Protest march, London, 18 December 2021

I didn’t make up my mind to go on the march until the Saturday morning. All week I’d been undecided. But when the weekend arrived and I saw it stretch out ahead of me, empty and dispiriting, like so many in the previous two years have been, I made my decision. I used Yandex - not Google, of course - to ascertain that it was still on, double-checked on Maajid’s Twitter feed, booked my train tickets from Bath to London, popped a diazepam to soothe anxiety, and I was soon on my way.

The Parliament Square meet had been scheduled for noon, but it wasn’t until after 1pm that I got into Paddington. I know central London like the back of my hand, having lived there from 1990 to 2008 and being Capital Radio’s traffic and travel correspondent for a while, so I chose to walk to SW1, down Edgware Road, past the ugly Marble Arch mound for the first time (a fitting symbol for this era if ever there was one), along Oxford Street, down Savile Row to photograph the building where there's now a plaque commemorating The Beatles playing on the roof, through Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, down to Trafalgar Square and finally down Whitehall.

Reaching Parliament Square soon after 1.30, there was only a small gaggle of protesters. My heart sank: had I come all this way for nothing? Had I been late for the revolution? Perhaps not. I got chatting with a couple of guys from the Heritage Party and they told me that an hour ago the place had been heaving, and then the crowd had set off in the direction of Victoria. I decided to head that way, and they had indeed left a paper trail: anti lockdown/vaccine/mask/tyranny stickers adorned bus stops and pillar boxes and shop windows. But as I walked I thought twice - it would take me ages to catch them up, and my feet were already aching. Perhaps there was a better plan? I did what every Englishman should do at a time like this and went to the pub and ordered a pint of beer (and nearly fainted at the price).

Sat with my London Pride in The Feathers I plugged into Maajid’s Twitter feed - he was doing live streaming - to see if I could recognise his location or if he mentioned it. I soon ascertained they were near Hyde Park Corner, so I formed a plan to join up with the marchers on their way back to Whitehall (where I guessed they’d return to). I really should have done more research beforehand. After draining my pint I set off, doing a quick diversion past the house which served as Patrick McGoohan’s character’s London abode in my all-time favourite TV series The Prisoner. Hmm, I wonder why I was attracted to a show about a free-thinker who refused to confirm to the suffocating diktats of authoritarian rulers who demanded conformity and absolute obedience…?

I headed north again, with a vague plan to go up through Soho and along Oxford Street and hopefully run into them. Then I hit the lowest point of my day. Blisters ballooning, and mentally battered by seeing masks on scores of faces, I thought to myself: this is crazy, you come to London and you can’t even find the damned protest. Maybe that’s because it's so small? Maybe it's just a rag tag of weirdos, and even if I found them it would give me little solace? 

As I padded west along Oxford Street I confess I thought about giving up. And then, like some divine gift from above, at Oxford Circus they marched into view. Hallelujah! Thousands of people, taking a right down Regent Street. And so I joined my first ever protest march - I’ve never felt energised enough by any cause before to join one, but the dismantlement of basic freedoms (usually via a quick press conference) by a craven yet iron-fisted government in thrall to public health zealots and dubious pharma lobbyists had finally called me to action.

I didn’t have any banners or placards of course - that would have made the Great Western Railway journey a bit uncomfortable - but I did have a few leaflets someone had given to me that read: "NO mask mandates. NO more lockdowns. NO vaccine passports. NO forced vaccinations", which I all agree with. So I intermittently thrust them to the skies, clutching them like some Poundshop Citizen Smith. Well, I was trying.

The marchers were a true cross-section of society, all ages, all races, all genders (heh). They were a decent bunch, and I would guess from every political persuasion. There were of course a few from the fringes, but what is the fringe nowadays? It’s hard to say how many of each faction - anti-vaxxers, anti-vaxx passports, anti-lockdowners, just people out for fun - were present because you can’t see inside people's minds. There were many banners and placards naturally, and a few of them made me wince slightly: if, say, “Vaccines are evil” was on one, I would have preferred it if they’d put the word “mandates” in the middle of the sentence, or “for children”, or “passports”. There were many that did say such things but the problem is that the mainstream media focuses most on the fringes in an effort to discredit the entire operation. 

On Regent Street at least 20 police officers stood guard outside the Apple store - presumably there had been intel suggesting that the tech giant that has helped shape the Covid narrative was going to be targeted by protesters. Aside from here and in Westminster, I didn't see that many police.

As we passed through Piccadilly Circus, it was like parallel universes colliding - us, maskless, driven by a desire to live our lives without excessive state interference; them, the shoppers and revellers, mostly masked and scared, driven by a desire to conform. In a way, they made more of a statement than we did: they’re walking billboards of fear, willing pawns in their leaders’ two-year experiment in mass control. Masking up, especially in the street, is the first step on the ladder of subservience. Our masters, who operate out of the capital city, must stroll around and think: job done, they’re doing what we want. I hadn’t visited central London since January 2020 (a truly blissful trip after the end of the Brexit angst and before the dawn of the Black Death), so I don’t know what the mask situation has been like on the streets but now it’s just as horrendous as Bratislava, Vienna and Luxembourg, places I visited in the autumn, when I thought we had avoided the worst of it. But as Laura Dodsworth writes, Covid passes were ready to go in early November, they have long been the plan, and as Fraser Nelson has said, the vaccine passport movement is a juggernaut rampaging through Whitehall, and there’s little a prime minister as pitiful as Johnson, a smashed avocado of a man, can do to stop it.

Reports of the death of hospitality and tourism may be exaggerated: London was packed. We passed through Trafalgar Square, where there are now some traffic lights that show a trans symbol instead of a green man when it’s okay to walk. And you thought rainbow crossings were bad. At only point in the day did I lose my temper. I’m afraid to say I snapped “You are evil” at a mother walking along with three young children that she had fully masked up. I just couldn’t help myself.

And so we went down Whitehall, the end point for most, and congregated outside what is ostensibly our seat of democracy, so besmirched by the scurrilous rascal who currently inhabits it. Stood guard were dozens of policemen (and a few policewomen) in full riot gear, looking into nothingness, occasionally nearly getting hit by a hurled beer can ("Stop throwing things!" a few protesters yelled). A firework cleared the Downing Street gates to cheers. At any one time, a thousand photographs or videos were being shot. The cops not in riot gear tended to be masked - there are few sights less sinister than a masked officer of the law; it speaks of long ago and faraway totalitarian regimes. Beer was being downed and it’s been a while since I’ve been among so many smokers. There were intermittent chants of “Freedom”, “We are the 99 per cent”, and a few more, but nothing properly caught on. I would have actually liked more anger - there wasn’t as much as was reported in the press, if it was reported at all. What we perhaps needed was a celebrity or a public figure with a megaphone - Farage would have done a good job, but he was never going to turn up. Even the likes of Milo or Katie Hopkins or David Icke, none of whom I’m especially keen on, would have given the event more focus. As it was, we just stood around for a long time, me with burning hatred in my heart as I glared upon the residence of the man whose actions have ruined the lives of millions for infinitesimal public health gains, the man who trashed any semblance of fair and proportionate governance, the man who criminalised human touch (while he and his minions didn't follow their own rules). 

Piers Corbyn was nearby. He was quaffing a load of booze - strange I thought, but then he did his fire breathing act, which was quite amusing. Then he apparently said some naughty things to a journalist; well, he was probably sozzled by then. Elsewhere, some talked of Rothschild, Bill Gates, Trump and Assange. They're not really my thing, but in this post-truth era, who can say what is true any more? We have been discombobulated by our government and the media.

I asked a chap with a dog how many he thought were here today. “A million,” he responded. Sadly that wasn't the case, but I liked his optimism. At the peak, there were certainly many thousands swarming Downing Street. A chap in a full Union Jack suit paraded around, and a religious group tried to sell their books on end of days. You draw them all into your mental shelter: [nearly] all are welcome in the heat of the protest. There is a feeling of respect to one another at all times, and I never saw anyone speak unkindly to a masker (except me...).

By about 5pm numbers were falling away. The smell of winter and fire was in the air. I ambled back and forth between Downing Street and Parliament Square. Occasionally the riot police would start trotting in a certain direction, causing a frisson as protesters would follow them, only for others to yell, “Don’t follow them! That’s what they want, it’s a distraction!” “Everyone back to Number 10,” another one said. “Hold your ground - do not move,” intoned a man near the front of the throng. One protester tried at length to tell a glassy eyed policeman that what went on in there - gesturing to Downing Street - was akin to a communist regime, with them partying while we had to follow their cruel laws. “Where’s my party invite, Boris?” shouted another. Hypocrisy is often the downfall of authoritarian regimes, and may be the thing that does this one in, too.

Protests dissipate when people simply get bored. As numbers fell, the police began to “kettle” us, or semi-kettle us, in to an ever smaller part of Whitehall. The more dissolute stragglers, some beered or ganja-ed up, looked like they wanted to cause a bit of mischief. Me, I’d had my fill, I’d done my bit, I’d turned up, I’d chanted, I’d walked my feet off; “What did you do in the Great War against Covid authoritarianism, Grandad?” Well, I did this protest for a start. Despite my sore feet, I did the long walk back to Paddington, stopping in a couple of pubs en route. I didn’t want to face Khan’s Underground, so I faced the street maskers instead, probably just as bad. It’s like walking through a city where every unthinking fool has a Che Guevara t-shirt on. It must be something deep in my psychological makeup, but for me seeing a mask is akin to seeing a rat on a kitchen table.

When I got to Paddington soon after 7pm my train to Bath was cancelled - not enough train crew. Now, I wonder why that could be...? How much more everyday life has to be inconvenienced, blighted and ruined because of ham-fisted and doomed attempts to tame an illness that is of minor danger to the vast majority of people? I managed to make it home on a couple of later trains, where I read that Khan had that day declared a “major incident” in London. Forgive me, but I thought a “major incident” was something like a plane being flown into a building - the alarmist language of our politicians does them no favours. 

I had thought that going on the march would elate me, that I would sit on the train home bursting with radiance because it would have reminded me that I wasn’t alone, and many were also fighting the good fight in these dark times. But the masked masses, perhaps one too many fringe groups at the march, and the dark cloud hanging over us of further restrictions and the inevitability of them coming in, deadened my mood. Depression is the new normal.

The pursuit of money and power, which is what drives all this, will not go away. And the last month in particular has been a textbook example of how authorities can cause mass panic and anxiety in their societies to further their ends; it is beyond reprehensible. Yes, Johnson’s reign of terror will be over one day, but what he has done will scar Britain for decades to come.