You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes.

It’s an actual fact that nobody who lives north of Stamford, Lincs, has ever knowingly eaten cucumber. I watch the northerners sometimes in the Tesco at Chester-le-Street, shuffling hurriedly past the vegetable section, eyes averted, nervous lest a pak choi reach out and grab them. There are even tomatoes for sale in our local bakery – they’ve been placed next to the pasties and steak bakes, presumably in the hope that someone will buy one under the misapprehension that they are filled with meat and gravy. But still nobody eats salad veg up here. At least, not in bloody winter. We get through the cold season on pies and insulin.

A few locals, meanwhile, are continuing to wear face masks – people who refuse to accept that they were misled (unwittingly at first, later not so unwittingly). The first definitive meta-study on the efficacy of masks has been produced by the Cochrane Library, which is often described as the world’s best resource for evaluating health care interventions, and which works in partnership with the WHO. The lead author of the review, Tom Jefferson of Oxford University, summed up the findings: ‘There is just no evidence that they [masks] make any difference.’

Have you heard this reported on the BBC? Nope, me neither. I wonder if that gloriously arrogant tankie, Susan Michie – clinical psychologist and Sage adviser – is still wearing her stupid mask? I would guess that she is, because, as with most of the berserk left, hard facts play no role in her worldview. In 2021 she suggested we should wear masks indefinitely, despite the growing evidence that they were useless. She was still tweeting pictures of herself masked up on public transport in June last year. And now, faced with the truth, she will probably buy a new batch and put up another asinine tweet.

The UK Covid inquiry is under way and I suspect it will not get to the nub of the issue, which is that, under the guidance of people like Michie, our entire economy was wrecked, children’s education stopped for 18 months and our future health seriously jeopardised as a consequence of the government’s actions.

I had – and have – no great objections to the first lockdown, or even the requirement early on to wear a mask and rub your hands with raw alcohol every few seconds. We didn’t know what we were up against, after all. Still, given that we didn’t know what we were up against, the rapid stifling of opinions which did not accord with Michie’s point of view, and the collusion in this by the big tech social-media companies and the likes of the BBC, the police and even the bloody army is a scandal which should not go unpunished – but almost certainly will.

So much of what we were forbidden to say, on pain of being banned from social media or sacked from our jobs, has turned out to have had considerable substance. As we now know from that Cochrane study, masks were of no use whatsoever in curtailing the spread of Covid – yet those who argued as much were silenced or vilified. Hand cleanser was of no use either, because – as we di covered towards the end of 2020 – Covid wasn’t transmitted by touching a shop counter or the handrail on a Tube escalator.

If you had proposed in 2021 that the Covid vaccine might be a bit risky, or that there was a connection with blood-clotting, your posts would have been taken down and your ideas certainly wouldn’t have been heard on the BBC. Nonetheless, we later found out that there was a relation between the vaccine and blood-clotting (much as there is between the virus and blood-clotting, it should be said) and we are still not entirely sure of the health ramifications of taking a vaccine tested in haste. You may have noticed, by the way, that we are no longer enjoined to get the jab: except for people over 75, it seems to have disappeared from our lives.

Opposition to lockdown was similarlysamizdat-like. The suggestion that our immune systems were being compromised by lockdown isolation was a view which Twitter and Facebook considered fake news – and yet it is now commonly accepted that our greater susceptibility to flu viruses may indeed be the consequence of that long period under lock and key. You will have your own anecdotal evidence of the much greater susceptibility – I certainly do – and it shows up in the figures for hospital admissions this winter. Then there are the cancers and other serious illnesses that went undetected and will be revealed in future death stats.

Another view which was simply not allowed was the notion that the virus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. This was ‘racist’ and ‘unhelpful’ – but it seems it was also almost certainly correct.

My objection, though, is not that the government, or Sage, got it wrong. It was the authoritarian mindset which demanded that countervailing opinions should not even be heard and that the people voicing them should be silenced as ‘Covid deniers’. This totalitarianism was quite explicit, such as when the BBC ran a debate on herd immunity and agreed with one of the participants – Michie, natch – that it should not be ‘even-handed’. As she said: ‘I’d got prior agreement from R4 about the framing of the item. I was assured that this would not be held as an even-handed debate.’

These people – the same ones who don’t know what a woman is and want to rewrite Roald Dahl – run our lives. They will not be gainsaid and they will stamp on you if you speak up. We need shot of them, sharpish.