It was an extraordinary spectacle. Why would anyone, let alone the leader of a country, encourage people to shake as many hands as possible given the WHO has said the coronavirus is easily transmitted in that way? Why would Boris think we’d all be pleased to know this?

Three more things happened today that made me think the shit with coronavirus just got very real. First, the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned after massive spikes in coronavirus infection in the worst-hit countries like South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan, ‘We are in unchartered territory.’ He also revealed the death rate for it has risen to 3.4 per cent compared with less than 1 per cent for regular seasonal flu.

Second, America’s Federal Reserve took the drastic emergency move to slash the interest rate by half a percentage point to limit damage to the economy from the virus. To put this into perspective, the US central bank hasn’t done anything like this since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 to trigger the global financial crisis. And nobody’s convinced that slashing interest rates now will make much difference to combating a disease. ‘It’s like placing a Band-Aid on an arm to cure a headache,’ said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economist. Indeed, after a brief rally, the cut prompted a further crash in the stock markets, which have already been suffering their worst run since 2008.

Third, the Queen – the very epitome of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ common sense – wore long, heavy-duty white gloves to present members of the public with honours at Buckingham Palace, the first time she is believed to have ever done this for an investiture.

Oh, and if all this wasn’t disconcerting enough, the French health minister called for a ban on the nation’s favourite practice, kissing. None of this seems like an overreaction to me.

In the USA, President Trump is desperately keen to keep a lid on a health crisis that could yet pose a decisive threat to his chances of winning the 2020 election in November. ‘Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,’ he tweeted, the day after the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) said the spread of the virus was inevitable. The CDC’s prediction sent the media into overdrive, which prompted Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, to say it was overreacting about coronavirus because ‘they think this is going to be what brings down the president’. But ironically, it will be underreaction to coronavirus by the Trump administration that could bring down the president.

If tough decisions need to be taken to contain the virus, then take them now. Nobody with half a brain will blame leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for doing too much too soon to combat what is clearly a very serious global threat to human life. But people rarely forgive their leaders for doing too little, too late. I’m not a normal panicker but I think coronavirus is going to be much more serious than people realise. And the war against it won’t be helped by either timidity or wokery.

The WHO has issued a new advisory saying: ‘DO – talk about people “acquiring” or “contracting” #Covid-19 … DON’T – talk about people “transmitting Covid-19”, “infecting others” or “spreading the virus” as it implies intentional transmission & assigns blame.’ What an absurd load of virtue-signalling guff.

This really doesn’t seem a good time to be going all politically correct on the language used to describe how you catch the virus. Surely, the stronger the wording, the more impact it will have and the more lives it will save. And conversely, the weaker the wording, the less impact it will have, and the fewer lives it will save. This bullshit advisory will simply annoy people and make them less likely to follow the guidance. So, in an absurd attempt to appease the wokies and PC language cops, the WHO – whose whole purpose is to save lives – may now cost lives.

WEDNESDAY 4 MARCH

Amid the growing global alarm over coronavirus, actress Busy Philipps announced on Twitter, ‘I will never stop talking about my abortion or my periods or my experiences in childbirth, my episiotomies, my yeast infections, or my ovulation that lines up w/ the moon!’

Dear God, if there’s only one good thing that comes out of this crisis, can it be that celebrities stop telling us about their yeast infections?

THURSDAY 5 MARCH

There’s been the first Covid-19 death on UK soil and the WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned: ‘We’re concerned that in some countries the level of political commitment & the actions that demonstrate that commitment don’t match the level of the threat we all face. This is NOT a drill, NOT the time to give up, NOT a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.’

It’s staggering to me that people, let alone world leaders, need to be told this given what’s happening in Italy, which today reported 769 new cases and 41 new deaths (bringing its death total to 148). It’s turning into total carnage there, yet Italy has one of the world’s best health-care systems.

Matt Hancock appeared on Question Time tonight and got a ridiculously easy time, so much so that he tweeted afterwards what ‘a pleasure’ it had been. He should have had much tougher interrogation, particularly given his continued insistence that mass gatherings are fine and don’t need to be cancelled.

‘Public gatherings aren’t a problem?’ I tweeted, incredulously. ‘Really? Then why is half the world moving to stop them?’

It would be nice to think we could enjoy a cessation of nauseating wokery until this is all over, but sadly not. Across the pond, Elizabeth Warren has pulled out of the race to be Democratic nominee, and of course blamed sexism. ‘One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years,’ she moaned. ‘That’s going to be hard.’

What self-pitying tripe, straight out of the Hillary ‘I won the popular vote!’ Clinton playbook. The truth is neither Clinton nor Warren ran good enough campaigns to beat the men they ran against. Playing the sexism card is pathetic and completely unjustified, and why should ‘little girls’ only want to vote for women anyway? Warren’s statement suggests women can’t win a US election at the moment, when there is no evidence to support that theory. They just need to be better candidates. Cynics said the same about a black person becoming president, then Obama came along to prove them all wrong by running a brilliant campaign.

This ‘pinky promises’ nonsense does women such a disservice.

FRIDAY 6 MARCH

Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been no-platformed by students half an hour before she was due to speak at Oxford University’s UN Women Oxford UK Society today about her experiences of being a minister for women and equalities.

Rudd, who stepped down as an MP in December, had her invitation pulled because of her previous involvement in the Windrush scandal. She was forced to resign as home secretary in April 2018, after it emerged that a large number of black legal immigrants had been illegally detained, denied legal rights, and in 83 cases deported from Britain, many of them people who had arrived before 1973 from Caribbean countries as members of the ‘Windrush generation’ – named after the Empire Windrush boat that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the UK in 1948.

It was a disgraceful episode, and Rudd was right to take responsibility and fall on her ministerial sword. But it should not disbar her from ever speaking to students about women’s rights. Rudd condemned her treatment by the students as ‘badly judged and rude’ and urged them to ‘stop hiding and start engaging’.

I’d have gone a lot further than that if they tried to pull this stunt on me. Surely, the whole point of university is to have your own opinions challenged, and to challenge other people’s opinions – not ban anyone whose opinions you don’t like? Why have our students become such a bunch of spineless snowflakes?

Universities used to be a place where contrary opinions were not just encouraged but considered essential to a student’s education. Somewhere that liberalism – discourse – was embraced and championed, and where freedom of speech was celebrated. Life on campus was once full of rigorous lively debate and speakers of all types were invited to come and give their opinions, the more controversial the better. Now, the only permitted opinions in universities around the world are those that the woke brigade have deemed permissible. If you deviate from these in any way, then you run the risk of being shamed, abused, no-platformed and, crucially, silenced.

This nonsense is a problem we’ve inherited from the USA, where no-platforming has been out of control for years – stifling free speech in the process – in an increasingly insidious way. One of America’s most no-platformed targets is firebrand conservative media pundit Ann Coulter, who is regularly the subject of abusive and violent scenes when she attends universities and colleges to speak.

Ms Coulter and I don’t see eye-to-eye about many things. I once spent 30 minutes shouting at her on CNN when she tried to defend calling President Obama a ‘retard’. Coulter can be obtuse, contradictory, offensive and incredibly irritating, and I usually completely disagree with everything she is saying. But I always enjoy our battles because she’s also very smart, highly entertaining and, like me, loves a good argument. More importantly, she also makes me think hard about my own opinions on big issues – challenging me to see another viewpoint. After all, there are tens of millions of Americans who think exactly like she does, which is why Coulter’s books invariably power to no. 1 in the New York Times bestseller list. And ultimately, this is how a proper democratic society should work: people with strongly held disparate views coming together to thrash them out in a public forum and hopefully reach points of consensus that benefit society. Unfortunately, that’s not how many liberals now see democracy.

I thus found it particularly dispiriting when Coulter was banned from speaking at the University of California, Berkeley because the bosses claimed it would prompt violent protests. ‘Unfortunately,’ Berkeley said in a letter to its student College Republicans group, ‘[campus police] decided that, given currently active security threats, it is not possible to assure the event could be held successfully.’ In other words, they choked to pressure from activists threatening violence to suppress democracy. Rather than stand up for freedom of speech, they bowed to mob rule.

What’s astonishing about this is that Berkeley was the very home of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. In 1964, Berkeley student Mario Savio made a speech about the vital importance of free and open discussion at the college. He urged the university to encourage students to debate all ideas, both mainstream and radical. Savio’s struggle was eventually successful, but only after he and his supporters endured suspension, arrest, fines and jail time. Yet Berkeley now seems to have decided it should be the home of killing off free speech, not promoting it. I find this appalling but not surprising.

The sad truth about modern liberals is that many of them don’t believe in free speech at all. They only believe in it if people agree with them. They don’t see their own opinions as opinions, they see them as ‘truth’, and if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they scream and shout, punch and kick, petrol bomb and stab, and furiously demand the offender be silenced and banned.

Ironically, Barack Obama, a woke hero, knows how dangerous it is. ‘It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem,’ he said at a town hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa. ‘Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side. And that’s a problem, too. I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language in it that is offensive to African Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. Anybody who comes to speak to you, and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because, you know, I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.’

Obama’s view was shared by Sir Winston Churchill, who said, ‘Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.’ And by a man from the opposite end of the political spectrum to Churchill, libertarian socialist Noam Chomsky, who said, ‘If we do not believe in freedom of speech for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.’

SATURDAY 7 MARCH

More grim news from Italy, where the whole of the Lombardy region of 10 million people has now been locked down – and the country’s health system is teetering on the verge of total collapse. Yet here in the UK most people, especially younger people, still seem remarkably relaxed about the virus, insisting it only affects old or sick people, so why do they need to worry about it?

There’s a horrible irony that the supposedly socially conscious ‘woke’ generation, so intent on ‘getting older people on board’ for things like gay rights, is so determined not to let a silly old pandemic curb their freedoms even if it kills a lot of old people. It’s also indicative of my wider belief that they’ve never had to endure anything really serious to give them perspective, so don’t even recognise a proper thing to genuinely worry about when it’s staring them in the face.

‘I keep hearing people say “stop scare-mongering about coronavirus, it only kills the elderly & those with an underlying illness”,’ I tweeted, ‘as if somehow we shouldn’t care about them. Well sorry, I do. And it’s time everyone stopped being complacent about this – it’s serious.’

I was met with another barrage of abuse for ‘scare-mongering’ – again – and ‘panicking people’. If only the trolls put as much energy into demanding firmer action from the government as they do into being outraged by me.

SUNDAY 8 MARCH

It’s International Women’s Day, and UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, posted a tweet to celebrate that read,

Hilariously, as people soon pointed out, the one category of woman they didn’t celebrate, in English at least, was ‘women’. Nothing more perfectly illustrates the ridiculousness of the gender debate than the deliberate refusal of organisations like the UN to use the word ‘women’ in case it offends people.

They aren’t the only villains in this regard. In 2018, the Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library in London, promoted an event aimed at ‘womxn’ to virtue-signal to the transgender lobby. When asked why they didn’t spell it ‘women’, the museum responded, ‘We’ve had some questions about why we’re using the word womxn for this event. We’re using it because we feel that it is important to create a space/venue that includes diverse perspectives. It was agreed during our conversations with collaborators as the programme developed.’

To which Labour MP Jess Phillips retorted, ‘I’ve never met a trans woman who was offended by the word woman being used, so I’m not sure why this keeps happening. As if internet dissent now replaces public policy. I get what they are trying to do, but why is it only women not men where this applies?’

Twitter user Suzie Leighton was more succinct: ‘Bullshixt.’

Today, Sadiq Khan, never a man to miss a virtue-signalling opportunity, tweeted that we should all ‘believe women, respect women, promote women, trust women’.

But, as I replied to him, what if the woman is lying? Or are we now supposed to presume every single woman on the planet is a perfect, morally untouchable version of Mother Teresa? Fortunately, many sensible women saw right through this absurd nonsense. Polly Vernon, a good friend and author of a refreshingly non-PC book Hot Feminist, tweeted, ‘I know some f*cking awful women, but I know some excellent ones too. We’re a mixed bunch.’

To round off the International Women’s Day farce, dozens of female Extinction Rebellion protestors chained themselves topless to Waterloo Bridge to ‘highlight vulnerable women in the face of climate breakdown’. They definitely got people’s attention, but judging by Twitter it was largely directed at the quality of their respective cleavages and not climate change, so the whole attention-seeking farce merely served to illustrate the ineffectiveness of this form of activism. ‘I bet this was a man’s idea,’ tweeted well-known ‘radical feminist’ blogger Jean Hatchet. ‘Or a woman who hasn’t worked out feminism yet.’ Greta Thunberg has achieved a lot more with a zipped-up anorak. One thing it won’t have achieved is make anyone think more seriously about how to save the planet.

Extinction Rebellion has demanded that ‘the government must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025’. This, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) – which supports XR’s demands – could only be fulfilled if all flying was scrapped, 38 million petrol and diesel cars were removed from the roads and 26 million gas boilers were disconnected. The ECIU said this was ‘an ambition that technically, economically and politically has absolutely no chance of being fulfilled’.

Notwithstanding this sobering reality check, many stars have clamoured to be seen with Extinction Rebellion, and of course, their own gigantically hypocritical carbon footprints were promptly highlighted by a gleeful media. None of them say they would give up flying. But at least they knew how absurd this sounds, for 100 celebrities, including Jude Law, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mel B and Steve Coogan, signed an open letter supporting Extinction Rebellion and admitting the obvious flaw in their position.

‘Dear journalists who have called us hypocrites,’ they wrote, ‘you’re right. We live high carbon lives and the industries that we’re part of have huge carbon footprints.’

But naturally, this admission didn’t stop them all lecturing us in the same letter about the impending death of the planet and demanding we all cut our carbon footprint. ‘The stories that you write calling us climate hypocrites will not silence us!’ they added. Clearly. This was like 100 morbidly obese people demanding we all stop eating so much food, but admitting they have no intention of doing so themselves – and running straight into the nearest McDonald’s to order a barrel load of Big Macs. Common sense, as so often the case, is getting completely drowned out by virtue-signalling and the need to be seen to do or say the right thing. And all this means is that real progress becomes impossible.

MONDAY 9 MARCH

I loved the Wombles when I was a kid. Author Elisabeth Beresford’s pointy-nosed, burrow-dwelling furry creatures were the first real eco-warriors when they burst onto our TV screens in the 1970s BBC classic – collecting and recycling rubbish, and demonstrating a selfless community spirit and respect for each other and the planet.

Now they’re being brought back in a new CGI version and, inevitably, they’ve been woked – with some of the Wombles now having darker skin tones, not just the original orange and grey tones, to make them ‘more relatable’ and ‘inclusive’. But Wombles aren’t real, they’re not humans, so why do they need to be made more ‘relatable’? This is yet another one of those nonsensical diversity box-ticking decisions that makes no sense, and which I’m sure nobody has ever actually demanded. It also makes a mockery of real diversity issues, and the undeniable need to make many aspects of society more ‘relatable’ and ‘inclusive’.

WEDNESDAY 11 MARCH

This afternoon, I watched on TV as the masses gathered at the Cheltenham Festival horserace meeting, all partying away like there was nothing to worry about. And tonight, I also watched Liverpool play a Champions League match against Atlético Madrid at Anfield, where another 52,000 people massed together – including 3,000 fans who flew in from Madrid, which is in lockdown because of a coronavirus outbreak so bad that no football is being allowed to be played there. Yet we have allowed thousands of people to fly in from a corona hotspot, with no checks on arrival, to potentially bring the virus into the UK, to watch a bloody football match. It seems insane.

As for the constant refrain that we are ‘following the science’, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of prestigious medical journal The Lancet, tweeted today, ‘The UK government – Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson – claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error.’

It seems to me we’re not learning anything from history. One of the reasons the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed between 17 million and 100 million people worldwide (the figure is disputed) was because of the shocking complacency by authorities and, as a result, the public.

For my generation, Covid-19 is the biggest threat to civilian life that we will have experienced since World War II, and it represents a particularly dangerous enemy because we still don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, or how bad things are going to get. Unlike a traditional foe, this is not something we can ‘defy’ with conventional weapons. It’s a virus, so if you come into contact with it, then it doesn’t matter how big or tough you are, you will get infected.

In fact, it’s estimated that 80 per cent of the entire planet may end up catching this coronavirus. Most, especially the very young and healthy, should emerge relatively unscathed. But for older people, and those with underlying health issues, Covid-19 is a very serious virus.

What we need now, just as in WWII, are calm heads, common-sense behaviour and stoicism. I can understand why people feel the need to stock up on basic essentials, given many of us will inevitably have to self-isolate. But there have been stunningly stupid, and grotesquely selfish, scenes of people cleaning out toilet roll shelves in supermarkets without a moment’s thought for whether some old lady living on her own may need some too, and buying up all the face masks when we know that health workers on the frontline have nowhere near enough.

It’s also been repulsive to hear so many moaning about possibly having to forgo their trips to the football, cinema, ski slopes or favourite restaurant for a few weeks or months. Are our elderly loved ones not worth skipping a movie for? No, we’re all going to have to make sacrifices for a bit. If that means postponing holidays, missing some sport or drinking at home rather than the pub, then so be it.

The bottom line is this: life’s going to get rough for a bit, as rough as most of us have known, and a lot of people are going to get seriously ill or die. But if we come together, act sensibly, put the health of others before our own selfish pursuit of pleasure and show some gritty resolve, then we will come through it.

It won’t be easy, but it’s the right thing to do. This is not a typical war, not least because we’re all fighting a common enemy, but we’re still going to need the kind of bulldog spirit as personified by Winston Churchill. ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’ he famously urged as the Nazis blitzed Allied forces. But it’s another of his quotes that seems more pertinent now: ‘Things are not always right because they are hard, but if they are right one must not mind if they are also hard.’

MONDAY 16 MARCH

Having seemingly, finally, woken up to the threat from coronavirus which he now says is the ‘worst public health crisis for a generation’, Boris Johnson announced new measures this afternoon to combat Covid-19, including a directive that if anyone in a household shows symptoms of it, the whole household immediately goes into 14-day quarantine. Susanna rang this evening.

‘I’m self-isolating from you,’ she announced.

Notwithstanding our permanently simmering on-screen tension, this seemed a rather dramatic deterioration in our TV marriage.

‘Something I said?’ I asked.

‘No, something that’s happened to one of my sons – he’s got a persistent cough, and under the new rule, we’ll all have to quarantine.’

‘Does he have the virus?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know because he’s not sick enough to warrant a test, and there’s no way of finding out without a test.’

This seems an absurd situation. What if her son, who has no fever, doesn’t have the virus, they all do the 14-day quarantine, go back out into the world and then one of the Reid household does get it? Do they all quarantine again?

A country-wide lockdown, if it comes, will be a massive test for all of us. Nobody wants their freedom taken away. But however tough it gets, it’s not going to be anything like as tough as it was for people during the world wars. As someone tweeted tonight, ‘Anne Frank and seven other people hid in a 450 sq ft attic for 761 days, quietly trying to remain undiscovered in order to stay alive. You’ll probably be fine in your house with your wine, your Grubhub [US version of Deliveroo] and your Netflix until 30 April. Feel grateful yet?’

It’s hard to think of a more perfect denunciation of the shocking lack of perspective so many people of this generation seem to have.

WEDNESDAY 18 MARCH

I’ve often wondered how the ‘millennial’ (born between 1981 and 1996) and ‘centennial’ (born after 1996) generations would cope with a real crisis. And I don’t mean one of the myriad crises many of them claim to have every second of every day, triggering the biggest explosion of ‘anxiety’ the planet has ever seen. No, a real one. One that impacts on every one of us, causes genuine hardship and strife, costs huge numbers of deaths and rips the global economy to pieces, and one that is a proper valid reason to feel anxious because it’s indisputably frightening and none of us, not even the world’s top scientific experts, knows how bad it will get before we come out the other side.

Well, now I don’t have to wonder because it’s happening. And while some of my younger earthlings are being perfectly stoic and sensible, recognising the gravity of the situation, others are behaving like complete and utter cretins, like the spring break students flocking to beaches in Florida, hugging and kissing each other like it was VE Day. Or the reckless twerps flocking to bars on St Patrick’s Day around America yesterday, when even Ireland shut down every pub in the country.

Every crisis draws out ‘useful idiots’, but this one seems to be drawing out a whole new level of stupidity. They’ve been dubbed the ‘Covidiots’ and I fear it’s a mutation of the disease that no vaccine can cure.

Two brothers from Tennessee, Noah and Matt Colvin, drove 1,300 miles around the state buying 17,700 bottles of hand sanitiser, hoping to make a massive profit on Amazon by selling them on for $70 a bottle. But the online store moved fast to clamp down on such greedy exploitative pandemic price-gouging and shut down their account after they’d sold just 200 bottles, leaving them with 17,500 bottles of hand sanitiser they can’t sell.

‘I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitiser that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me,’ said Matt Colvin, who is of course now ‘that guy’.

What kind of mentality makes people so brainless?

For the answer, we need look no further than High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, 31, who reacted to news that the virus may still be wreaking havoc through the summer, by telling her 38.4 million young and impressionable Instagram followers, ‘Til July sounds like a bunch of bullshit. I’m sorry, but like, it’s a virus, I get it, I respect it. But at the same time, like, even if everybody gets it, like, yeah, people are gonna die. Which is terrible, but like inevitable? I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this right now.’

No, Vanessa, you shouldn’t.

Ms Hudgens perfectly represents a woefully entitled generation that’s grown up whining about absolutely everything – yet has so little to legitimately whine about given how much safer, healthier and more prosperous the world is now compared to any other time in recorded history. They mock and scorn the ‘boomers’ (those born between 1944 and 1964 – I don’t quite qualify, having been born in 1965, but this doesn’t stop them calling me one for being old, out of touch, boring and narrow-minded). But their response to this emergency is already revealing a shocking selfishness.

The biggest sacrifice we’re being asked to make is not go to the pub or beach and sit at home for a while watching TV. Is that really too much to ask? Fortunately, there are some high-profile young people who do get it, like pop superstar Ariana Grande, who tweeted the following message to her 72 million followers: ‘I keep hearing from a surprising amount of people statements like “this isn’t a big deal”, “we’ll be fine”, “we still have to go about our lives”, and it’s really blowing my mind. I understand that is how u felt weeks ago but please read about what’s going on, please don’t turn a blind eye. It is incredibly dangerous and selfish to take this situation lightly. The “we will be fine because we’re young” mindset is putting people who aren’t young and/or healthy in a lot of danger. You sound stupid and privileged and you need to care about others … like, now.’

She concluded, ‘Like, your hip hop yoga class can f*cking wait, I promise. This a national emergency and a pandemic of global proportions.’

THURSDAY 19 MARCH

‘Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism,’ screamed a headline in The Atlantic today.

It was above a lengthy piece by Helen Lewis, author of the book Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights in which she argued, convincingly, that feminism’s success is down to complicated, bloody-minded women who fought each other with the same passion they fought the cause.

In this new piece, she complains that Covid-19 will ‘send many couples back to the 1950s’ and ‘women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic’ because the main burden of responsibility for looking after the home and kids if we enter a prolonged lockdown will fall to women. ‘Many fathers will undoubtedly step up,’ she mused, ‘but that won’t be universal.’

I was struck by her certainty about what men will do in this pandemic. Imagine if I’d written that ‘many mothers will undoubtedly step up but that won’t be universal’. I’d have been rightly accused of sweeping sexist, misogynist generalisation.

I know Ms Lewis, and she is not a man-hater by any means, but it grates with me that her instinctive verdict on what the male response will be is automatically negative, without any proof yet that her fears are correct. It plays into the ongoing narrative since the #MeToo movement began that all men are bad unless they prove otherwise. But we’re not, just as it would be wrong to presume all women are good until they prove otherwise. I know good and bad men, and good and bad women. And many of both sexes who flirt on the hard deck of both good and bad.

Lewis’s piece made me think more seriously about feminism. I’ve stated that I’m a feminist and I consider myself to be a feminist. Or, rather, I feel very comfortable identifying as a feminist in the manner in which it used to be defined. That is, I believe 100 per cent in a woman’s right to full gender equality, and the principle that men and women should be treated exactly the same, politically, economically, legally and socially, and afforded the same opportunities. That, after all, was how the women who originally fought so courageously for equality over one hundred years ago saw it themselves.

As singer Kate Nash pleaded, ‘Feminism is not a dirty word. It does not mean you hate men, it does not mean you hate girls that have nice legs and a tan, it does not mean you are a bitch or a dyke; it means you believe in equality.’

Sounds simple enough, right? Yet it isn’t, partly because some men remain unreconstructed misogynist dinosaurs who think feminism is a profanity, but also because women themselves have become massively divided over what feminism means. Let’s be honest, for some women feminism just means hating men, and indeed hating other women who don’t share their angry view of what feminism should be. This squabbling has turned ‘feminism’ into such a toxic word that many women now decline to even identify as one because of all the controversial connotations that surround modern debate about it. And while women go about shaming and vilifying each other, men like me who believe in gender equality can only stand back and scratch our heads in bemusement.

Feminism has gone on a long and often very difficult journey – the latest wave is typified by the ongoing #MeToo and #TimesUp movements – and in the process its meaning has evolved and been hijacked by many vested interest groups all desperate to redefine it as they see it.

Of course, the very last person many women wish to hear define feminism is a man, and especially if that man is me. But that isn’t going to stop me, because the battle for true feminist ideals will only be won if men are persuaded to embrace them.

It’s time women worked out which feminist role models do their cause a service, and disservice. The absolute nadir of modern feminism, for me, came when Kim Kardashian and Emily Ratajkowski – two of the most followed women on social media in the world – tweeted a topless selfie of themselves in a ladies’ restroom as they flipped the bird. It was, according to them, a shining expression of liberating, female sexual freedom. To me, it looked like a couple of fame-hungry chancers deliberately flaunting their naked flesh to make money. I have no problem with that, but please don’t pretend it has anything to do with fighting the cause of gender equality.

‘RIP feminism,’ I tweeted, posting the image next to a picture of Emmeline Pankhurst. This ignited a firestorm of indignation from women across the globe. How dare I say feminism is dead? What right have I got to even question their motives for getting their kit off? Who the hell did I think I was even talking about this subject as a man? And those were the responses I can repeat …

Kim and Emily, revelling as always in all the publicity, were both keen to publicly reaffirm their positions on this matter. Ms Kardashian, accepting an award at the Webbys, said five words: ‘Nude selfies ’til I die!’ What a magnificently empowering statement to rally the female gender! Right up with there with Pankhurst’s demand a hundred years ago to be given the right to vote. Or perhaps not.

The thought of Kim’s gazillion young female followers on Twitter and Instagram rushing straight to their cell phones to bombard cyberspace with nude pictures of themselves in honour of their role-model heroine should leave real feminists horrified. How does it promote female equality, to so lamely and publicly titillate men and make them view women purely as objects of sexual desire? Or to encourage women to think that is the only way they can achieve success?

As for Ms Ratajkowski, she, in a sublime moment of chronic self-awareness failure, branded me an ‘attention-seeker’. This from a young lady for whom the words ‘shall I keep any clothes on today?’ never seem to enter her thought process. This week, she posted naked photos of herself, presumably because she didn’t know what else to do in a pandemic. ‘Every woman,’ she declared, ‘whether they’re comfortable with the term feminist, probably wants to be equal to men and that fundamentally is what feminism is about.’

Well, yes, Emily, it is. So why do you feel the need to hijack the meaning of the word to justify flashing your breasts and middle finger to millions of complete strangers? Men don’t do that, and if they do anything similar – as singers Justin Bieber and Usher both did – they get roundly and rightly ridiculed for it.

The kind of feminist battle that Pankhurst would definitely have endorsed, as did I, was House of Cards star Robin Wright fighting to be paid by Netflix the same as her co-star Kevin Spacey (before he was brought down by a #MeToo scandal) when she discovered he was getting paid a lot more. ‘There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch, are equal,’ she explained, ‘and they are in House of Cards. I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [her husband] Frank’s for a period of time. So, I capitalised on it. I was like, “I want to be paid the same as Kevin or I’m going to go public.”’

And she did. The result? A contract worth $5 million. Good for her. That, surely, is what feminism is about: unearthing gender inequality and correcting injustice through personal strength, determination and courage.

Women of the world need to ask themselves one simple question: who makes you feel more empowered or liberated? Kim and Emily flashing their flesh? Or Robin fighting for gender parity on pay? The answer, I would hope, is obvious. Feminism, real feminism, is surely better than just shameless public stripping. It’s about women striving to be treated exactly the same as men and to be paid the same for doing the same job if they do it just as well. I support that ambition 100 per cent.

A good example, to me, of a feminist role model is professional female darts player Fallon Sherrock, who at the end of 2019 became the first woman to ever beat a man in the men’s World Championships. In fact, she beat two men, drawing huge media attention, big TV ratings and global acclaim from superstars like tennis legend Billie-Jean King. Darts is not a sport that relies on power, so there is no reason why a woman can’t be as good as a man. Sherrock qualified for the men’s tournament purely on merit. There was no tokenism, no ‘let’s go easier on the girls’ nonsense. She was there because she was good enough, and she proved it by winning two matches.

In the same vein, I would cite the extraordinary 17-year-old female German racing driver Sophia Floersch, who suffered a horrific crash while she was competing in her first Formula 3 World Cup race at the Macau Grand Prix against male and female drivers. On the fourth lap, Sophia struck another driver’s car as she approached a bend at 175 mph. The collision caused Sophia’s car to spin out of control and catapult several hundred yards through the air into a wall. It’s the most horrifying accident I have ever seen, and everyone who watches it would assume she must have died. But Sophia lived, despite fracturing her spine. And within just a few hours, she tweeted, ‘Just wanted to let everybody know that I am fine but will be going into surgery tomorrow morning. Thanks to everybody for the supporting messages. Update soon.’ No fuss, no playing the victim. Can you even imagine the scale of self-pitying hell that would be unleashed on the unsuspecting public if any of the Kardashians had a minor 25 mph car prang today in which they broke a diamond-encrusted toenail?

Sophia is now back racing, against men and women, and has both an incredible talent for driving a car and incredible courage too. She is a rising star in a male-dominated sport determined to prove she can mix it with the boys, and I applaud her for it. Both she and Fallon Sherrock have done more for progressing women’s rights and the cause of feminism than a million Kim Kardashian topless selfies. And the impact this will have on girls and young women is immeasurably better.

If there’s one thing worse than fake female feminists, it’s fake male feminists who race to attach themselves to any absurd virtue-signalling feminist bandwagon, all competing with each other as to who can sound the most ‘pro-women’.

As the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns careered around the world, destroying many undeniably vile men in their wake, they also threw up a lot of men desperate to distance themselves from their own ghastly male gender and firmly establish their woke ‘I’m with you!’ credentials with women.

Leading this PC-crazed pack has been singer John Legend – a man whose supreme talent as a musician (he is one of my favourite singers) is only matched by his supremely irritating capacity to spout faux virtuous garbage to make himself look good.

For example, my favourite festive holiday song is ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. Immortalised in the 1949 movie Neptune’s Daughter, it’s a joyous celebration of flirtation, as a handsome charming man tries to persuade a beautiful charming woman to stay the night with him on a wintry night. There’s nothing sleazy about it, or nasty, or even remotely ‘problematic’, to quote the ghastly buzzword of modern-day political correctness. It’s fun, sexy, playful, and both the man and woman are completely in control of their own actions during the mutually enjoyable and totally consensual experience. This is a scene that has played out many billions of times in the history of our great planet.

It’s called seduction. And that process only becomes something sinister or even criminal when a woman is being forced to do something she doesn’t want to do. That is not the case in ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. It was written by US songwriter Frank Loesser to sing with his wife Lynn Garland at their housewarming party in New York. The original lyrics included these lines:

‘My mother will start to worry …’ (Man: ‘Beautiful, what’s your hurry?’)

‘The neighbours might think …’ (Man: ‘Baby, it’s cold out there.’)

‘Say, what’s in this drink?’ (Man: ‘No cabs to be had out there.’)

To 99.9 per cent of all those who’ve ever heard these lyrics, particularly in the context of the film clip, they are perfectly sweet and innocent. But to the 0.1 per cent of super-woke, permanently offended virtue-signallers out there, this is in fact a sickening depiction of sexual harassment or even sexual assault. To them, the man’s obviously a disgusting monster, refusing to understand that no means no, who has slipped some kind of Bill Cosby-style drug into the woman’s drink in an effort to render her unconscious so he can attack her.

This ridiculous narrative, started by a few angry radical feminists a few years ago, reached a climax in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. By late 2018, radio stations began banning the song altogether, led by WDOK Star 102 in Cleveland, Ohio, who attributed its decision to the ‘lyric content, based on listener input, amid the #MeToo movement’.

The public, gloriously, reacted by marching out to buy Rat Pack legend Dean Martin’s iconic version of the song in such huge numbers it rocketed back into the US Billboard chart, with sales surging 70 per cent thanks to the furore. You might think this would be the end of the matter. But sadly, it wasn’t. In fact, it was just the start as John Legend decided the original version of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ was so despicable the lyrics must be rewritten for the #MeToo era. So that’s what he did, writing a new version with Insecure comedian Natasha Rothwell, which he then performed with Kelly Clarkson. The new lyrics included:

‘I really can’t stay …’ (Man: ‘Baby, it’s cold outside.’)

‘I’ve gotta go away …’ (Man: ‘I can call you a ride.’)

‘This evening has been …’ (Man: ‘So glad you dropped in.’)

‘… so very nice.’ (Man: ‘Time spent with you is paradise.’)

‘My mother will start to worry …’ (Man: ‘I’ll call a car and tell ’em to hurry.’)

‘What will my friends think?’ (Man: ‘I think they should rejoice.’)

‘If I have one more drink …’ (Man: ‘It’s your body, and your choice.’)

What a load of nauseating tripe. At this stage, it’s worth remembering how Mr Legend himself first got together with his equally annoying, publicity-mad, swimsuit model wife Chrissy Teigen. They met on the set of his music video for the song ‘Stereo’. He was the most powerful man on set, the star and therefore, effectively, the boss. She was an impressionable 21-year-old model hired to work alongside him. Ms Teigen told Cosmopolitan several years later, ‘I walked into John’s dressing room to meet him and he was ironing in his underwear. I said, “You do your own ironing?” He said, “Of course I do.” I gave him a hug.’ After the shoot, she says they went back to his hotel room and ‘hooked up’. Hmmm. I’m not an expert on the whiter-than-white standards of super-woke behaviour, but by Legend and Teigen’s own yardstick, isn’t every part of this story highly ‘problematic’? Older, powerful boss hooking up with younger employee after they work together? The CEO of McDonald’s was fired in 2019 for doing exactly that.

And when it comes to rewriting inappropriate lyrics, why did Legend pick on ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’? After all, it pales into insignificance compared to the shockingly sexist and misogynist lyrics of so many current rap and pop stars.

Snoop Dogg sang, ‘B*itches ain’t sh*t but hoes and tricks, lick on these nuts and suck the d*ck.’ Kanye West sang, ‘I know she like chocolate men, she got more n***as off than Cochran.’ Eminem sang, ‘Slut, you think I won’t choke no whore, til the vocal cords don’t work in her throat no more?’ And as for Pharrell Williams’s ‘Blurred Lines’ collaboration with Robin Thicke, he’s since admitted the lyrics, including ‘I hate these blurred lines, I know you want it,’ were ‘rapey’.

John Legend hasn’t suggested rewriting any of these songs. Why could that be? Oh wait, is it because they’re all performed by his good friends? As with most ‘woke’ campaigns, this one was riddled with sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Legend targeted ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ because it was an easy win for him – something guaranteed to get him lots of publicity and make women go, ‘Awwwww, isn’t he lovely?’ Yet when it comes to the often disturbingly hateful women-shaming lyrics of so many of his contemporaries, the same Legend remains complicitly silent.

Deana Martin, daughter of Dean, perfectly summed up the fake outrage. ‘It’s mad. It’s a sweet, flirty, sexy, fun holiday song that’s been around 40 years. This breaks my heart.’ As for what her dad’s reaction would be, she said, ‘He’d be going insane right now. He’d say, “What’s the matter with you? Get over it. It’s just a fun song.”’

Exactly. It is, or rather it was until the woke brigade got their claws into it. There would be zero tolerance for such trivial, meaningless nonsense. And here’s the most laughable part of this whole pathetic furore: in Neptune’s Daughter, the song is actually performed twice. There’s the famous version between Ricardo Montalbán and Esther Williams where it’s the man doing the persuading. And there’s a far less talked about version between Betty Garrett and Red Skelton where it’s the man who wants to leave, and the woman who’s trying to persuade him to stay.

Needless to say, nobody ever mentions this second one, because it doesn’t suit the man-hating theme. Oh, and did I mention that the movie ends with both couples planning their weddings? If John Legend had his way, the movie would now be rewritten to have the men arrested.

FRIDAY 20 MARCH

I had hoped the coronavirus might compel celebrities to quit the virtue-signalling for a bit, given the real stars right now are the health workers risking their lives to save ours. But, sadly, the opposite has happened and it’s just given them the perfect excuse to tell us how much they care about us all.

Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot decided that what the world really needs right now is her and a bunch of famous friends, including Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell and Amy Adams, singing a diabolically tuneless version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ line by line from their homes. It was presumably supposed to be the self-isolating version of the iconic aid-for-Africa anthem ‘We Are the World’ but rapidly became a ‘We Are Being Mocked by the World’ abomination from the moment Gadot released it yesterday.

Aside from the horrible singing and unctuous self-promoting style of delivery, the message of Lennon’s original classic was imagining a world without borders, possessions. So, to see a bunch of multi-millionaire stars singing from within their heavily guarded mansions was particularly hypocritical. As one Twitter user put it, ‘A load of millionaire singers and actors singing “imagine no possessions” is not what I need at 8.55 am.’

This pandemic is already exposing an uncomfortable truth for celebrities: nobody gives a shit about them when people are fearful for their lives or losing loved ones. It’s also revealed just how fake so many of them are. These shameless, self-absorbed antics aren’t really about trying to help other people, they’re about helping prop up their brands when they can’t do what they normally do to maintain their lucrative star status. But this won’t stop their virtue-signalling claptrap.

Perhaps the world’s most notable virtue-signaller is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a man so dripping in dubious sincerity it’s a miracle he doesn’t drown in a pool of his own virtuousness every day. He’s the kind of guy who enthusiastically embraces every new woke fad because he is desperate to be seen to look wholesome. In this sense, he’s the opposite of someone like his US counterpart Donald Trump, who enthusiastically embraces everything anti-woke because he is desperate to be seen to not give a monkey’s about looking wholesome.

The problem with virtue-signalling so hard in order to be a part of a ‘movement’ like wokery is that you make a complete and utter politically correct plonker of yourself, as Trudeau has done on countless occasions in his race to be their no. 1 public ‘ally’. Ironically, he is a handsome young politician constantly drooled over by many of the same women who claim to find male objectification of female flesh so demeaning. Trudeau – who is photographed topless far too often for it to be an accident – knows his fanbase and thinks he knows exactly what they want to hear.

Amid the #MeToo and #TimesUp firestorms he bided his time, waiting for the perfect occasion to throw his virtue-signalling voice behind the feminist cause. It finally came when he addressed students in a Q&A at MacEwan University in Edmonton. In video footage that swiftly went viral, a woman from the World Mission of God, a non-denominational church guided by the ideals of ‘God the Mother’, stood up to ask him a question.

‘We came here today,’ she began, ‘to ask you to look into the policies that religious charitable organisations have in our legislation so it can also be changed because maternal love is the love that’s going to change the future of mankind …’

On hearing that last word, shirt-sleeved Trudeau recoiled like he’d been shot by a crossbow and instantly raised his left arm in indignant angst. ‘We like to say “peoplekind”,’ he declared, rudely interrupting the woman and flapping the same arm around aggressively, ‘not necessarily “mankind”. It’s more inclusive.’

‘There we go!’ she cried, excitedly. ‘Exactly!’

The crowd erupted with cheers and applause. Or rather, the other women in the crowd did. Most of the men just looked silently bemused.

‘We can all learn from each other!’ Trudeau added, milking his audience like a greedy dairy farmer.

Trudeau comes over in the clip as the worst kind of hectoring, bully-pulpit smart-arse, dripping with virtuous self-aggrandising sanctimony. He also saw fit to single-handedly rewrite the English language. There is no such word as ‘peoplekind’. And he’s wrong too about the etymology of the word ‘mankind’.

It dates back to a time, many centuries ago, when males were called ‘werman’ and females ‘wyfman’, and ‘man’ was a gender-neutral term meaning all human beings. So ‘mankind’ was originally intended to signify humanity. Not that Trudeau will care about such trifling details.

After all, he is the single-most PC-friendly, touchy-feely prime minister in the history of world politics. He marched at Canada’s version of Gay Pride, he’s pro-choice on abortion, pro legalising marijuana and pro just about anything else that he thinks might win him the hearts of global liberals. There’s not a diversity box Trudeau hasn’t promptly hammered himself inside. He’s even called poverty ‘sexist’.

‘I am a feminist, I’m proud to be feminist,’ he declared after acceding to office. And to prove it, Trudeau’s first ‘gender-parity’ cabinet contained the exact same number of men and women, 15 of each. To understand why he’s become such a fervent gender trailblazer, look no further than an incident early into his tenure, in which Trudeau stormed across the Canadian House of Commons during a heated debate and accidentally elbowed a female MP, Ruth Ellen Brosseau.

He didn’t even know he’d done it, which is hardly surprising when you watch the video of the incident and see an accidental, very mild contact of the kind that happens every second of every day on the subway. But that didn’t stop Ms Brosseau reacting like she’d been beaten to within an inch of her life. ‘It was very overwhelming,’ she wailed, ‘and so I left the chamber to go and sit in the lobby.’ Her colleague Niki Ashton said she was ‘ashamed’ to witness the ‘deeply traumatic’ incident and declared that Trudeau’s ‘manhandling’ was the ‘furthest thing from a feminist act’.

‘If we apply a gendered lens,’ she raged, ‘it is very important that young women in this space feel safe to come here and work. [Trudeau] made us feel unsafe and we’re deeply troubled by the conduct of the prime minister of this country.’

A horrified Trudeau begged for forgiveness like a serial killer on death row apologising for murdering a hundred people. ‘I want to take this opportunity now the member is OK to be able to express directly to her my apologies for my behaviour and actions. Profoundly and unreservedly.’ On and on he went, switching between English and French, pouring out his agonised soul until I feared he might collapse in a heap of tearful sackcloth-ridden misery.

Ever since, he’s doubled, trebled and quadrupled down on his feminist credentials – cowed into supine submission by the militants in his own parliament and now viewing everything through that ‘gendered lens’.

As a result, Canada’s senators passed legislation to make the country’s national anthem gender-neutral. After a 30-year campaign by protestors, and to the consternation of many Canadians, the second line will now be changed from ‘in all thy sons command’ to ‘in all of us command’. (Nobody seems to have worked out what this all means for the supposedly gender-neutral word ‘person’, given that it contains ‘son’.)

But as with all virtue-signallers, Trudeau just didn’t know when to stop. And his denunciation of ‘mankind’ turned him from caring, sharing feminist heart-throb into a global laughing-stock.

There’s been a creeping invasion by the PC language cops for the past few years. University campuses around the world have started banning words like ‘sportsmanship’, ‘right-hand man’, ‘manpower’, ‘man-made’ and ‘gentleman’s agreement’ – all because they contain the dreaded word ‘man’ and are thus supposedly offensive. This despite the fact I’ve never met a single person who actually finds any of those words offensive unless they are urged to do so.

But it’s one thing for snowflake students and professors to pull dumb stunts. It’s quite another for the culprit to be the prime minister of the world’s second largest geographical country. Put it this way: if Justin Trudeau has his way then one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind (apologies for anyone offended by that word) will have to be banished from our consciousness too.

When Neil Armstrong, the first man – sorry, person … no sorry, human – on the Moon, said it was ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’, he could have had no idea just how offensive he was being.

And of course, like so many woke heroes, Trudeau’s self-acclaimed virtue turned out to have feet of very non-PC clay. I’ve not met a high-horse rider yet who doesn’t eventually tumble off into a pit of shameless hypocrisy. But I’ve got to hand it to Trudeau, when he fell, he really FELL.

Last year he was exposed for having repeatedly blacked and browned up his face, which is about the least woke thing that any wokie could do. TIME magazine revealed Trudeau had attended an ‘Arabian Nights’ party in a turban and with his face painted dark brown when he was a teacher at West Point Grey Academy.

‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ a stern, ashen Trudeau said. ‘I take responsibility for it. It was a dumb thing to do. I’m disappointed in myself. I’m pissed-off at myself for having done it. I wish I hadn’t done it but I did and I apologise for it. I should have known better, but I didn’t.’

So far, so predictably self-flagellating; Trudeau knew the only way out of this Grand Canyon-sized hole he was in was to beat himself up. But there were two problems with his statement. First, he wasn’t a young student at the time of his Arabian Nights brownface stunt – he was a 29-year-old teacher. And this wasn’t 1951, it was 2001, so the explanation that a man of nearly 30 had no idea that painting his face brown at an Arabian Nights party might be racist doesn’t fly, especially as TIME reports he was the only person there in brownface.

Second, it wasn’t his only venture into the face-painting arena. Pressed to disclose if there were other incidents like this, Trudeau admitted to wearing ‘blackface’ at a high-school talent show, where he sang ‘Day-O’, the song made famous by black singer and civil rights campaigner Harry Belafonte. Sure enough, CBS News soon located a photo of him performing at that show in blackface. And a few hours later, a third incident emerged in which he was seen with blackface in a video, apparently from the ‘early 1990s’ – laughing, pulling faces and sticking his tongue out.

So, Trudeau’s a serial blackface and brownface offender. Of course, he didn’t resign. And few liberals called for him to resign. He was one of their own, so didn’t need to be cancelled. Contrast this with the way TV host Megyn Kelly was banished from the NBC airwaves after musing that it didn’t used to be deemed offensive to wear blackface on Halloween. Kelly never actually blackfaced herself, and what she said is perfectly true, but that didn’t matter as she became the sacrificial lamb to a howling mob of outraged liberals who’d never forgiven her for working at Fox News. The way she was destroyed, and Trudeau saved, epitomises the rank hypocrisy and deceit that lies at the heart of cancel culture.

The same high-profile liberals who demanded Kelly’s head on a plate didn’t do the same with Trudeau, even though he repeatedly did the very thing she only talked about. Instead, they praised his ‘honesty’ and his ‘sincere apology’. This, we were told, was very much a ‘teachable moment’ that he should survive.

But there’s nothing ‘honest’ about a virtue-signalling prime minister keeping his blackface habit a secret for two decades until the press uncovered it. And as for sincere apologies and teachable moments, Megyn Kelly made an abject, tearful mea culpa on air and it made zero difference to the mob. The only lesson she got was that there’s one rule for conservatives on such matters and quite another for liberals.

Can you even begin to imagine how the same people defending Trudeau today would react if this was Donald Trump who’d been caught wearing blackface? They would want him instantly hounded out of office. Yet, because it was nice-guy Justin, the one who really cares, he got a pass.

In other news, this afternoon Boris Johnson told all pubs, cafés, bars, restaurants and gyms to ‘close tonight as soon as they reasonably can’ and asked people to ‘please’ not go out.

Alongside him was Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who announced a staggeringly large rescue plan for businesses – most of which will immediately hit the shutters from today – including a furlough scheme where employees will be paid 80 per cent of their wages for the next three months, up to £2,500 a month per person. The economic fallout from this crisis is going to be monumental.

My increasingly passionate attempts to get people to wake up to the reality of this threat were brought up in Parliament yesterday. ‘During times of national emergency,’ Conservative MP Lee Anderson addressed Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, ‘the media play a vital role in delivering information to concerned viewers, listeners and readers. Scrutiny is good but undermining the national effort by spreading disinformation helps nobody and creates panic among some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Will my right honourable friend raise this issue with broadcasters such as ITV, where Piers Morgan, who has no scientific or medical qualifications, seems to want to make irresponsible comments on a daily basis?’ Rumblings of ‘Hear! Hear!’ filled the House.

Rees-Mogg replied, ‘I am grateful to my honourable friend for his question and he is right to point out the role the media plays in informing the public and holding the government to account. One does not have to take every utterance from controversialists as holy writ. Piers Morgan enjoys causing a row and, frankly, I think it would be better to pay less attention to him, rather than more, and listen to the government advisers. Free speech is very precious. If people want to say silly things and look foolish, that is a matter for them.’

Much as I’m amused by the irony that Parliament is now debating whether I should be given any attention, I’m bemused as to what ‘disinformation’ I’m supposed to have been spreading.

SATURDAY 21 MARCH

‘Friend had her birthday yesterday,’ texted Susanna. ‘Her mum and best friend both gave her loo roll. What a time to be alive.’ She then forwarded me a tweet from Irish actor John Connors which read, ‘Such a shame we don’t have Piers Morgan in Ireland, he’s the only journalist with the balls to challenge government day in and out. He’s doing more good than all our journalists combined. Fact. When the history books are written, the Brits will thank him greatly.’

Definitely, right after pigs fly over my house.

Susanna and I discussed how this crisis has brought my ‘The world’s gone nuts’ mantra into sharp focus. ‘In a way it all plays into your anti-woke theme,’ said Susanna. ‘How a virus smashed identity politics … how we woke up to a real problem … viruses don’t respect your self-ID?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I don’t see any way back for the old woke bullshit after this. We can already see zero tolerance for whiny celebs.’

‘No one is getting cancelled for not being woke anymore,’ she said.

‘Weakness is no longer something to celebrate, etc,’ I said.

‘I don’t see it as weakness,’ Susanna retorted. ‘It’s just a privilege, no one has time for it anymore, the virus is the great leveller.’

Is it, though? I’d love to think it is, and we’ll emerge from the coronavirus wreckage as better people with a better sense of perspective. But history isn’t reassuring on that front. One major hurdle will be people’s increasing intransigence to any deviation from their world view. Someone who got this danger better than most was the late Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker, who died last year.

In a review of his new book Groupthink: A Study in Self-Delusion, published posthumously, another Telegraph writer, Allison Pearson, wrote, ‘The book begins in early 2019 with the author trying to account for a world “wracked by strains, stresses and divisions which even a decade ago would have been hard to imagine”. He singles out Islamist terrorism, the European Union, the secular religion of climate change (very much not a believer!), a rift between the ruled and their rulers and identity politics. Underlying all of them is “the peculiar social pressure to conform with a whole range of views deemed to be ‘politically correct’ marked out in those caught up in it by their aggressive intolerance of anything or anyone who differs from their own beliefs”. For a scientific explanation of this growing zealotry, Booker turned to a thesis put forward more than 40 years ago by Irving Janis, a professor of psychology at Yale University. In The Victims of Groupthink Janis observed how “a group of people come to be fixated on some belief or view of the world which is hugely important to them. They are convinced that their opinion is so self-evidently right that no sensible person could disagree with it. Most telling of all, this leads them to treat all who differ from their beliefs with a peculiar kind of contemptuous hostility.” Janis used this theory to account for several notorious fiascos of US foreign policy – failure to heed intelligence about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor being one example – in which a group made decisions based on how they would ideally like the world to be, not according to the realities of the situation. What strikes the modern reader is Janis’s uncanny premonition of today’s “cancel culture” in which an individual expressing a point of view that challenges the liberal orthodoxy can be no-platformed.’

I totally agree with this. It is precisely the problem with modern illiberal liberalism: if free speech is stifled and a rigid set of intransigent opinions is enforced by cancelling any dissenting voices, we end up in a world where debate doesn’t exist, so bad decisions inevitably get taken. I wonder if the pandemic will fix this insidious culture, or exacerbate it?

SUNDAY 22 MARCH

Shocking news: the Sunday Times is reporting that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser and the architect of Brexit, described the government’s strategy in a meeting in early February as – and this was apparently a summary of his words – ‘herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad’.

This is horrific and astounding on many levels. Why the hell is Dominic Cummings leading government policy anyway? I never voted for this unelected, grim-faced, casually dressed bully-boy.

Boris’s sister Rachel tweeted, ‘As it’s Mother’s Day here’s one of my own mother’s unbeatable instructions which is what she always says to me in a crisis: “It is urgent … to do nothing.”’ This seems to be an instruction Boris has taken firmly to heart. He’s still just ‘advising’ people not to gather in public and still trusts the public to take his advice, even when it’s obvious that many aren’t, and when countries like Italy and France are in total lockdown. I’m sorry, but this isn’t leadership.

This weekend, we’re seeing the result of his refusal to order people to stay in. The sun shone over Britain and many have treated it like a bank holiday weekend – flocking to beaches, parks and tourist sites where they mingled with each other in direct contravention of their prime minister’s friendly advice. The scenes made me sick. These people are morons, imperilling their own lives and those of others. But ultimately, I blame the spineless sheep leading the country more than the brainless lemmings jumping off the coronavirus cliff. If the guy at the top is saying, ‘Please stay home but go out if you need some fun,’ then it’s hardly surprising if many think this can’t be too bad.

The people who will really suffer are the health workers desperately struggling to save people’s lives all over the country. So many doctors and nurses have gone public to say they’re being exposed to terrible personal risk due to the chronic lack of suitable protective clothing, masks, gloves and sanitiser. These are the people we need to prioritise – selfless heroes who epitomise the essence of unity and communality as they battle together all day every day to save the lives of complete strangers. They’re the perfect antidote to selfish, woke individualism, and to the spoiled egotistical celebrity culture that society has so ill-advisedly put on some kind of higher pedestal.

Aside from failing to give health workers adequate protection, the most egregious failing in this crisis has been with coronavirus testing. ‘Test, test, test,’ has been the WHO’s mantra since January. Yet ten days ago, the British government announced it was stopping general testing and would only now test the seriously ill in hospital. Now we’ve done a U-turn on that insane decision, but the damage has been done. Britain needs massively higher levels of testing as a matter of extreme urgency, not least to ensure our health workers can do their jobs. We also need to lock down immediately in a proper enforced national quarantine because the sad but entirely predictable truth is that many stupendously selfish people in Britain don’t give a damn about Boris Johnson’s cheery ‘advice’. But we’ve let the genie out of the bottle and freed it to do its worst for much longer than we should have done.

Tonight, Mail on Sunday journalist Caroline Graham, a long-time friend, emailed to say her mother is seriously ill in hospital with Covid-19. ‘Mum’s not great,’ she wrote, ‘the virus is consuming her, I’ve never seen anything like it. People have no idea what’s about to hit.’ She said the hospital staff were enraged by people ignoring social distancing rules. ‘The nurses are furious people aren’t staying at home and feel utterly betrayed by Boris. I’ve been here since Tuesday and the mood has gone from stoic to one of f*cking outrage. One of the nurses has been up since 5 am, and has asthma and two kids but has been coming in every day to try to save patients like Mum. They have no proper gear and there’s a staff shortage because care assistants and even the phlebotomists refuse to enter the Covid-19 ward. This is a national disgrace. If anyone spent five minutes on a coronavirus ward, they would self-isolate in a heartbeat.’

We’ve got Matt Hancock on again tomorrow. It’s time to take the gloves off.

MONDAY 23 MARCH

In the car to work, I was still simmering with anger over what Caroline had told me. It’s disgraceful that we’re sending our frontline health workers into this war without the right protective equipment. Why haven’t they got it? It’s been two months since the WHO called this a global health emergency, and we’ve surely prepared for a pandemic like this.

Not bothering with the usual niceties, I got stuck in to the health secretary straightaway. ‘Mr Hancock, the NHS frontline is reeling from what is already happening, and at the thought of what may be coming quite soon. They are ill-equipped, they don’t have enough equipment, enough PPE, enough masks, enough anything, and they’re terrified and many of them are now falling sick themselves. What reassurance can you give to NHS staff that you and your government are going to get them the protection they urgently need?’

‘Well, you’re right, Piers, this is incredibly important,’ he replied, ‘and our NHS staff and staff in social care have got to have the equipment they need. What’s happened is that there’s been a sudden sharp increase in the amount of protective equipment that is needed.’

No shit, Sherlock, I could have predicted that for him six weeks ago. Irritated by his response, I interrupted him. ‘Why are we so late though? Given the World Health Organization alerted the world to a possible global pandemic at the end of January, given that we saw the scenes in China, so we knew what was happening, why is this country, this government, and I say this respectfully, so woefully ill-prepared in terms of the equipment we need to fight this virus?’

Hancock’s eyes, with the tell-tale dark bags of acute tiredness lurking beneath them (I don’t underestimate how hard he must be working, but if you want to be health secretary then this is what you signed up for), narrowed slightly.

‘Well, that’s not the case,’ he snapped, ‘and I think you know it.’

This is a Trump-esque interview technique, telling the journalist he agrees with you even when you know he doesn’t. It’s quite effective if the journalist doesn’t instantly rebut.

‘That is the case,’ I retorted. ‘Literally, yesterday, all day long, doctors, nurses, consultants were hitting the airwaves, and hitting social media, telling appalling stories. I’ve got a friend of mine whose mother is in a critical condition with coronavirus in a south London hospital and she says the nurses are absolutely desperate, they have very little protection, they’re worried sick about themselves and about the avalanche coming their way. They don’t feel protected and I don’t think it’s good enough for you to sit here and just say, actually they are.’

‘No, I wasn’t saying that,’ he replied, tersely, ‘getting the equipment to the frontline is mission critical. There’s been a sudden increase in the need for it, which is totally understandable and right, and I have to get it to them. And of course, we knew there was going to be this increase, but getting the distribution of this huge quantity of equipment right across the NHS is a very significant challenge. The point is this: if you ask people to go out and look after and care for others, then we’ve got to make sure they have the equipment they need.’

Yes, it is. And they haven’t.

‘If you really care for the people who are doing all the hard stuff and risking their lives for us, Health Secretary, why is the government doing nothing to lock down this country that bears any relation to what most other countries are doing? Why is it that Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, almost all the other countries around us in Europe are in almost total lockdown and we are seeing these catastrophically stupid scenes all over the country – people piling into pubs, the Cheltenham Festival not cancelled, all weekend people going out partying like it’s a bank holiday, and still the prime minister stands at the podium and says, “My advice is that you don’t do this.” People are not listening to his advice. They want clear direction, these people, because they’re too stupid to make that decision themselves. We are risking lives, in my humble opinion, and by all means tell me I’m wrong, but I believe that every day we are not locking down properly as a country, we are putting the very health workers that you are talking about at greater risk.’

‘Well, I share your frustration, Piers,’ Hancock replied. ‘The number of people not following the advice is incredibly damaging to the effort to stop the spread of the virus.’

‘But given we all agree, including the prime minister, that it will cost lives, why is he not mandating it and locking down the country? If that is the new strategy, then lock the country down.’

Hancock looked irritated again, but this time I wasn’t sure if this was from irritation at my own frustrated angry tone, or his own angry frustration that perhaps Boris is not doing what I’m suggesting. The Sunday Times report yesterday suggested Hancock’s been pushing for a proper lockdown for several weeks. If so, there can be few more difficult things for a politician to have to do than defend something you yourself don’t agree with, especially if you believe lives depend on it.

‘The strategy has been the same all along,’ he insisted, ‘which is to protect life, and to make sure we stop the spread of this virus …’

I interrupted him again, prompting him to shake his head with irritation. ‘With respect, Health Secretary, your strategy has not been the same all along. There was a massive report by Tim Shipman in yesterday’s Sunday Times highlighting how dramatically it changed. You actually came out of that quite well because you were one of the few people that appeared to get it and were pushing for a lockdown. But there was a sentence in that piece that you’ll be very well aware of involving a guy called Dominic Cummings, one of the prime minister’s senior aides, who at the end of February outlined the government’s strategy. Tim Shipman, one of the best political reporters in the country, reported those present say it was “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. Not a direct quote but a summation of Dominic Cummings’s view of the government strategy, and we know herd immunity was the strategy for the next two weeks, and then dramatically it changed to the complete opposite. So please don’t insult my intelligence by telling me we’ve followed the same strategy. We haven’t.’

‘Herd immunity has never been the strategy …’ Hancock insisted.

‘Your own chief scientific adviser said on the radio literally ten days ago, herd immunity was the strategy,’ I exclaimed. ‘Was he lying?’

‘No, he didn’t say that. And I don’t want to get into who said what in the Sunday Times in what wasn’t a direct quote.’

‘Let me play it to you …’ I suggested.

‘No, Piers, NO. If you will listen … then I will tell you the answer.’ I ignored him.

‘Let’s listen to what the chief scientific adviser said. You say he didn’t say it, let our viewers make their own minds up.’

I then played him the tape of Sir Patrick Vallance saying the strategy was herd immunity.

‘That was your chief scientific adviser literally spelling out herd immunity, the strategy you say we weren’t following.’

‘No, we weren’t, and we aren’t. The message I would give to your viewers, and I know you’ve got your frustrations …’

‘I’ve got more than frustrations, to be frank with you!’ I hit back. ‘I’m seeing an NHS getting run over, morons out all over the streets ignoring the friendly advice of our prime minister, and I am seeing the leader of this country refusing to take draconian measures to lock down the country when almost everywhere else has done so. He’s a libertarian, we keep being told. He believes it’s wrong to remove people’s liberty. I couldn’t give a stuff [about their liberty], honestly, Health Secretary. I don’t think you agree with it either. I think from what I’ve been reading you should think we should be locked down.’

‘What I’m going to do is tell the people watching this programme what needs to happen,’ he replied, speaking slowly to buy time. ‘The tittle-tattle that you’re talking about, I’m not going to get into.’

‘TITTLE-TATTLE?’ I erupted. ‘Really? How dare you! You think what I’m saying to you is tittle-tattle?’

‘I think that picking up on bits and pieces in the Sunday newspapers is less important in terms of broadcasting to the nation what needs to happen at this incredibly difficult time,’ he replied.

Hancock said more draconian action would follow if the advice was not taken and went through a robotic checklist of all the current government advice. When I interrupted him again to talk about testing, he visibly tensed up, pursed his lips and stared back slightly murderously at me.

‘Only ten days ago,’ I continued, ‘the prime minister announced we were not going to be continuing any testing with anyone but the seriously ill in hospital. Literally as the World Health Organization …’ Hancock began furiously shaking his head.

‘Well, you can shake your head,’ I said, ‘but this is what was said from the [news briefing] podium by the prime minister, and the World Health Organization was saying at that very moment “testing, testing, testing, testing, testing”. Why did we abandon testing for all but the seriously ill? Why are we still only testing 8,000 a day when we were promised it would be 25,000? The lack of testing is a massive problem, isn’t it?’

‘We are absolutely ramping up the testing,’ Hancock replied.

I’ve noticed ministers now repeatedly using the phrase ‘ramping up’ when they have to defend the lack of PPE or tests. It’s obviously a line pumped out from the Number 10 press office to deflect criticism.

‘Again, what you said in the question isn’t right …’ he stammered.

‘Well, which bit is wrong?’ I asked. ‘You can’t just say that, which bit is wrong?’

Hancock sighed again audibly. ‘We are ramping up the testing …’

‘What did I say that was wrong?’ I persisted. ‘You said what I said wasn’t right, what was wrong?’

He shook his head again.

‘Don’t shake your head, just tell me what I was wrong about?’

‘You said the prime minister had said we were stopping testing … not true.’

‘He did, apart from the seriously ill in hospital, we would be doing no more testing, that’s what the expert team at the podium said. Do you dispute that?’

‘Erm, yes, as you characterised it … but, Piers, there’s a more important thing going on here …’ This was an old Tony Blair tactic when cornered – decline to answer the question and tell the interviewer what’s ‘more important’ to discuss.

‘I know that people are worried and angry, I want to increase the amount of testing too … and I want to communicate to people the things that we are doing and we should have a responsible conversation based on the strategy that we have as a country to get through this. And as health secretary, my top priority of protecting lives is the basis of everything I do, including increasing the testing, which of course is critical.’

We moved on to argue about people in supermarkets not maintaining social distancing – which most aren’t – and again I asked him why we don’t make it mandatory and enforce it.

‘If we were the only country involved in this,’ I said, ‘then I would say, OK, fair enough, you must know best. But every other country around us has locked down more than us, which prompts the question: what do we know that they don’t?’

Hancock said the other countries were ahead of us in ‘the curve’ – but that would surely make it even more urgent for us to take quicker action, wouldn’t it?

‘Health Secretary,’ I said, ‘stop trusting people when they’re ignoring you.’

This whole lengthy exchange with Hancock was riveting viewing but also potentially very significant from an evidential viewpoint. What the UK’s health secretary says publicly at this stage of a global crisis like this might well come back to haunt him in any subsequent public inquiry into how we responded.

Twitter blew up after the interview, with the most unlikely people rushing out to applaud me for going after Hancock so aggressively. Ash Sarkar, the self-proclaimed communist writer and political activist who has roundly abused me for years, tweeted, ‘I never thought I’d say this either, but Piers Morgan is doing what every broadcaster ought to at this time – holding the government’s feet to the fire over their botched pandemic strategy.’

She was joined by another hardcore left-wing activist Owen Jones, whom I’ve also regularly locked horns with, who tweeted, ‘Yes, I’m going to say it: huge kudos to Piers Morgan for holding the government to account, and it’s an example other journalists should follow.’ If someone had told me in January that these two would be publicly praising me, I’d have thought them stark raving mad. But I already sense this pandemic is changing everything.

The reaction wasn’t all positive. One old newspaper colleague struck a note of caution. ‘Piers,’ emailed Steve Sampson, a former Sun executive whose opinion I always value, ‘I’m a big supporter, you don’t need to hear that repeated. You need to slightly change the tone. We are now at war – the Falklands, Iraq. Whatever. Holding the government to account means something different now. The country needs you to question them closely, ask all the questions they can’t. You’re the bridge. No one else around you has the heft. Whether we like it or not, Hancock and the others are running it. This is going to get way worse. You need Hancock leaving the studio to go and get on with it, not in ribbons. Still push him and the rest, just with a change of emphasis. Steve.’

Others were far less polite with their critiques. As fast as I was gathering new unlikely admirers, I was losing old ones – for much the same reasons Steve was politely getting at. I received a stream of abuse all day from ardent Brexiters on social media for being ‘disloyal’ and ‘unpatriotic’ in the way I questioned Hancock. These were the same people who’ve loved me since the EU referendum for being a Remainer who loudly campaigned for the result to be honoured but seem to think I must now be slavishly loyal to Boris Johnson’s government. But I don’t care what party is in power during this crisis, only how they handle it. Partisan politics, and Brexit, seem utterly irrelevant.

Tonight, Boris addressed the nation and announced we were now finally going into proper lockdown. All non-essential shops will close with immediate effect, as will playgrounds and libraries. We will only be allowed out for one hour of exercise alone, essential shopping for food or medicine, or for work if we can’t work from home. Even though I’ve been shouting for this to happen, it’s still a stunning moment – the biggest loss of freedom for the British people in 70 years. It won’t be too bad for those with nice houses and big gardens, but imagine being cooped up in a high-rise council flat with three kids for weeks or even months on end?

With her usual dreadful tone-deafness, Madonna posted a video of herself at her lavish mansion, naked in a candlelit bath full of rose petals while prattling on about the virus being the ‘great equaliser’.

Yeah, right. It’s self-evident that wealthy stars in vast secure homes will be far safer from the virus and more comfortable in lockdown than poor people living in cramped conditions on vast council estates. Madonna was savaged for her self-indulgent tripe, an early sign that the public will have no truck with spoilt celebrities showing off during lockdown.

TUESDAY 24 MARCH

America is on the same trajectory as Italy was several weeks ago, and if the carnage that’s unfurled there now unfurls in the USA, as many experts predict, then it may decimate human life like no other single entity in the nation’s history.

Right now, the only thing that can possibly stop this happening is a complete and total shutdown of the kind Trump himself ironically once demanded on all Muslims entering the USA after the ISIS terror attacks. Coronavirus will kill many more Americans than Islamist terrorists ever have.

Governments have been scrambling to find a way – any way – to contain it, and almost all of them have now arrived at the conclusion that the best way to stem the tide of infection is a lockdown similar to the one we now have, finally, in the UK. This means a complete cessation of any ‘normal’ activity. This means people whose jobs don’t directly contribute to fighting the virus stop working and stay at home. This means everyone exercising draconian social distancing. This is how China, where the virus emanated, finally got on top of it – along with massively intensive testing of the kind America has abjectly failed to deliver. If Americans think their current lack of ‘freedom’ is bad, they should see how an authoritarian state like China handled its lockdown. But it worked.

As with his fellow populist Boris Johnson, President Trump’s natural political skills that made him so electorally popular sit uncomfortably with this crisis. The American people are incredibly fearful, for very good reason. They want firm, calm, decisive action, unambiguous, accurate advice and constant reassurance that their government is doing everything it can to fight the virus. What they don’t want is a blustering, bravado-laced leader shooting from the hip every day, lying about being ‘in total control’ of the virus, espousing unproven ‘cures’, picking idiotic fights with the media or political opponents, and giving false hope about when this will all end.

Trump, like Johnson, has been flailing through this crisis because all his natural instincts are to maintain everyone’s ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’, and because he appears to be motivated more by a desire to save the economy than to save lives. I don’t think he’s a callous, uncaring human being, contrary to what some believe. I’m sure that beneath Trump’s typical self-aggrandising ‘I’m handling this beautifully’ self-confidence lies a guy secretly panicking at the rapidly escalating US coronavirus infection rate and death toll.

And I’m also sure he believes with every fibre of his being that getting the economy going again will be crucial to America’s recovery from this crisis. After all, Trump’s a money man to his bootstraps who has spent his entire life driven by a craven love of business, success and cash. So, for him to now see his presidency consumed by the greatest disintegration of the economy in US history will be hitting him harder than he is letting on. One minute, Trump was cruising to re-election, the next he is staring down the barrel of a disaster of epic proportions that threatens to derail everything, including his chances of winning again in November.

But Trump needs to understand very clearly that lives matter more than money. The economy will eventually recover because it always does. Lives lost to the virus will never be recovered.

WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH

During my clash with Matt Hancock on Monday, I asked him about the issue of nurses and doctors racking up parking tickets at hospitals due to their long shifts in the crisis.

I’ve complained many times on air before about how absurd it is that health workers have to pay to park their cars where they work to save people’s lives. When I asked Hancock if he would scrap all charges, at least for the duration of the pandemic, he replied, ‘I will look at it, yes.’

Nothing’s yet been done, though, and I woke up today to a number of health workers tweeting me copies of their parking tickets. This incensed me so much that I ripped into Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick on GMB for the government still not ordering free parking for all NHS staff as they fight the virus.

‘We’re already indebted to them,’ he blustered, ‘anything further we could be doing, Piers, we should be considering.’ As he blathered away without making any firm commitment, I decided to do something myself, and vowed on air to personally pay for any and all parking fines sustained by NHS staff. Talking to them straight down the camera, I said, ‘I will pay them and then go to the government and have the battle with them – you don’t get involved.’ Sometimes, you just have to publicly shame people into doing the right thing.

‘That could turn out to be a very expensive gesture,’ chuckled Susanna after the show. I hadn’t really given much thought to that. Bit late now!

At 9 pm tonight, the government announced free parking for all NHS staff and care workers for the duration of the crisis, and I was bombarded with messages on social media from health workers thanking me for standing up for them, which made a nice change from all the abuse for my ‘scare-mongering’. It feels good to be able to wield my platform in such a positive way.

THURSDAY 26 MARCH

A campaign was launched a few days ago for everyone to step outside our homes tonight at 8 pm and ‘Clap for the NHS’.

It’s a lovely idea, but I was doubtful about the public’s willingness to actually do it. I shouldn’t have been so cynical.

At 8 pm, I walked out with Celia and Elise and began clapping, and to my astonishment so did almost everyone else in our part of Kensington. There were cheers and roars too, and people hitting pots and pans. It was an extraordinary, rousing and intensely moving moment. I found myself giving a thumbs-up to neighbours I’ve barely ever spoken to, smiling in solidarity.

And when we went back inside after five minutes and turned on the news, we discovered that the same scene had been replicated everywhere around the country in the most spine-tingling act of national unity I’ve ever seen and one which will have surely given our health-care heroes such a boost when they most need it, on a day when it emerged that 39 doctors have already died from coronavirus in Italy.

The great national clap might also go a long way to healing Britain too after all the horrible toxic feuding over Brexit. And if it does, how ironic that we’ve finally found a way to come together – by being forced to stay apart.

FRIDAY 27 MARCH

An astonishing, tumultuous, unnerving day. First it was announced that Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus, then a few hours later that Matt Hancock has too, and that Professor Chris Whitty has self-isolated, fearing he also may have it. As we digested these stunning developments, Dominic Cummings was seen running out of Downing Street.

The instant sense of national panic and worry at this unprecedented and unpredictable turn of events reminded me of the first few hours after 9/11 when all hell was breaking loose and nobody was quite sure how things would end.

It also raises immediate, urgent questions about who’s now in charge of our fight against the virus.

‘If Boris has a #Coronavirus fever, as he says,’ I tweeted, ‘then he surely shouldn’t still be trying to run the country? Too many huge, crucial decisions to be made for someone who may be feeling very rough to be at the helm. Who is the designated survivor PM – Raab? Sunak? Gove?’

‘Piers,’ replied the Financial Times chief feature writer Henry Mance, ‘don’t know how to break this … but after the last couple of weeks, it’s actually *you*.’

News of Boris’s diagnosis lit up Twitter, and the troll cesspit began gleefully celebrating the fact he had the virus and hoping it kills him. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to feel Boris was stupid and reckless to boast of shaking hands in a hospital containing coronavirus patients just three weeks ago. But for people to actively want him dead, and I saw many tweets to this effect, is just disgusting.

It also shows that for all the #BeKind bullshit since Caroline Flack’s suicide, many people have learned absolutely nothing. Not least super-rich celebrities who continue to be extraordinarily tone-deaf in this crisis.

Billionaire movie mogul David Geffen posted a photo to Instagram of his gigantic $590 million gin-palace yacht with the caption, ‘Sunset last night … Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.’ Like Madonna, he was promptly ripped to shreds. The public has zero tolerance for wealthy, privileged stars rubbing their noses in it right now.

MONDAY 30 MARCH

My 55th birthday. Had a fun chat with the family on Zoom, the video-conferencing platform that’s exploded in popularity since the pandemic started and is now, staggeringly, worth more than every US airline combined.

It’s not the same as seeing people in the flesh, but it’s a lot better than not seeing them at all. Technology is at least allowing us to maintain visual contact – what the hell would this kind of lockdown have been like a hundred years ago?

TUESDAY 31 MARCH

Neil Thompson, GMB’s editor, phoned me this afternoon to tell me that our presenter Kate Garraway’s husband Derek is critically ill in hospital with coronavirus. They’re both good friends of mine, and when I spoke to Kate on the phone tonight, she was calm but understandably frightened. Derek’s just 52 and had no underlying health condition, but is now fighting for his life. This virus is terrifying.