Tom Harwood: To us Brits politicians in their own lives must be sullen, sad, and sober

We want our politicians to be miserable.

This is, I think, a fundamental truth that has to be acknowledged if we are to understand the emotion at the core of the 'partygate' row.

No one cares if ministers and advisors were in rooms together in Number 10. We care if they were having fun.

No one cares about officials having discussions about vaccine logistics or how to avoid mass unemployment. We care if there was warm wine or M&S cake there at the same time.

No one cares if the Prime Minister thanks his staff for their work - least of all that he thanks them outdoors - unless there are nibbles present.

At the core of this whole saga is a puritanical story. Politicians and their advisors may gather as long as they did so in a fundamentally miserable way.

To some extent it’s cathartic to demand morose politicians. After all they’re the people who design the regulations that govern our lives. Not just in a pandemic but beyond that realm too. The restrictions on how businesses can operate: from staffing ratios to opening hours to health and safety.

Perhaps it’s time to stop calling those everyday peacetime rules set by government ’regulations’ and start calling them ‘restrictions’ too.

Politicians after all ordinarily do little else then invent new ways to restrict our liberty and our income. More regulations and higher taxes.

It’s a rare moment that the one way train to a bigger tax burden and a more restrictive state chugs back a stop or two. And even on those vanishingly rare occasions we see it rolling back, it does not take long for the breaks to screech on, the reverse gear to dislodge, and the huffing great locomotive of the state to plough ever further forward into our lives.

No wonder we want MPs to be paid far less than they are. No wonder we flinch when we see one has claimed for business class train tickets or has the temerity to take a holiday.

No wonder we convulse at the idea Number 10 Downing Street might be spruced up, or that the Government of the United Kingdom might have its own aeroplane that is not also shared by the Royal Family and the RAF.

No, to us Brits politicians in their own lives must be sullen, sad, and sober. The idea that a politician let alone a Prime Minister might have anything close to a moment of down time is fundamentally anathema to us.

So let's set aside the epidemiology, as so many have done for so much of this pandemic. Let's set aside even the dark often fatal crime of hypocrisy. Ultimately perhaps what has alighted the nation quite so much is the agonising terrible squirm inducing notion that politicians might be having fun.