The first Zoom driven Prime Minister's Question Time.

The first Zoom driven Prime Minister's Question Time.

So here we are just over a month into the coronavirus lockdown and none of us can tell whether we're coming or going. Mornings are turning into afternoons at quite an alarming speed, the men and women in the House of Commons will officially be communicating via Zoom, a new fangled, high tech gadget which will now act as a temporary replacement for human conversation in the flesh. The old techniques are no longer relevant and sadly this is the way it'll have to be for the time being. Nothing is changing and nobody is going anywhere which we all privately knew anyway.

The trouble is that the politicians in their power uniforms will have to be content with an entirely new method of unburdening themselves. It had to come eventually but we might have been hoping that by now the disease that has now stopped us from functioning altogether is quite clearly intent on hanging around for quite some time and none of us can do anything about it. It feels as though we're stuck in a cul de sac or some barren wasteland where all you can hear is the occasional drilling.

We may be tearing our hair out with utter frustration and the truth is our lives have been completely turned upside down. We monitor the latest media developments and that's more or less the same brick wall we were looking at over a month ago. The voices from Westminster are beginning to sound disembodied, denuded of any kind of meaning or, dare we say it, intelligence. We are pottering around aimlessly rather than breaking into a purposeful strut. Or maybe we're using this unique period of lives both constructively and productively. Perhaps we've completed a major project at home, built a conservatory, re-decorated your home or even made up your mind to learn a new language. Or maybe you've just given up.

But that would be an entirely defeatist attitude and we won't have any of that. There will be an end result to this miserable catastrophe, an awkward conclusion perhaps but nonetheless something to hold onto when that end doesn't really look in sight. We are now in the kind of dire predicament that our tangled minds are trying to rationalise but simply can't. We are now quite literally wandering souls, hoping and wishing that the day will come when definitive remedies can be found and we can finally come out of hiding and seclusion.

This afternoon though the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will endeavour to conduct Prime Minister's Question Time from his living room, or quite possibly his garden shed, maybe the kitchen in which case ours is a cup of tea with two sugars and a chocolate Digestive biscuit or perhaps a slice of cake. It is hard to know how this one is going to work. Perhaps Boris Johnson may care to sit next to the window or maybe the fridge. These are head scratching times, befuddling times, mystical and surreal times where all is not what it seems.

We have already seen those empty green parliamentary seats with no occupants. Our fine, upstanding politicians from both sides of the House may have to resign themselves to quite the most alien environment of all time. You begin to wonder whether this is how things were when Winston Churchill was Prime Minister during the Second World War. No sittings, no busy committee rooms in the highest echelons, just the dull thud of Hitler's bombs and mass human murder. Nothing but blind terror.

The difference is though is quite marked this time. Then the world had to defeat a megalomaniac dictator cum murderous nutter with big designs on world domination. Roll forward 75 years and this time the war is a viral one, a deadly disease that has obliterated huge masses of the world population without giving us any prior warning. Now though we have been reduced to small clusters, close knit family units yearning and crying out for peace and reconciliation. But hold on this is not that kind of war and we all know that.

Still, it is good to see our Prime Minister Boris Johnson up and about because there was one horrendous moment when we thought we were going to lose him as well. His fiance Carrie Symonds has just given birth and Boris is a dad again. This should be the beginning of a new world for baby Johnson but we must hope that by the time his baby boy is a teenager he will grow up into a world free not only of disease but economically prosperous, healthy and conquering new global territories.

For a while society will have to content itself with a gentle recovery, slow baby steps in a manner of speaking, a painful rehabilitation and a gradual return to the way it was before Covid 19. We will continue to look aghast at the number of fatalities and casualties and we will hope that shortly the numbers will dwindle rapidly.

Politicians can be mysterious creatures of habit until somebody tells them that a dramatic medical upheaval has jolted them into some new kind of reality. For the time being though Dominic Raab and his loyal colleagues will have to talk to each other via cyberspace with faces confined to square boxes on the screen, crackling microphones at their disposal and grinning faces who keep asking you whether they can hear you or not.

You're reminded of that slightly baffling British TV quiz show from the 1970s where legendary comedian Bob Monkhouse would ask members of the public general knowledge questions. The quiz was 'Celebrity Squares' which more or less approximated to the actual title of the show. Celebrities would be questioned in square boxes on a whole variety of subjects and the prize was either a holiday or a speedboat which wouldn't have been greeted with any delight if you happened to live on a council house estate.

Politicians though are not renowned for their quiz show prowess although they are partial to a good satire. For the time being though it is time for the Foreign Secretary to announce his homely homilies on Covid 19 from maybe the privacy of his spare box room or quite possibly the attic which would be too much of a tight squeeze or far too claustrophobic for anybody's liking. Carry on everybody. Stay safe and of course at home. 

PS Dominic Raab was available for duty at the House of Commons.