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Here’s a new profile of the heroic Jonathan Sumption. A slice:

Well, Lord Sumption has certainly done that in recent months, becoming the intellectual champion of the anti-lockdowners – one of the few public figures prepared to stick his neck out and articulate a case against the Government’s measures in regular newspaper columns (several in The Telegraph) and on television. His stand has drawn criticism from his former colleagues at the Bar and from those who believe the threat from Covid justified the most illiberal measures seen in peacetime. But Sumption, who began his working life as an academic, believes the response has been massively disproportionate and betrays a distinct lack of historical perspective.

‘Covid-19 is towards the upper end [the most bearable] of the kind of epidemic that humanity has had to cope with from the beginning of time,’ he says. By contrast, he argues, the various lockdowns the Government has enforced over the past year have been brutal in prohibiting the most basic of human interactions. ‘It is historically extreme and unusual,’ he adds. ‘We have never, ever done such a thing.’

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Sumption feels so strongly on the subject that he appears ready to take on all-comers in any forum. ‘These (lockdown) rules are an attack on our humanity. They are an assault on everything that makes humanity spiritually valuable,’ he says with feeling. ‘The interaction with other human beings is completely fundamental (cơ bản, căn bản) to our existence.’ Then, he adds, there was the ‘attack on the entire spiritual dimension of our existence – the closure of schools, the closure of museums, theatres, churches, sports grounds. These are things without which we cannot function as human beings. And I do not think that the saving of lives is worth such a price.’

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