Don’t be fooled by the sunshine – there are only dark days ahead – Peter Hitchens

‘I have come to hate this beautiful weather, the loveliest spring for 50 years. I long to wake up to a filthy morning of dirty grey skies and miserable rain, like the one Tennyson described when he wrote ‘ghastly, thro’ the drizzling rain, on the bald street, breaks the blank day’.

This is because I think the British people are lost in an unreal, sunshiny dreamtime of delusion, seeing the current crisis as a sort of holiday after which they can all amble off back to the world.

They once knew, a world that died for ever some time ago. I am reminded of John Wyndham’s terrifying science fiction novel The Day Of The Triffids, in which everyone is captivated by an amazing, spectacular meteor shower – and all those who watch it late into the night, oohing and aahing with delight, wake up the next morning permanently blind.

Except, in this case, we will all be permanently less free and permanently poorer. And that will, of course, include the sacred NHS, which the nation love-bombs every Thursday night but which is already so threadbare that it cannot properly equip its doctors and nurses.

Just wait and see how much worse this gets in the coming era of post-shutdown austerity.

Not to mention all the various zealots and fanatics who already see this new world as an opportunity to impose their various dogmas and fads on us.

I won’t dwell yet again on the damage the Government has already done, and which deepens every day. I only say that without serious and angry opposition, this will only get worse. This clueless Cabinet is motivated only by fear.

People who strove all their lives for office now have no idea what to do with the powers they thought they wanted, and are terrified of the responsibilities that came with them. They do not understand what they are doing and are not in charge of their own destiny.’