Calling Covid experts arrogant and wrong doesn’t make you a nutjob

To realise a friend has totally shifted their political beliefs is a strange, unsettling feeling. It happened to me the other day at a wedding. As we entered the whisky-drinking hours of the party, I wound up in a long political discussion with an acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen for several years.

I remembered them as a fairly standard London liberal and proceeded accordingly, only to quickly find myself explaining that no, I didn’t think the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, and no, I didn’t agree with Peter Hitchens (the cantankerous Mail on Sunday columnist) that Covid-19 restrictions represented the end of Britain as a free society.

And yet — in my life at least — this sensation has become a surprisingly common

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