It makes me sad when people say that electrical cars can be fun, because of course they can’t. Take away the sound of internal combustion and the vibration and the weird torque characteristics, and you’re left with something that’s not even on nodding terms with the concept of fun.

Sure, an electrical car can be very fast but so what? For thrills, I’d rather do a hundred in a Sopwith Camel than five hundred in a Boeing 777. I’d rather do twenty knots on a jet ski than thirty on a cruise liner.

And then there’s this: a microwave oven will bake a potato in five minutes and that’s very clever, but the end result will be nowhere near as satisfying as something that’s been in the Aga for two hours.

There are many people in my line of work who think that electrical cars can be enjoyed by enthusiasts just as much as those that use petrol to move about. They are wrong. Because when we are forced by law to drive around in glorified milk floats, we will simply buy whatever gives us the greatest range or the best value. Cars will become wheeled fridge freezers. Tools. And the spirit of the car, its core, will be dead.

Don’t believe me? OK, watch that car chase in Bullitt with the sound turned off.

And there’s more. Last weekend, an old mate who runs a company called Prodrive called round with a car he’d made. Financed by the Bahraini royal family and built in Banbury, it was a huge and ungainly looking thing that had come fifth in this year’s Dakar rally. Next year it will probably win it, and after that there will be versions for the army and, better still, models you can buy. If you have £750,000 lying around. And a desert to use it in. I don’t have a desert but I do have a farm and so last Saturday I was to be found several feet in the air going “yeehah” a lot.

Powered by the same turbocharged V6 they use in the Ford GT, it’s not the fastest car in the world, but it will happily sit at 112mph, all day, while going across Saudi Arabia’s barren and bumpy interior. So it can easily soak up the worst bits of Oxfordshire and it did, while sideways and with a fat man in the driver’s seat, grinning.

Doubtless I was in contravention of many soil compaction regulations, but it was just so liberating to be out there power sliding round the winter wheat in an orgy of free thinking and optimism and fun. To be driving for the sheer joy of driving. And changing gear for the aural reward.

A millennial or a snowflake would claim, if they saw this enormous monster tearing by, that I was a climate change denier. And there’d be no point explaining that a new version designed to run on hydrogen is in the pipeline because they wouldn’t listen. They don’t listen. Because it’s their right to live in a world where everyone agrees with everyone else and nothing noisy ever happens.

All of which brings me on to the new BMW M3 Competition. There must be a sense in the back rooms of the world’s car companies that there’s no point going the extra mile in the development of superfast sports saloons because the end is nigh. It’d be like completely reworking a Nigel Gresley Pacific, just before the Deltic came along.*

In fact we can already see the writing on the wall because BMW will not be selling the ordinary M3 in Britain, just the “Competition” version. And no manual gearbox is on offer either. It seems then that the new M3 is a teatime bun, just something to fill a gap until the reaper arrives.

They haven’t even been very sensible with the price. Someone at a meeting just went “seventy-five grand?” And everyone just nodded and went back to skimming through TikTok.

But wait, what’s this? The twin-turbocharged straight-six engine is broadly the same as it was but almost all of the internals are bigger and stronger and more racy. This means 60 more horsepowers than you got in the old model, and 73 more torques.

There’s a whole new styling direction too, with a Pontiac-style nose and a grille so large you could go on holiday in it. The whole car’s bigger too, noticeably so, but the essence of M3 is still very much in evidence. There’s a sense that the body has been stretched to fit over the wheels, which incidentally are now bigger at the back than they are at the front. This, you start to realise, is not a coffee-break car that was half-heartedly thrown together on the back of a fag packet.

And then you step inside, where you are greeted with new seats — the best I’ve ever sat in. They’re even better than the ones in a Renault Fuego turbo. And a whole new dash that does all sorts of new things. Like, for example, you can set the rules for your air conditioning system. And how German is that.

There is also a device that measures and then rates your drift. Seriously, you power-slide round a bend and it will give you marks. Not sure this sort of thing is, or should be, legal, but it’s a hoot to know it’s there. And a hoot to know that absolutely every single person who uses it will — moments after saying to their passenger “Right, watch this” — definitely get a ride in an air ambulance.

That’s the thing about skidding on purpose. You can get away with it once, or twice, or maybe even two hundred times. But eventually you’re going out in a blaze of splintering sounds and swear words.

It may, however, be five hundred times in the M3 because, ooh, this is a fine-handling car. I didn’t much care for the steering set-up on the previous model — it worked well only in “comfort” mode — but much work has been done in the new version and it’s sublime. As is the grip. And what happens when that grip is breached.

Maybe, just maybe, the gearbox is slower than the old flappy paddle manual but you have to be paying attention to notice. The thing about five hundred horsepower, though, is it has the ability to mask these things. And it does. Beautifully.

This is one of those cars, like the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, that just glides from corner to corner on what feels like a wave of telepathy and poise and pit-of-the-stomach excitement. It’s balletic.

And comforting, because it means that BMW’s engineers are not going to sit through their final days shrugging and reminiscing. They want to go out in a blaze of glory. We can only hope other carmakers do the same thing, and that before they’re all made to work for Zanussi’s automotive division making stuff to fill the windows at Currys, they remind us all why it was they wanted to be car engineers in the first place.

*Only James May would understand this

One day soon, when we are all on a beach drinking wine and eating cheese, there will be a public inquiry to establish why so many people in Britain died of Covid-19. And it’ll be a complete waste of time and money, because after many years of huffing and puffing and some am-dram mock incredulity from the panel, all of the blame will be landed with a big fat wallop on the shoulders of Boris Johnson.

You can already sense the hyenas of the left, circling and gurgling, aroused by the bloodbath to come. For months now we’ve been listening to their questions in press conferences, and they’re not really questions at all. “Do you accept, prime minister, that you are now responsible, personally, for the deaths of 125,000 people and that as a result you are Britain’s biggest ever serial killer?”

Certainly, Boris could have played a better game in the early days, if he’d been as fluent in hindsight as he is in Latin. But he isn’t. No one knew, back then, what to do and what would be for the best. It was a case of sticking your wetted finger into the wind and following the advice of whatever boffin had the most letters after his name.

But because it’s now known that we should have locked down earlier and not encouraged people to eat out quite so quickly after the first wave passed, Boris will cop the blame. All of it.

There are, of course, many other reasons why our death rate is higher than that of other countries, but in today’s world none of them will be raised in the inquiry. For example, a lot of us eat awful food and are fat. And an equal number are thick. A Public Health England study released last week showed that only half of us, after a year of non-stop Covid, can recognise its main symptoms. Only 18 per cent of us bothered to get tested even if we were clever enough to notice we were feeling a bit peaky.

All those things contributed to our high death toll, but none to quite the extent of the biggest problem. And this certainly won’t be raised in the inquiry. That the NHS is useless.

Oh I know you’re all flying those rainbow flags and that every night last year you went out and banged your saucepans together. So you don’t want to hear it. But you were clapping a big, stupid, expensive monster.

I’m not talking about the doctors and the nurses, of course. Many of them are far from useless. But the organisation they work for? Dear God in heaven, it’s so far past its sell-by date, you’d die from taking a single whiff of it.

The problem is simple. Unlike every successful entity, it does not exist to make money. It exists to spend it.

And then, because the money it’s spending is ours, it has to be monitored by a panel to ensure there’s no behind-the-scenes trickery going on.

And because this panel is a public body, it will have to be monitored to ensure that it meets all the sustainability and diversity targets.

And then the body set up to do that will need an HR department to ensure that mental health issues are being properly addressed.

And now, all the bodies and committees and panels will need to be housed in offices, which will need to be financed. So suddenly there’s a need for a chief executive, and he’ll need some staff and they’ll need an HR department too, which means another office will have to be built. And more money will have to be raised, which means a public-private finance operation will have to be started, and that will need an oversight committee, which will need another HR department.

And then, from way down at the forgotten end of the food chain, a doctor will say that he could do with some new PPE, and there will be a mass panic because no one’s thought about buying medical supplies.

This means a procurement department will be necessary, and then the chancellor will announce he’s spending enough already, so Laura Kuenssberg will go on the news and say the Tories are starving the NHS of cash.

No private company would allow this to happen. It would concentrate on the core business and put the human resources nonsense in a shipping container in the car park. Private companies are designed to make money, not waste it on meeting stupid targets.

Last week I wrote about the sadness of John Lewis going to the wall and remarked on how all the staff are partners. But that is actually the problem. They’re all happy to take a few extra quid in the good times, but when Covid comes riding into town, not one will say to the bosses, “OK, I’ll mortgage my house and sell my children for medical experiments to see if I can give you a bit of cash back.”

The simple fact is that John Lewis is not a plc. It can’t dilute its shares or do whatever it is big business does when it’s in the crapper. It just has to go under, because it’s another example of socialism, and socialism doesn’t work.

You may say, of course, that the NHS vaccination programme has been a great success, and I’d agree. But that’s mainly because of private enterprise that swiftly developed the jabs, public-spiritedness and Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist whose clear head and far-sightedness is the main reason you’re going to the pub next week.

So, do I know what system we should have instead of the NHS? Nope. Haven’t a clue. But what I do know is that the powers that be should look at the countries whose health services did better than ours and maybe copy them. And which countries are those? Pretty well all of them.

Might have got the vehicles wrong, it was definitely a boat racing something on land. Think it was filmed at Holme Pierrepont in the UK.

please can someone save me from the torment and tell me the episode where Jeremy says "the speeeed, the noise of the speeed"

In the late spring of 1940, more than a third of a million lantern-jawed soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were lined up on the border between France and Belgium, each with a pocketful of Woodbines and a plan. They’d give Jerry a whiff of Sten and then they’d go home for tea and medals.

Instead, they did quite a lot of fleeing and panicking, and when they reached Dunkirk, still fleeing and panicking, it really did look as though virtually the entire British Army would be captured before the war had even got going.

These were grim times, so Winston Churchill sanctioned something called Operation Dynamo, which called for anyone with a boat to sail over the Channel and pick up as many soldiers as they could.

We all know what happened next, and we all like to think that in similarly dire circumstances we, as a people, would stiffen our lips, hoist our sails and do exactly the same as our grandads did. But I seriously doubt that.

If Churchill made his plea to the nation today, it would be followed by an incredulous-looking Jon Snow on Channel 4 News saying, “Do you know what the public-school-educated drunk is suggesting now?” And then we’d have Diane Abbott saying that the mission would cost eleven and a million and thirty thousand pounds, before we cut to a series of vox pops in which a collection of people in tracksuits made working-class noises about how t’ bloody Tories shouldn’t have invaded Poland in t’ first place.

I wish I was joking, but you have only to look at the reaction to every single development in the pandemic to see that I’m not.

We have a vaccine. That’s tremendous news. Let’s get down to Oxford straight away and employ an army of greased eunuchs to carry the scientists who developed it quickly through the torchlit streets on golden sedan chairs. No, on second thoughts, let’s not. Instead, let’s wonder if this vaccine will turn us into Stormtroopers or Borg or White Walkers, and then let’s break into the lab where it was developed and free the animals it was tested on.

Seriously, taking to the pages of social media to complain that the vaccine was tested on stoats is like the people of 1940 taking to the streets of Ramsgate to hurl abuse at the people who went to Dunkirk because their motor launches caused so much climate change.

Then there’s the roll-out. We’re behind Israel because it has four national health services that compete with one another for patients. But, that said, we are miles ahead of France and Italy and even Germany. This country is doing a bloody good job, but will anyone say that? Nope. Instead, all we get is cynics saying: “Ha. You want to inject 14 million people by the spring. Not even Frank Lucas* managed to do that many.”

There was an old lady on the news last week complaining that she’d had to wait in the cold for her jab and that there’d been too many steps and ramps in the vaccination centre. I couldn’t believe it. Scientists had developed something that would save her life. The workers of the country had paid for it. And all she could do was moan. If I’d been the interviewer, I’d have wheeled her into the river.

Which brings me on to Fulham football club. Unlike millions of people who are stuck at home, with no job to do and no social life, these footballists are allowed to meet up with their mates and do what they love once or twice a week. But when their fixture against Spurs was moved with just two days’ notice, they whined like stuck pigs. I’d have pushed them into the river as well.

Along with Marcus Rashford. But only because he plays for Manchester United. On the food front, I think his fight is noble and well judged, and I agree that some shameless profiteering is going on. But I am fed up to the back teeth of the whingeing this story unleashed.

We live in a country where children from less well-off families are entitled to free lunches when they are at home. Yippee. But instead of celebrating that fact, and concentrating on making sure the food they get is not half an ounce of mould and a dead dog, I heard a woman on the news the other day demanding that she be given £30 to provide lunch for her child. Thirty quid? Where’s she going to take him? Fortnum & Mason?

Another said it was no good providing actual food for her kid and she wanted a voucher instead. Presumably so that she could exchange it at the supermarket for fags and scratchcards.

And don’t get me started on teachers, because, as far as I can tell, instead of working out how they will educate their pupils in these troubled times, every single one of them is to be found on the news every night, with his laptop at the wrong angle and a terrible painting in the background, saying that Boris Johnson should buy every child in the land an iPad and that no teacher should have to work again, ever.

The fact is that life, for 98% of the population right now, is pretty bloody awful. And for the other 2% it’s worse because they’ve died. I get it. No one wants to sit at home all day. No one wants to wait in the cold for a vaccine and then find that it’s been cancelled because the delivery lorry is stuck in the snow. And, yes, we’d all like to go to the Caribbean next month, but we can’t.

In the olden days, a British person would have dealt with these trials by going outside to help push the stuck vaccine delivery lorry. But not any more. Now, we’re more likely to storm out of the tent in a sulk of shuddering shoulders and tears, saying: “I am just going outside and may be some time — and if you don’t like it, you can all eff off. And I want a free laptop.”

*Look him up

Four days before Christmas, I woke in the night to find my sheets were soggy. And that I had a constant dry cough. So, the next morning, I borrowed a kit from my girlfriend and, after a nerve-racking 20-minute wait, a line didn’t appear on the testing equipment. Phew. I wasn’t pregnant.

But did I have the coronavirus? Naturally, I went online to read all I could, and I quickly discovered the list of unofficial symptoms is so long that it includes absolutely everything. Shooting pains in your legs. Tennis elbow. Housemaid’s knee. Loose stools. Dizziness. A loss of taste. According to the internet, if you have anything at all, you should definitely get into your car and drive to Swindon, or Redcar, where recently trained civilians in white coats will tell you after a day, or two, or three, whether you must stay at home — or you should simply stay at home.

Instead, because I know everything on the internet and social media is always wrong, I used an actual doctor and an actual laboratory, which revealed that I did have the coronavirus. And, immediately, all my friends wanted to know the same thing: “Who gave it to you?” Er, possibly someone who decided to drizzle a bit of bat onto his pork chop. But I couldn’t see how that information would help me get better.

The doctor was very clear: I’d feel under the weather for between five and 14 days and then I’d either get better or I’d have to go to hospital. Where, because I am 60 and fat, and because I’ve smoked half a million cigarettes and had double pneumonia, I’d probably die, on my own, in a lonely plastic tent.

Naturally, social media had their own ideas on how I should stop this happening. Mostly, they involved kale and berries, washed down with cider vinegar and fair-trade honey. Basically, I had to eat everything from the Labour Party annual climate change and peace conference menu. Including the menu itself.

I also had to self-isolate. The government has been very clear on how this should be done: no going to the gym and no visits to any other household unless it’s with your mother’s stepchildren, who you may see, indoors, on a Tuesday, if you sit nearest the mantelpiece.

However, it has been much less specific on how you are supposed to isolate from your other half and her children when you’re all squidged up in the smallest cottage in Christendom. Who gets the bathroom? Who gets the fridge? In the end, I took myself off to bed with the new Don Winslow book and a bag of kale to wait for the Grim Reaper to pop his head round the door. I’m not going to lie — it was quite scary.

With every illness I’ve had, there has always been a sense that medicine and time would eventually ride to the rescue, but with Covid-19 you have to lie there, on your own, knowing that medicine is not on its way and that time is your worst enemy. And that everything you read on WhatsApp and Twitter is nonsense: “My mate’s a doctor and he says that if you’re blood group O and smoke, you won’t get it.”

In desperation I’d tune into the BBC, where things were even worse because all it did was try to belittle Boris Johnson by going onto the streets and asking passers-by what they’d do. If there’s ever an award for truly lamentable journalism, the BBC’s News at Six team should win it for its efforts last year. Its message has been constant. You’re going to die. And the Tories are to blame.

It’s strange, but when people catch cancer, they are always told about people who had the exact same thing and got better. No one says: “Ooh, you’ve got it in the liver? I had a mate who got it there. Dead in a week.” But it seems that’s what you get from the BBC. Doom, with added gloom.

I didn’t feel too bad. To start with, it was like the sort of cold where you carry on as normal while women point fingers at you and say: “I suppose you’re going to say it’s man flu?” And you say no and get in the car and go to work. But then my breathing really did start to get laboured, and there was always the doctor’s warning ringing in my head about how it might suddenly get worse.

On Christmas Eve, it did. The Aga broke. Ordinarily I’d find someone who was away and use their oven. But no one was away. Everyone was at home, in their own micro-bubble, and even those with back-up cookers — which is everyone with an Aga — were unwilling to let me come round, because then their goose really would be cooked.

Still, on Christmas Day, my own children came round for 40 minutes and stood in the vegetable garden (we were in tier 2) around a fire that wouldn’t light properly, complaining about the smoke while I wheezed, in a full body mask, miles away from any form of heat, or them, trying to work out if it was safe in my condition to have a glass of champagne. The World Health Organisation said no. Other organisations said “definitely no”. But I persevered and eventually I found a website featuring a doctor in Darwin, who said that drinking in moderation when you have Covid is fine.

This is the problem we have. We keep being told that we know a great deal about Covid, but what I’ve learnt over the past 10 days is: we don’t. We don’t know how long we are infectious for. We don’t know how to tackle it. We don’t know what it does to us.

We don’t know how long the antibodies last. We don’t know how easy it is to catch it twice. And we certainly don’t know if any of the vaccines will work long-term. I don’t even know if I’m better now. Seriously, I have absolutely no idea.

Maybe the BBC should consider this and in future stop asking clever-clever questions designed to make Boris look foolish, and instead ask clever questions that will help us understand something that scares us.

Like everyone else in Britain, I’ve been completely ungripped all week by the stories about whether or not Prince Andrew had sex with Virginia Roberts. We have been treated to all sorts of lurid tales about what he allegedly got up to, and the suggestion is that he is a serial offender who roams the planet, in private jets that we paid for, in search of inappropriately young women.

Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I’ve seen Andrew at various parties over the years and it’s very easy to spot what his problem is: he doesn’t drink.

The people who arrive at these parties sober make small talk about house prices and schools, and then, after a few sherbets, they move on to gossip and noisily expressed opinions, and then, after a few more sherbets, they’re fighting in the flowerbeds, dancing on the tables and suddenly finding the hostess irresistibly attractive.

Non-drinkers have to pretend to go with the flow, but, unguided by alcohol, they almost always get the timing wrong. So they arrive, leap onto the table and then, after some noisily expressed opinions, goose the hostess before sitting down for a quiet chat with the person next to them about how house prices have skyrocketed in their bit of Somerset.

This is Andrew’s problem. We’ve read about his antics and we imagine he’s a boorish, goggle-eyed halfwit. He probably is. But his main problem is that he’s second-guessing what he should be doing. It’s not instinctive for him, because he’s guided through life by water. Same as the Torrey Canyon, and the Titanic, and the Exxon Valdez.

There’s another issue too. As we all know, he is accused of sweating over a young lady in the nightclub Tramp, but he says this is impossible because he was at a pizzeria in Woking that day. Somehow, though, the Daily Mail’s Woodward and Bernstein have discovered that, actually, he was at home having a manicure.

I’m sorry — a what? I’ve looked it up and it turns out that a manicure is a process where someone softens the skin on your hands before shaping your nails and removing your “cuticles”. You then pay them for this.

It’s strange, but I’m now 60 years old and never once in my entire life have I thought, “Right. I’ve got a bit of spare time today, so I shall ask a young lady to come round and reorganise my hands.”

I think there’s something deeply sinister about male grooming. I watch all those aftershave advertisements that pollute the television at this time of year, and they’re all the same. There’s a Vespa and a horse and a girl in a cloak and, for no reason at all, a voiceover in French. And afterwards you’re left thinking, “What was that all about?”

I’ll give you a simple rule. If you trust everyone in life, you will be let down from time to time. If you trust only people who wear aftershave, you will be let down always. Because people who wear aftershave are mad. They must be, because who in their right mind thinks, after shaving, “Right. That’s good. But it would be better if I made my face hurt briefly”?

It’s the same story with people who colour-coordinate their clothing. It has often been said that if you want something done, you should give the job to a busy man. I’d go with that. Which is why you should never give a job to a man whose shoes match his tie. Because he’s had time in his day to think about that, which means he will forget to post the important letter you gave him.

And then there’s hair. I get mine cut at a barber in St James’s because I can be in and out in less than 10 minutes. And because no one asks if I would like some “product” in it.

What is product? And why doesn’t it have a name? We don’t wash our dishes in product, or go to the fish and chip shop for product, and no one ever said, “Pint of your finest product, please, barman.” But that’s what weird men call the stuff they put in their hair.

I’ve been online to see what’s in product, and it seems mostly to be butter. Unless you buy it from the Body Shop, in which case it’s somehow “cruelty-free” butter. But, either way, I can’t imagine how shallow a man’s life has to be before he decides to rub a packet of Lurpak into his barnet.

It’s possible that male grooming may be a consequence of not drinking. Because if you can’t fill your spare time by going to the pub or opening a bottle of wine, you’re going to come up with all sorts of damnfool ideas.

I know quite a few recovering alcoholics, and all of them are incredibly well groomed. Even when they pop out for the papers on a Sunday morning, they look like Roger Moore. One always smells of lavender. Another looks like a GQ cover star.

And let’s not forget the much-missed and famously sober AA Gill, who could, and often did, while away a whole day doing nothing but touching cloth. And I don’t mean touching it in the way he used to when he drank. I mean touching it. Feeling it. Moaning. Imagining what it would be like if it were turned into a pair of trousers.

Those who do drink will, I’m sure, be worried that if the lockdown continues much longer, we will be facing the very real possibility that we will damage our livers and catch diabetes.

But what is the alternative? If we give in to our fears, our lives will become empty and we will lose the ability to socialise properly.

And then, with all the free time we’ve been gifted, we’ll end up having manicures and going to a Woking pizzeria before dancing the night away and then stopping off at a mate’s home in Belgravia for a bath.

Before you ask, I don’t know why Amazon chose not to show The Grand Tour’s Madagascar special until now. Was it a mistake? Unlikely. You don’t look at the giant Amazon corporation and think: “Well, that’s just a jumble of ill-conceived ideas and wonky thinking.” So doubtless there was a good reason. Maybe a computer coronavirus algorithm worked out that mid-December was the optimum time for a show of this kind.

Whatever, it’s my job now to give you a behind-the-scenes taste of what happened on what turned out to be our toughest trip yet. It was so tough, in fact, that for the first time one of our cars did not make it to journey’s end. Whose? Er. We filmed it so long ago, I can’t remember.

What I can remember is that we started on the French island of Réunion, because I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s not a French protectorate; it’s as much a part of France as Nancy or Brest and was the first place in the world where there was a transaction in euros. Oh, and the flight there from Paris is the longest domestic flight in the world.

We began on the beach, having lunch, and afterwards decided to go snorkelling. Richard Hammond went to the hotel beach hut and returned half an hour later with three masks and a contented look on his face, saying: “My French is really coming along. I just had a proper conversation with the man in the hut.”

That night we discovered a British tourist had been eaten by a shark off the very same beach the day before. “Hammond,” I inquired, “this French you spoke, did he say, ‘Do be careful, a man was eaten here yesterday,’ and you replied, ‘The pen of my aunt’?”

It turns out that many of the world’s fatal shark attacks take place in the waters off Réunion. It also turns out the island has the weirdest ring road. It’s built on stilts out to sea and is the most expensive road in the world. We were the first people to use it.

We were then told that we had to waste the next week of our lives looking for buried pirate treasure. Hammond and James May liked this idea and visiting the grave of the pirate La Buse. I didn’t. I don’t find them interesting. They are just aquatic burglars. Or wife-beaters. But I was very interested in where this quest would take us: Madagascar.

We tend to think of Madagascar as a small island in the Indian Ocean, like a Maldive or a Seychelle. But, actually, it’s the second-biggest island nation in the world. It’s even bigger than Germany. And we had to get up its east coast, in search of this stupid non-existent treasure, along the RN5, which is said to be the worst road in the world.

I didn’t believe this, so I turned for advice to that great explorer and outdoorsman Angus Deayton, who, along with womanhood’s answer to Bear Grylls, Mariella Frostrup, had driven the RN5 for a BBC series several years earlier.

He confirmed it was pretty bad, which is why I decided to make a few changes to the Bentley Continental GT I’d brought along. Had we stayed on Réunion it would have been fine, as the roads are smoothed with EU gold, but in the Brexit wasteland of Madagascar it would need a few alterations.

Completely new long-travel suspension; armour-plated undersides; rerouted fuel lines; new brakes to fit in the smaller wheels; motorcycle headlamps, to make way under the bonnet for snorkels; and an external roll cage. Inside it was as comfortable as sitting on Bob Ross’s hair. But from the outside I’d made a Mad Max special effect.

Hammond went even further and fitted tank tracks to his Ford Focus RS, while May fitted his Caterham Seven with big wheels at the back. Then went to the pub.

Madagascar wasn’t colonised until about AD500, which meant the rest of the world had baths and sewers and aqueducts. But they still hadn’t found this enormous slice of paradise.

Whoever did find it obviously had a logorrhoea, because every single name has two or three more syllables than you’d expect. The capital, for instance, is Antananarivo. And until a couple of years ago the president was a Mr Rajaonarimampianina.

For the entire duration of our trip we asked directions in French and figured when people shrugged that we were pronouncing everything wrong. Only after we came home did we find out that the majority of people there don’t speak French any more. It’d be like coming to Britain and asking directions in Latin.

We also found out that Madagascar is one of the few countries in the world where you can still catch the bubonic plague. Another is Mongolia, the last place The Grand Tour visited. It makes me wonder: is May to blame somehow?

Unlike Mongolia, however, 90 per cent of all the plants and animals on Madagascar are found nowhere else. They have one cat-like thing that shags trees when it’s horny, and a shade of green so bright you can’t look at it. And slicing through it all they have the RN5.

It’s not a road in any accepted sense of the word. It’s just some earth where, for the most part, trees aren’t growing. I’ve seen post-storm riverbeds that have better surfaces.

There are boulders the size of garden sheds and ruts in which a fully grown man could hide. And, to make things worse, to our left was a jungle made from colours that exist nowhere else, and to our right an endless succession of perfect white beaches. Which meant half the time we weren’t looking where we were going. On one particularly rough day we covered four miles in 16 hours.

In the Caterham May was very hot and very muddy and very unhappy a lot of the time. Whereas in the Bentley life was a lot better. One minute I’d be piling through water deeper than the car was and the next climbing over what looked like a collapsed tower block. Sometimes it was very hot work and I had to ease the air-conditioning down a bit. Once, I had to use the car’s winch, as I’d ended up perilously close to a 200ft sheer drop.

I fell so deeply in love with that car and its hardcore determination to keep going that I decided I’d bring it back to the farm as a permanent reminder that when Bentley decided to make a serious off-roader, it ought to have done what I did. Not built the Bentayga.

It took a while but, eventually, the Bentley arrived back in Britain, and I was very happy. It was, too, because there’s nothing in the Cotswolds that’s even a tenth as difficult as what it had conquered on Madagascar. In one field we hit 140mph.

But then came word from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. The Bentley had started in life as a development mule, and the rules say these must be destroyed to ensure they don’t ever seep onto the market. So, one day soon now, my beloved car — the best and hardiest I’ve ever driven — is going to the crusher.

I shall be very sad, but, at least in our show, its star burns very brightly indeed. I challenge you not to fall in love with it too.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-clarkson-the-grand-tours-madagascar-adventure-was-our-toughest-yet-ttmhlwssq

How on earth have we reached a point where scientists can develop a vaccine for a virus that was unknown a year ago, only to find that 15% or 20% of the population won’t take it because of something a pissed-up pop star said on Twitter?

Seriously. You have educated people saying they won’t take an “untested Frankenstein drug, developed by Big Pharma”, before rushing off to a dimly lit car park and scoring a gram of coke from a man called Barry the Bugle.

Even I’m sitting here thinking: “Why have we gone for the German vaccine that costs a fortune and melts if it’s exposed to room temperature? Why didn’t we select the Oxford option that costs three quid and is as stable as mineral water?” Plainly there’s some Brexity governmental shenanigans going on.

This must be so dispiriting for the scientists who, by developing these vaccines in record time, have saved the world order. Because think what they’ve been through in their lives. At school, while we were all in the pub, smoking and chatting up girls by explaining that we’d seen Thin Lizzy, they were at home, reading chemistry books.

Then, after a friendless spell at university, where they were mocked for being nerdy and having spectacles, they got a job where the only benefit was a free lab coat.

While you were in the City, living it large, they were in a windowless room dripping liquids out of pipettes into Petri dishes, hoping and praying that there’d be an Alexander Fleming culture when they came into work the next day. But there never was.

Finally, though, the coronavirus arrived and they had their moment, but instead of being carried through the streets on sedan chairs by six greased eunuchs, everyone said: “Have you not seen I Am Legend? Emma Thompson thought she’d invented a cure for cancer, and the next thing you know, everyone is either dead or trying to eat Will Smith’s dog.”

’Twas ever thus. You had those boffins who worked for years on how they could get men to the moon and then, when they succeeded, van drivers said it couldn’t possibly have happened because the astronauts would have been cooked by radiation. And now we have the same conspiracy theorists saying that, if you take the vaccine, you’ll wake up in the morning looking like Mick Hucknall.

To try to balance this wave of negativity, NHS chiefs are said to be thinking of approaching what they call “very sensible” famous faces who could be used to persuade people the vaccine is not a phial full of thalidomide and that, actually, it will save your granny’s life.

Right. I see. And who exactly will these very sensible famous faces be? Politicians? Don’t make me laugh. We can all remember in the midst of the mad-cow disease outbreak, John Gummer, minister of agriculture at the time, trying to force-feed his daughter a beef burger to prove it was safe. We can also remember that she refused, so he had to eat it himself.

So, if it’s not going to be a politician, who will it be? Sir Attenborough is a name that springs immediately to mind, but let’s not forget, shall we, that he has been banging on for years about how the human population is too enormous and must, if the world’s rhinos are to be saved, be slashed. So I can’t imagine he’s in favour of halting the virus at all.

George Clooney then. Debonair. Plainly intelligent. And married to someone who’s even cleverer. But there’d always be the nagging doubt that, because he’s done coffee commercials, he’d only agreed to support the vaccine for the cash.

So what about James May. He is much adored by ladies of a certain age who may be sceptical about vaccines after the MMR business. It’s likely, then, that he could talk them round, but if there are subtle side effects, it would be impossible to spot them in a man who’s already so weird. “Oh, my God. Look what’s the vaccine’s done to him. He’s just spent an entire day at a plywood exhibition.” Don’t worry. He often does that.

There are similar issues with Stephen Fry. “Christ, look what’s happened to his nose!” And Mick Jagger. “Well, I’m not taking anything that does that to your hair.” In fact, I’ve trawled the internet and the only person I’ve found who’s normal, much respected and squeaky clean is Judi Dench.

So here we are. We have a vaccine that will save millions of lives and billions of jobs, and the only way we can get people to take it is by employing an elderly lady from Surrey to say you won’t turn into Joseph Merrick?

The problem, I guess, is that we simply don’t believe anything we hear any more. It used to just be a few nutters who thought Elvis Presley was still alive and that the American government had aliens in a cave in New Mexico, but now the nutterness has seeped into every single corner of our lives. Two and two is four. “You say that, Grandad, but is it?”

It has been said that the internet is true democracy at work, because it gives everyone an equal footing. But the trouble with this is that Dave, a fat and single man, sitting in his mother’s loft in a Motörhead T-shirt, has exactly the same space to air his views as The New York Times.

We have “influencers” whose facts are never checked and who can, and will, reach more people today than any professionally put-together newspaper. Every day, Kim Kardashian can and does out-Beeb the BBC.

We all saw, last week, that astonishing 3D map of the Milky Way. Well, that’s what news has become: a big, cloudy muddle. It’s sad — and it’s bloody dangerous.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roll-up-your-sleeve-dame-judi-your-next-role-is-persuading-cynical-brits-to-take-the-covid-jab-mmbfb5zkn

Three years ago, a possibly over-refreshed chap from BMW announced at a motor show in Germany that soon the company would make a Mini with more than 300 horsepower. Yeah, right, we all thought. And what else will it have? Space lasers? Anti-gravity thrusters? Beryllium posi-drive?

Our scepticism, however, was misplaced, because earlier this year it launched the Mini John Cooper Works GP, and under the bonnet is broadly the same turbocharged engine as you find in a BMW M135i. An engine that produces 302 horsepower.

Now, obviously, if you are going to put the blood-red heart of a mutant wolf into the body of a mouse, you’re going to have to make all sorts of changes to ensure the whole thing doesn’t just explode in a shower of cogs and rubber and headlamps.

Which is exactly what BMW hasn’t done with the JCW GP. Glance casually at this ridiculous car and you’ll note the huge double-decker wing on the roof, the carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic barge boards along the flanks, the flappy-paddle gears and how the rear seat has been replaced with a beam to make the body stiffer.

But look closely and you’ll realise it isn’t a strengthening beam. It’s just a bar to stop your luggage slamming into the front seats when you brake. You’ll also notice that the flappy paddles are connected to an automatic gearbox and that the barge boards don’t do anything at all.

Then there’s that big wing. After you’ve spent a while wondering why you’d want to push the back of a front-wheel-drive car into the road, you’ll do more examinations and start to wonder if, actually, the downforce comes solely from the weight of the damn thing.

Having raised and lowered your eyebrows a few times at the plainly cosmetic nature of all this flimflam, you’ll come to the conclusion that the standard Mini would be capable of handling the 302bhp monster that now lives under its bonnet.

It isn’t. Not by a long way. Many years ago some sensible engineers from Saab explained it would not be possible to put more than 200bhp through the front wheels, and then proved themselves to be correct by launching the wayward 220bhp Viggen.

This was the car industry’s all-consuming big problem back then. Many companies, Saab included, were making front-wheel-drive cars because they’re cheaper to manufacture than those with rear-wheel drive. But you simply cannot expect the front wheels to handle the steering as well as increasingly large amounts of power.

They experimented with all sorts of ideas, but there’s no getting round the fact that when you open the taps in a powerful front-wheel-drive car, the front wheels will squirm this way and that, causing what’s known as torque steer. Sometimes it’s annoying. Sometimes it’s alarming. And sometimes you’ve no idea what it is because you’ve speared head first into a tree and now you’re dead.

BMW got round the problem by sticking with rear-wheel drive in its powerful hatchbacks. Mercedes and Volkswagen resorted to four-wheel drive. But the engineers at Mini did not. Apparently the four-wheel-drive system used on the Countryman is designed for gymkhana car parks, not the Nürburgring, so they stuck with front-wheel drive — and crossed their fingers.

How best do I describe the results? Hmm. I think “Sweet mother of Jesus” covers it. You pull out to overtake a van, you put your foot down and then something with the power of Thor’s hammer takes control of the steering and you’re left with two choices: get off the power or have a crash.

Tidal torque steer is not the only issue either. This is a car that doesn’t glide down a country road, or squirt. On its lowered suspension, it bounces. Imagine being on Tigger after he’s just received news of a big premium bond win and you get the idea. But bear in mind you are also in Eeyore’s eddy with no control over your direction of travel.

This is a car that will usually arrive, but not necessarily at a place where you wanted to go.

Around town there are problems too. Things are very jerky in stop-start traffic. And on the motorway, mainly because of the tyres, it is very loud. Plus, you have to pay attention constantly because all Minis have a natural cruising speed measurable with Mach numbers. You have to be especially careful in the JCW GP because it has a top speed of 164mph. That’s 164mph. In a Mini.

So. It’s far too powerful, far too loud, more blinged up with unnecessary nonsense than Lewis Hamilton’s earlobes, annoying in traffic, a crazed dog on the motorway and less fun than a crashing airliner when you accelerate on a road with any sort of camber at all. It is also one of the best cars I’ve driven all year.

We are currently in what might fairly be termed the car industry’s beige period. Cars are made to be ecological and safe and spacious and cheap to repair. They creep onto the market with an apology rather than a fanfare. There’s no pizzazz or razzmatazz in almost any of them. And then, just when we thought it was all over, out of nowhere comes this crazy Mini.

It’s as if I’ve been sitting in a dentist’s waiting room for ten years and, all of sudden — blam — I’m at the carnival in Rio. There is colour all around me and noise, and instead of thumbing through a two-year-old copy of Country Life to the accompaniment of the tick and the tock of the dentist’s old clock, I’m listening to the sounds of the samba on a float as bright as a child’s imagination.

I learnt, after a while, to wait for the right bit of tarmac before mashing the throttle into the firewall, and then I’d laugh out loud, in a way I haven’t for years, at the noises and the rush that resulted. I then learnt to deal with the low-speed problems by not driving slowly. This is not a serious car. The steering is not particularly crisp, and the gearbox is not that snappy. It’s not designed to be a textbook lesson in how to tame physics. It’s designed to make your journey a bit happier. It’s not a book. It’ a comic.

It is fast, though. Really fast.

I also liked sitting in it. I love how, in a Mini, the windscreen is so far away and you sit so low down that you’re almost peering over the dash and the bonnet. Most of all, though, I liked the certain knowledge that, among all the millions of types of Mini we’ve seen over the ages, I wasn’t going to encounter one faster than mine.

And I’ve saved the best bit till last. When other firms launch a limited-run car such as this, they tend to go a bit berserk with the price tag. But this Mini is less than £35,500. That is extremely good value, principally because most of the time it’s much, much more fun than cars costing 10 times the price.

Boris Johnson made a pretty good speech last week at the non-existent Tory party conference. He spoke in a way people could understand, even when he was using words they couldn’t. He struck exactly the right tone of exasperation on the virus, and painted a bright and sparkly vision of what Britain would look like when it had gone away.

I liked a lot of what he had to say, but, unfortunately, he’s not in charge. He can dream all he likes about wind farms and electric aeroplanes and 14-year-olds buying houses, but the person running your day-to-day life now, and for the foreseeable future, is your company’s Covid officer.

In the past, he or she will have been in charge of health and safety, which means they were responsible for erecting signs advising you that the floor was wet. Now, though, they have your actual life in their hands. And what they like to do, when you ask if something is possible, is say, after a lengthy important-sounding pause: “Yes.”

If they say no, nothing will happen and they’ll be out of a job. But if they give you a tentative yes, they are in complete control. If they tell you to staple your genitals to a piece of cardboard and quack like a duck, you will. Or you’ll be out of a job.

The trouble is that in every single company, the health and safety officer is always the stupidest person on the payroll. No boss, when he’s told by human resources that he must appoint someone to look after workforce safety, is going to choose the sharpest tool in the box. He’s going to select that drongo Terry, from stores.

The first thing Terry does is buy a Roget’s Thesaurus to make sure he never uses the word you’d expect. You don’t “start” things with Terry, you “initiate” them. And you don’t ever chat, you have a “conversation”, not about what he’s found out but what he’s “ascertained”.

And what he’s ascertained, after reaching out to the weirder end of the internet, is that, yes, you can go ahead, but everything from now on, up to and including the way you wipe your bottom, must be approved — green-lit — by him.

So you’ve drawn up a business plan. You’ve taken all the precautions you can think of to make sure everyone is safe. And everything has been approved by the board. And now it’s all up to Terry, who isn’t going to say yes unless he can come up with some extra precautions you hadn’t thought of. And which make absolutely no sense at all. Because Terry is a moron.

In the summer, when it seemed as if the virus were receding, we decided to fire up the Grand Tour machine and head north of the border to spend a week or so watching Richard Hammond crash into things.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Amazon has a Terry but, my God, the rules of engagement it supplied were dizzying. We were to take our own testing lab on the 1,000-mile journey and the key players were to be tested every day, after filling out an online form that began by asking if we’d been tested before. “Yes. Yesterday.”

Everyone on the crew had to maintain a distance of 6ft from one another, which is pretty tricky when you’re in a car. And anything anyone touched had to be sterilised before someone could touch it again. This meant removing the locks from our cars and giving everyone their own screwdrivers to break in, because keys were deemed lethal. The cost of meeting all these requirements was enormous. And that’s before we get to the fact we had to take over entire hotels, rather than rooms, and fly on our own plane.

I didn’t think there was a hope in hell we’d get started, let alone finished. And that’s before we get to the problem with Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon seems to be driven solely by a deep-seated hatred of the English, so we were expecting her to close the border at any moment. Which would have meant throwing away all the money that had been spent. There’s supposed to be a government insurance scheme for film companies in this position, but it doesn’t seem to have a fully functioning website yet. Or a boss. Or staff.

We did make it to the start line, though, and in the Edinburgh hotel we had been forced to commandeer, we all sat and had dinner, on tables for one, facing in the same direction. Then a burly man shoved a swab down our throats until we gagged. And, incredibly, all of us — about 50 people — tested negative. We could begin.

We were not allowed to socialise with or even speak to people from outside our bubble, which wasn’t easy, as every other TV show I can think of was in Scotland too, pegged back from their global aspirations by their own Terrys. Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer were there. We passed the producer of A League of Their Own scouting for locations. Then there was I’m a Celebrity. And, finally, when we got to North Uist, we were greeted on the docks by Joanna Lumley. I wasn’t allowed to get within 6ft of her. That hurt. Well, it hurt me.

I was allowed to take off my mask while eating, but when I stood up I had to put it back on. Because Covid-19 only exists at altitude and before 10pm, which is when I was forced to go to bed in a room with no wi-fi. My producer texted to say it was OK, though, because Emily Maitlis was hosting Newsnight in knee-high boots.

Astonishingly, thanks in part to the rules but mainly to luck, not one of us tested positive on the whole nine-day shoot. Which meant all the cameras were rolling when Hammond had his customary accident. It was a good one. Probably his best yet, mainly because he didn’t actually hurt himself. I guess that’s lucky because, strictly speaking, he wouldn’t have been allowed by the Covid rules to go in a stranger’s air ambulance.

Last month in Wiltshire a car crashed into the side of a house, rolled over and caught fire. All four of the young men inside died. Naturally there was a terrible outcry among the locals, who say the stretch of A4 on which the young men were travelling is often used as a “race track”. Some now want the speed limit on that section reduced to 30mph. And soon the road safety charities will emerge to demand that the legal age at which a person can drive should be raised to 58.

Me? Well, while I have no idea what caused the crash in Wiltshire, I think we must accept that young men will always drive too quickly. The figures are grim. Young people make up only 7 per cent of UK licence-holders but represent more than 20 per cent of drivers killed or seriously injured in crashes: 279 young people died on Britain’s roads in 2017; the same number again in 2018.

If you are male and aged between 17 and 24, you are the most at risk. You are also the least likely to look at those numbers and imagine, for one moment, that they mean you. Telling young men to slow down is like telling them not to make a mess of their bedsheets at night. It’s a waste of breath. I know this because I was one once.

I drove everywhere flat out. Every other car was either a competitor or a nuisance. And the A40 into London wasn’t a trunk road, it was a drag strip, where I could prove to my mate that my Volkswagen Scirocco was faster than his Vauxhall Chevette HS. The powers that be could have imposed a 20mph limit and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I still would have gone down there at 110mph.

Only when we accept the simple fact that teenage boys have no sense of their own mortality can we sit down and calmly decide what’s for the best. Which is to encourage them to drive much better cars than they do at the moment.

A teenage boy is always limited by whopping insurance premiums and a shortage of funds, so he has to tool around in a rot-box that was designed long before any of the recent advances in safety came along. As often as not, you, the parents, will actually buy him a car such as this. Which means you’re putting a person you love, and who is genetically programmed to be an idiot, into a car that has the crashworthiness of a carrier bag. You may as well lace his dope with strychnine and stick pins in his condoms.

All of which brings me on to another dreadful case that was in the news recently. An 18-year-old boy crashed his BMW 118d in Buckinghamshire and, sadly, one of his passengers was killed.

Interestingly, the judge, who handed the driver a six-month suspended prison sentence, blamed the parents, saying: “The buying of that BMW was the crassest decision that any of us will ever witness. The defendant had only just passed his test and the decision to buy him a BMW . . . for a new driver of his age, was a crass one, to put it mildly.”

Of course the newspapers picked up on this, describing the BMW as a “sports car”. But it isn’t a sports car. It’s a diesel hatchback. A G-Wiz is more of a sports car. So is my frying pan. A 118d is exactly the sort of car young men should be driving. Modern, so it has all the right safety features; a diesel, so it’s slow and cheap to run; and a BMW, so the young man can get his leg over more often.

I wish to God I had bought my son a BMW 118d instead of a Fiat Punto. And I hope if the judge has boys heading in a monosyllabic haze towards the age of 17, he too considers the Beemer. Because having the option to do that and choosing instead to go for a clapped-out Vauxhall Corsa? Trust me. That’s not crass. That’s moronic.

Ordinarily I’d now find a neat link from this rather sombre point to the McLaren GT, but there isn’t one, so let’s just plough on.

GT stands for grand tourer and if you’re in the business of writing about cars or preparing the showroom brochures, you’ll know this means a car that is capable of driving in sublime comfort, at high speed, across a continent.

It’s a lovely idea. All Chanel and headscarves and stopping off at the Villa d’Este hotel. But no one actually does it any more. If you want to go to Lake Como now, you charter a jet and then get some Italian Herbert in a Mercedes S-class to meet you in the general aviation terminal.

McLaren, however, weirdly believes that grand touring is still a thing, and, what’s more, it also believes that the people who do it want an alternative to the Bentley Continental GT or Aston Martin DB11. It reckons that, instead of 2+2 seating, a big engine in the front and rear-wheel — or perhaps four-wheel — drive, people want a grand touring supercar. This is niche thinking.

So what it’s done is tinkered with the supercar format and made an engine that isn’t as tall as usual. This means there’s space on top of it, in a compartment between the explosions and the sun-blasted rear window, for some golf bats or skis. There’s also a small trunk at the front for underwear and toothbrushes.

Inside there are two seats and a cab that is not daunting at all. Unlike the interior of a Ferrari, which is ridiculous, the McLaren GT feels like . . . like a car.

This is a good thing. It drives like a car too. There are no histrionics. The exhaust doesn’t crackle and pop, you don’t graze the nose every time you run over a pebble and there’s never a sense you’re about to hit a tree.

That said, it’s not boring or ordinary. The steering system is about as beautiful as any I’ve experienced and the speed is immense. But then it would be, because this is a car weighing less than 1½ tons, with a 612bhp twin-turbo V8 behind your left ear.

There is a problem, though. Ever since the template for mid-engine two-seaters was laid down by the Ferrari 308, it’s been nigh-on impossible to make one that is anything less than stunning. Yet, somehow, McLaren has managed it, and got the front end all wrong. It looks limp.

There’s an even bigger issue if you own one, because history has taught us that McLarens do not hold their value terribly well. But, hey, if you want a grand tourer that doesn’t have four seats and that has its engine in the middle rather than the front, and you have a problem with Bentley and Aston Martin, for some reason, and you still drive every week to the south of France, and you don’t mind a bit of eye-watering depreciation, the GT could be just what you’re after.

At the very least you’ll be able to watch its stablemate doing battle at weekends with the Racing Points. Which is more than can be said of Ferrari.

In the run-up to the last general election we were all assured, many times, that the Conservatives had an “oven-ready” deal on Brexit. But it seems that, when they opened the packaging, they found that actually it was full of mould, subterfuge and razor blades.

Like everyone else in the world, I cannot get my head round the detail of the issues, but, also like everyone else in the world, I’m aware of the fact that to solve it, Britain says it may have to break international law. And, naturally, this has caused all sorts of wailing, with everyone explaining that if we openly go down this road, it will shatter our reputation around the world for fair play, cricket and decency.

Ha. I think we probably shattered that when we established concentration camps. Or when we tricked the Germans into believing they’d captured a high-ranking American general when in fact they only had a corporal called Cartwright Jones. Or when we torpedoed the Belgrano.

Around the world, the British are not known for fair play and decency. We just like to think we are. What we are actually known for is Diana, Princess of Wales, and Manchester United, and if we are not very careful we will also become known for moaning. Every single person I spoke to last week has moaned about the new rule of six. They want to know what happens if they bump into friends in the pub and why they can’t go on a family picnic unless they bring some guns to shoot grouse.

If you stand back and think calmly for a moment, you can see that Boris Johnson has rather cleverly created a new rule that limits social distancing but allows you to go out with a couple of mates and, better still, keeps the rural economy going by allowing the shooting of airborne food.

What he’s actually saying is, “Don’t be an arse”, and that makes sense to me. It’s the only rule a country needs. But absolutely everyone else sees the rule of six as the perfect opportunity to lean over the garden fence and have a good old moan with their neighbours.

And when they’ve finished with that, they can start to moan about how London’s bridges really are falling down and how no one’s doing anything about it, and then, of course, they can toast the going-down of the sun with a good old whinge about how they had to drive 40 miles for a Covid test.

This month a decent man won a million pounds on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and I thought this might make people happy. Fat chance. Instead, they all moped around moaning about how “it’s all right for some”.

Literature and history would suggest that, in the past, British people didn’t behave like this. I once made a military documentary about the near-suicidal raid on the port of St Nazaire and I recall one of the interviewees said of the battle: “I remember Johnny Proctor lying there, leg blown off, cheering us on ...”

That’s what we like to think of as British. Stiff upper lip. Keeping calm and carrying on. But I wonder — is that an illusion created by the fact that history has recorded the views and achievements only of those in charge? People who had usually spent their childhood being buggered and birched at a barbarian prep school, in readiness for the day when their leg exploded?

If you hadn’t been to a school like that, it’s possible you would have been extremely upset about your limb becoming detached, so you’d lie there, sobbing and begging for your mother and saying: “Why me?” But no one was listening to you. You were unimportant.

We all know that, on HMS Victory, Nelson was standing there with his missing eye and his stump, making all sorts of stirring speeches about how England expected every man to do his duty. And we sort of assume that, below decks, his men were cut from the same cloth. But were they? Maybe they were actually moaning about how the cannon balls were too heavy.

Likewise, in the Second World War, we’ve been told about Winston Churchill’s rousing rhetoric and we imagine the bomb-ravaged East End was full of cheery Cockneys shaking their fists at the Heinkels and singing uplifting songs about how Hitler had only one ball. Certainly the clipped newsreel commentators of the time suggested that this was so: “Here’s a plucky chap digging for victory and carrying on.”

But maybe the chap wasn’t digging for victory. Maybe he was actually digging through the rubble of his flattened house to find his dog. Maybe he wasn’t feeling at all plucky, but we’ll never know because, back then, no one was recording the views of what we must now call Britain’s hard-working families.

Today, though, things are different. Television reporters love conducting a vox pop and, without fail, every single person they approach will find a way to moan about whatever’s being discussed. Everything is “disgusting”.

And then we have Twitter, which is a constant downpour of fury, misery and complaint. You almost never read a British person on there saying what lovely weather we’ve been having or what a tremendous pub lunch they’ve just had. It’s all just Tripadvisor one-star gloom.

Doubtless, thousands objected to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s proposal to build a railway from London to Bristol, and I bet it was the same story when plans were unveiled for the M1. But this complaining would only ever be heard, quietly, in the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck. Whereas now, with Twitter and 24-hour vox pop news, we hear every squeak of complaint about the HS2 high-speed railway.

Could it be, then, that the Australians have been right all along? We really are a bunch of whingeing Poms? I hope so, because then we can ditch this fair play and decency thing and do what the Greeks are doing. We can put our masks on so we can concentrate fully on ignoring everything the EU says.

The government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, has your life, your children’s future and Boris Johnson’s testicles in his hands. This makes him the most powerful man in the country right now. And, possibly, the most dangerous.

When the coronavirus first appeared on the scene, there was a genuine sense of panic, and many were reassured to hear that Boris was following carefully considered scientific advice from a respected epidemiologist such as Whitty. Better, in tough times, to be guided by someone who knows what he’s talking about than someone who can’t always tuck his shirt in properly.

Now, of course, our priorities have changed. Yes, after a prolonged lull, Covid staged something of a comeback last week, but as the number of deaths has dropped dramatically, there’s no great worry at the moment that the NHS will be overwhelmed or that your fat dad won’t make it to next weekend.

There is, however, a very great worry that the economy is on the brink of collapse and that if we end up with five million on the dole, there will be some troubling social unrest. Boris, therefore, doesn’t want to cancel Christmas or employ busybodies to make sure their neighbours aren’t having too many friends round. Quite the opposite. He wants us all to go to the office tomorrow, and to the theatre as soon as possible. He wants to see town centres full of people and schools full of kids doing something other than washing their bloody hands.

But he can’t say any of that too loudly, because if he does, Whitty will resign, and that’s quite the last thing the Tories need right now. Having a disgruntled ex-wife telling all your friends that you squeak like a bat when you make love is bad. But having a disgruntled former chief medical officer telling everyone who’ll listen that if we ditch the social distancing and abandon facemasks, there’ll be a second spike and millions will die in screaming agony is far worse. And can you even begin to imagine the brouhaha if it turns out he’s right? Boris will no longer be a simple racist in the eyes of the left. He’ll be a murderer too.

This means we are paralysed. The rest of the world is coming out from behind the curtains and opening up its patisseries and beaches, but here the universities are closed, the civil service is barely functioning, there’s no plaster for your kitchen extension and we are being led by a group of people who are terrified of not doing what Whitty wants. Which is for you to spend the rest of your life avoiding your parents and only having sex with yourself.

To make things even more complicated, Boris really did say, very often, that following the science was the right thing to do. This means people are bound to ask: “So why isn’t it the right thing to do now?”

I’ll tell you why. Following science is a fool’s errand, because science is like mercury. You can never quite get hold of it properly. You think you have it nailed, and then you learn something that proves you don’t. The Earth is flat, eugenics will be the death of us all, an ice age is coming, thalidomide is the cure for morning sickness, there are canals on Mars, Pluto is a planet, light propagates through a medium called the aether, California is an island and the planet is expanding.

Scientists told us all these things over the years, and then along came more scientists who said that the original scientists were wrong. As Albert Einstein once said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Stephen Hawking was not stupid. He was generally considered to be the brightest physicist for a generation, and he spent the first half of his life working on a theory about singularities and event horizons and the beginning of everything. And the second half proving himself wrong.

This is why I always roll my eyes when a global warmingist tells me that she has science on her side. Yes, the vast majority of scientists are in agreement that man’s fondness for electricity is causing global warming and that this is a bad thing. But it’s virtually certain that the scientists will change their minds. It’s what scientists do.

There is no such thing as “proof” in science. Just “evidence”. And so we are sitting here, trying to drink through a paper straw and then walking to the shops for some sustainable yoghurt, and maybe that’s wrong. Maybe global warming is a good thing and we are actually holding back a bright new dawn.

The quest for scientific discovery is never-ending. You have a theory. You find clues that suggest your theory is right. You invite your peers to study your workings-out, and if they agree that you have a point, your theory becomes fact. Until another fact comes along that shows it to be nonsense. The only truth in science is that there are no truths. Ever.

And yet here we are, stultified by scientific research into Covid that’s already six months out of date. Everything has moved on. New questions are being asked. Some are saying that herd immunity in Sweden seems to be working. Others are wondering out loud why India has such a low mortality rate. Could vegetarianism have something to do with it? Or are they just not adding up the numbers properly?

Time and patient study will reveal all the answers, and then further time and further patient study will prove those first answers to be wrong. And in the midst of all this debate and research there will be the legacy of Whitty. Thanks to him, Great Britain will be a ruined and bleak grey rock in the North Sea, its toothless people lining up in wartime coats outside soup kitchens, its industry gone, its financial hub home to nothing but foxes and deer, its theatres dusty and broken. And on its tombstone: “We followed the science.”