I think we can now admit that Covid sent us all a little loopy. Matt Hancock certainly seems it, handing over more than 100,000 highly sensitive texts to a hostile journalist. Today’s revelations show Hancock telling colleagues ‘we are going to have to get heavy with the police’. While everyone gets excited about the lockdown files, there are still plenty of lockdown trials going before the courts. Which, even if a gratuitous breach, seems a little pointless now. Rules are being enforced that are no longer in place. Rules that, the Daily Telegraph reports, weren’t based purely on ‘the science’.

One of those poor souls still before the courts is Phillip Hylton, a 60-year-old man from South London. Mr Hylton’s is a sad tale of what happens when bad legislation meets useless institutions. He found himself up at the City of London magistrates’ court on Thursday afternoon accused – and take a deep breath here – of ‘participating in a gathering of two or more people in a private dwelling/indoors in a Tier 4 area’ under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020. Phew.

So, what exactly did he do? According to Mr Hylton, he’d headed off to Safika Organic Health Centre in Brockley to pick up some medication for his daughter who was unwell. The alleged offence is listed as taking place on 11 January 2021, in the middle of the mad muddle that was the Tier system. Safika, it seems, was allowed to stay open during the Tier 4 restrictions because it sold health goods. While Hylton was there, the police rocked up and a group of five or so people emerged from the shop’s cellar. ‘I didn’t know them from Adam,’ he told me. He had, he said, no idea what they were doing down there. From what I could gather chatting to Mr Hylton outside the court, the police took some details and off he went.

Well, over a year later, the bailiffs came knocking. They told him that he had been convicted of lockdown offences and that he owed the courts £950. That was the first he’d heard about it. He says he moved house since the run-in at the organic health shop and the new tenants had failed to send on the numerous summonses.

Mr Hylton managed to get a ‘statutory declaration’ meaning he could be tried again because he didn’t know about the proceedings. Which brings us to Thursday afternoon at the City of London magistrates’ court. Mr Hylton turned up at the allotted time and found himself waiting for hours for his case to be called, sent from this courtroom to that, until eventually he was put before the magistrates’ bench.

The prosecutor, Leila Nahaboo-Osman, told the court: ‘It only came to light, not long ago, that the officer who is required [the one who found Mr Hylton at the health shop] is not in attendance today. It appears that the officer was only warned today and that he has been on compassionate leave.’ She offered to play the officer’s body cam footage, but the magistrates declined. You really do need to have the key witness there if you plan on landing someone with a criminal conviction.

Mr Hylton is a mild-mannered man. He seemed more bemused than angry to be there. Representing himself, he made the not unreasonable argument that his case had stretched on a little too long. Mercifully, the magistrate, Dr Ian Cole, agreed: ‘We are not minded to adjourn this case. The original incident occurred in January 2021 and the officer in the case was only warned today.’ With that, the prosecutor gave up. The magistrate told Mr Hylton: ‘The Crown has offered no evidence in these matters. Therefore they are dismissed and you are free to leave.’

I have no way of verifying what Phillip Hylton told me is true. No doubt the prosecution would have put forward a very different interpretation of events. But they couldn’t because somewhere in the miasma of lawyers, case officers, police constables and prosecutors, something went very badly wrong. In fact, it sounds like absolutely everything went wrong. The courts didn’t, or couldn’t be bothered to, check where Mr Hylton was living. The prosecution only managed to send him the crucial body cam footage the night before, in a format that he couldn’t view. And the police couldn’t organise themselves enough to get one officer into the right courtroom at the right time. All this, more than two years on from the alleged offences.

The criminal justice system is pretty useless at the best of times. I spent a good few years traipsing around London’s courts reporting on the accused and the damned; the number of times I’ve seen cases like Mr Hylton’s barely bears thinking about. Which means inordinate amounts of wasted time and money; it’s an astounding example of state ineptitude. Most of all, though, we have to ask ourselves: should 60-year-old blokes, seemingly just popping to the shops, really be up in front of a judge in the first place? On the evidence above, it seems pretty obvious to me that they shouldn’t.

Phillip Hylton, of Blythe Vale, South London, was found not guilty of a single breach of the Health Protection Regulations 2020. The injustice, however, continues.