Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

We all need a break every now and again. In my case I managed to convince my editor to grant me a Sunday away last week. It was most welcome and I return refreshed, if not renewed.

During my time away, Harrogate MP Andrew Jones has been uncharacteristically visible in the Mother of Parliaments; first during the Covid debate in the last week of September and, this week, popping up at PMQ’s to ask BoJo for a recovery bung for the Harrogate Convention Centre and other constituency exhibitors. It’s hard to keep pace with this newly Whirling Dervish of a pol - it brings a whole new meaning to “keeping up with the Jones’.”

As the Covid era grinds on – we are now well into the eighth successive month of restrictions upon our lives and liberty – the effects on our individual and collective health and wellbeing, especially our mental health, are beginning to weigh heavily upon us. Being told with whom we can or cannot socialise, foreshortened and proscribed hospitality hours (a curfew in all but name), masks and hand sanitiser, interminable Zoom meetings, interminable Zoom drinks and, worst of all, enforced separation from loved ones. This is now spoilt fruit.

Harrogate is famously home to a significant number of the reasonably well to do blue-rinse set. What demographers call an ageing population, or what AJ might consider his core vote. Many of whom reside in care homes across the constituency, isolated from loved ones by the government’s insistence on the restriction of visits by relatives. Mr. Jones was absolutely right to say in debate that “balancing wellbeing and isolation is very difficult but the emotional consequences of no visits are absolutely profound.”

When I eventually meet my maker I hope I will be able to say that I arrived at the pearly gates (whether St. Peter lets me in or not) with the touch and caress of those who are dear to me fresh in my memory. That’s the stuff of living. A few extra days of life achieved by quarantining myself from loved ones or, worse still, being quarantined by my government, is not a bargain I would make. Surely this has to be a family decision, made in possession of the knowledge of who and what is important, enabled of course by full information, skilled and professional care home staff, protective equipment, sensible hygiene measures and visitor scheduling. The visitor screens suggested by our MP feel somehow cold and distancing, reminiscent of prison visits or a transaction at a high street bank branch (if you can still find one). And anyway people are already improvising and attempting to wave to their relatives through windows, but this is scant substitute for human contact. Hugs are what is needed, you might say, rather than mugs.

In the end, what jars for me about current care home visitor policy is that it is illiberal, runs counter to the claim made by the Conservative Party that it is freedom loving, that it celebrates personal responsibility and, worst of all, that it is simply inhumane. I know of course that Covid cut a swathe through care home populations and I hear the ongoing policy rationale for standing in the way of long overdue reunions. I just happen to think it’s wrong. Ideologically, politically and practically. I’m with Andrew on that.

Those merry few who have read these columns in the past twenty weeks will know that ‘hens teeth’ best describes the compliments I’ve heretofore felt able to offer the Honourable Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough. I don’t consider myself generally bilious in nature, so my criticism is offered (mostly) in the spirit of sorrow rather than in the flush of anger. It is in this dejected vain that I refer to Wednesday’s “questions to the Prime Minister” during which our duly elected asked, cap in hand, for a not so modest consideration for the town’s conference and exhibition businesses.

This must be a tale of two halves; one the Harrogate Convention Centre, the other, the Great Yorkshire Showground. The HCC, like the errant and spendthrift heir to the family fortune, in need of a bailout for council mismanagement sins far predating the current effects of the Covid crisis. The second, the more deserving and always well behaved second child, a perennial success now fallen on hard times, through no fault of its own.

The state has, so far, stepped in admirably with vast sums of financial support for both the public and private sectors. In his 2019 general election debate with Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson accused Labour’s erstwhile leader of being in possession of a forest of magic money trees, if he were to fund his extravagant policy promises. In office, Johnson has been forced by tragic circumstance on a spending spree worthy of Viv Nicholson. The time has surely come to make tough decisions about on what we spend our dwindling resources. All claims are not equal and should not be treated as such. To do so risks propping up enterprises that were failing long before the effects of Covid took hold.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.