Judith Sloan takes aim at the IPCC’s latest blatherings in today’s Spectator, and amusingly likens them to the Inca approach to controlling the weather – club a virgin to death today, in the expectation that the gods will reward you with rain to nourish your crops. If no rain is forthcoming, sacrifice another virgin, and so on. When rain finally comes, claim victory for your evidence-based climate policy.

The same could well be said of our leaders’ attempts to propitiate the Covid gods – consult the ‘arithromancers’ of the epidemiology priesthood, who do some fanciful modelling and tell you that if you chop off huge chunks of our social and economic capital today, Covid will go away. If it doesn’t, chop off even huger chunks tomorrow. When the virus has finally, like all its predecessors, run its natural course, claim vindication for your policies, as you sit among the smoking remains of the society you have ruined.

Tom Forrester-Paton