I live in a village and there is one thing we have in abundance: idiocy. That situation can be replicated across the country from city to glade, from farmer to copper, to teacher to baker to candlestick maker, as a collective bout of intellectual vacuity seeps into every community and vocational pore.

My tipping point was a story over Yuletide entitled ‘Santa arrested for not wearing a mask.’ I confess, I did not get much further than the headline, as the internet is on go slow after this morning’s power cut caused by a worker stupidly drilling through a cable outside a local substation, or some other such excuse. Still, in fairness, at least they did not use the go-to: ‘because of Covid’ in mitigation.

Another story to get my goat was the fallout of the senseless and tortuous murder of little six-year-old Arthur, who has been told by us all that he IS loved, despite it now being too late to show him how deeply. His stepmother, Emma Tustin, is peculiarly being turned into some kind of anti-celebrity by the tabloid press, with pictures of her pink jail cell and reports of her failed attempts to end her own life. For those us of who cannot bring themselves to shed a tear for such an aberration of humanity, to then read of the stupidity of the penal powers that be astounds. It is claimed she has been booked onto a ‘parenting course’ in chokey. Whatever next? Taxpayer-funded training for Bojo on ‘remaining truthful’? It just does not add up.

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To be fair, a lot of the stupidly has been given a green light by our old chum ‘Covid’ as the well-meaning were put in charge of ‘keeping us safe.’ Why not go the whole hog and draft in Michael Crawford to reprise Frank Spencer to run government strategy, although judging by recent events I believe he already has been.

The collective silliness has reached the peak of politics as the whole ‘Partygate’ fiasco demonstrated. The one thing many of us have in common is the belief that large swathes of our ruling party are stupid as they flap about attempting, and failing, to deal with an issue that was easily resolvable. Yes, there was not a party, and I wasn’t at the party that did take place according to the report, which wasn’t really a report… or some such gobbledygook. With a modicum of intellect, it would have been over in a flash but instead they fanned the spark to create an inferno which has been doused by the deflecting of attention away from such goings on by the actions of Putin.

I went to a concert a few months back, my daughter’s inaugural introduction into the world of musical entertainment, to watch Cavetown and very good he was, surprisingly, to me and the other middle aged bag carriers, lurking against the side wall of the magnificent Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, as their offspring undertook this teenage rite of passage.

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The event was spoilt by officialdom as staff, taking the government diktats to heart as they ran scared from that week’s Wuhan variant, worked hard to ‘keep us all safe.’ This involved forcing us to queue outside for 105 minutes, crowded together without masks or social distancing, as they meticulously checked our online tickets, undertook a bag search and employed a metal detector sweep, with a complete absence of any semblance of manners.

It seems as if stupidly is accepted as long as they have the Covid barrier to take refuge behind. Appointments at doctors, hospitals, visiting loved ones in care, burying our dead, students falling behind, getting the car MOTed, getting caught in a log jam on the way to the west country: All of these and many, many more daily instances were, and are, blamed on Covid and not collective ineptitude. Sadly, common sense and stupidity reign as the next generation become irreversibly institutionalised by this diet of nonsense and bluster as I am left wondering what the purpose of leadership is, if, as a collective, we succumb to the herdthink of the stupid as we discount the logical.

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher