So, what have you been doing during lockdown?

Learning a new language, finally reading all those books that you really only bought to leave lying around the house to impress visitors? (Visitors, what visitors – Editor?)

Or drink yourself to oblivion on a daily basis, to relieve the seemingly endless banality of a day-to-day life that consists almost entirely of food shopping and avoiding the news?

I’ll leave it to you lot to hazard a guess as to where my energies have been invested over the past 12 months. Yes, there’s been quite a fair bit of alcohol consumed, but I have also interspersed my Herculean drinking bouts with a rigorous exercise regime, which would put the annoyingly super fit Joe Wicks to shame...

Basically, like most folk, I’ve been climbing the walls.

Whilst I have tried to avoid the news as much as possible, it’s pretty difficult to completely drown out all of the noise that has been made over the year. And some of that noise makes for depressing listening.

I don’t think that the UK was in particularly good shape prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, what with the Brexit fiasco, and the fact that a mendacious, spoilt, incompetent philanderer had become Prime Minister, but the past year has provided us with some firm reminders, if any were required, that the Tories really are amongst the most despicable species to crawl the Earth.

In April last year, Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital as a precautionary measure as he had shown symptoms of coronavirus. After an initial assessment, he was moved to an intensive care unit as his symptoms worsened.

At that point in time, a spokesman stated that he was receiving “the most excellent care,” and that the Prime Minister wanted to thank sincerely, “all of the medical staff for their hard work and dedication.”

A few days later, he was out of intensive care but remained in hospital. The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock said, “the NHS is there for us all, and I know our amazing NHS staff have given him their characteristic world-class care.”

When he eventually left hospital, Johnson stated that the NHS had saved his life. He was effusive in his praise for NHS staff and in particular, to two nurses who had tended to him throughout his period in intensive care.

Those nurses were from New Zealand and Portugal. Johnson said he had seen the pressures the NHS was under after seven days in hospital, including three in intensive care. And he had witnessed the “personal courage not just of the doctors and nurses, but everyone: the cleaners, the cooks, the healthcare workers of every description, physios, radiographers, pharmacists.”

He couldn’t have been clearer on how the country would eventually overcome the virus. “That is why we will defeat this coronavirus and defeat it together. We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.”

In March this year, the Tory government announced that health workers, including the nurses who saved the Prime Minister’s life, would be offered a 1% pay rise. For many, once inflation is taken to account, this would mean a real time pay cut.

Matt Hancock, a man with more faces than a town clock, insisted that the decision to recommend such a small increase was due to an assessment of “what’s affordable as a nation” after the economic toll taken by the coronavirus crisis. He’s a liar.

The Tories, despite their two-faced praise for the NHS, have other priorities. Brexit has turned the UK into a small, and in the eyes of the world’s major powers, insignificant player on the global stage, and Johnson and his John Bull cabinet are in the process of trying to convince those major players that we’re still a force to be reckoned with.

And where do the Tories turn in their pathetic attempts to do so? Nuclear weapons.

The Tories are set to scrap a policy aimed at the gradual disarmament of nuclear weapons and increase the cap on those warheads that can be stockpiled from its current level of 180 to 260.

In an eye-wateringly naïve statement, PM Johnson stated that by doing so, the UK would be better equipped to deal with threats from amongst others, terrorists and organised crime groups. Firing a nuclear weapon at drug smugglers or people traffickers seems a bit over the top to me.

We can’t afford to give a decent pay increase to the people who dedicate themselves to saving lives, but we can fork out whatever it takes for bombs that would obliterate millions of lives, in a pathetic attempt to show what a big country we are.

It is beyond shameful.