With repetitive calls to “beat the enemy” and vows to “win this fight,” Boris has aspired to compare the challenges of the COVID crisis to the struggles of war. Aside from rallying the Blitz spirit, Boris presumably appreciates the opportunity to recall and channel the memory of his great hero, Winston Churchill.

I’d resisted tweeting for 4 days, six hours and 27 minutes. It was agony. I wanted to tell everyone. Every person I had ever known. Everyone I met. This was earth-shattering news and my journey in life was about to change completely. I’d just been given a set of keys to help shape the world: and if I get it right, the new future will not just be for me, but for a whole generation. 14th January 2020, I was offered an unconditional offer to study at Oxford University. Apart from my unbridled excitement and pride at making it to one of the world’s most revered, elite, powerful centres of reason, inquiry and philosophical openness, you might ask, why does this matter so much?

As conservatives it is natural that we spend a lot of time thinking about and defending the private ownership of the means of production, however lately I have come to wonder if something else is at play – that slowly the very concept of ownership is being eroded and that things that people used to have, they’ll instead have to rent. What’s worse this is being pioneered by the very corporations that we fight to defend (simply because you can make many times more money by continually charging someone to use something: say a lamp, than a one-time sale).

Homeownership has always been central to conservative politics, and it is no coincidence that conservatism at its best has often been focussed on putting people on the housing ladder. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher set out to create a property-owning democracy in Britain. Of her many liberalising reforms, few are more famous than the Right to Buy scheme which introduced, for the first time for many middle-class Britons, the prospect of property ownership.

Recent loosenings of lockdown restrictions have, of course, finally allowed one to experience the joys of consumerism. Those familiar with Oxford are of course aware that along with the spires, the pubs, and the tacky tourist shops, this dreamy city is home to a selection of bookstores. From the Oxford-grown Blackwell’s to the elegant out posting of the Waterstones on Broad Street, to the Jericho vintage book store, Oxford has provided me with a worthy means of restarting the economy: hoarding books.

You won’t have heard of David T Johnson. That is not surprising. He is an obscure American diplomat who served such an uneventful tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs that Wikipedia doesn’t even know when he left the job. More importantly, in 2004 he was the second-in-command at the US Embassy in London. Working in an embassy, his job was mainly to massage the ego of his host country, hold a lot of champagne receptions and keep a tight hold on the Ferrero Rocher expenditure.