As some of you may have noticed, my column didn’t appear in the last issue. I had hoped to use the week’s leave to indulge in seasonal partying. But the hosts of most of the festivities in my diary cancelled, citing Omicron. Having had the booster vaccine last month, I was up for socialising. Not so the majority of my intended hosts, who perhaps felt more responsibility in that role.
But the main point, in terms of politics, is that these cancellations predated the government’s advice to be — in the words of Boris Johnson — “cautious” in the face of a new Covid variant of extraordinary transmissibility, against which the first two vaccine jabs would be much less protective.
As in the period just
