QUENTIN LETTS: Covid face masks had been suffocating, dehumanising, manky and damp and turned us right into a nation of furtive, overwhelmed souls bullied by goose-stepping officers. Wear them this winter for the flu? NEVER

Martinet of the month must be Daniel Elkeles, a previously obscure senior manager in the National Health Service.

He popped up on Tuesday to demand that we again start wearing masks, as happened in the pandemic.

Mr Elkeles claimed that this was necessary to stop the spread of a December flu bug.

‘If you are coughing and sneezing,’ quoth this sage, ‘then you must wear a mask when you’re in public spaces, including on public transport to stop the chances of you giving your virus to somebody else.

‘We were all very good about infection-control during Covid. We really, really need to get back to that now.’

The flu bug was described, not entirely scientifically, as ‘a tidal wave’. An atishoo-nami, perhaps.

Must we ‘really, really’ heed Mr Elkeles and the other functionaries and ninnies who quickly echoed his demand for masks? 

Or might the country this time be more wary about believing public servants who would boss us about and, in the process, cause untold damage to our society?

The good news is that Mr Elkeles was immediately opposed by Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. 

Mrs Badenoch took the properly Conservative view that citizens should be allowed to make up their own minds. She said she was ‘traumatised’ by the Covid masks. 

Mr Farage, for his part, snorted that the Elkeles proposal was ‘nonsense’.

The mask mandate brought in by the last government in July 2020 – and much cheered by the then Opposition Labour party, whose leader wanted lockdown to last even longer – was the moment I gave up on Boris Johnson’s premiership. 

How could a loose-fitting mask possibly prevent such a catchy disease as Covid?

It struck me as nonsense, and I was reasonably sure that my old acquaintance Boris would once have instinctively agreed with that. 

Yet he had been pushed into it, maybe after nearly dying from the bug himself, maybe as a result of pressure from Whitehall advisers and his wild-man sidekick Dominic Cummings.

The edict, which banned us from entering shops without a mask, turned Britain into a country of furtive, beaten souls.

At once the nation seemed to be living through some Doctor Who episode in which human identities were obscured and individualism was erased.

Having emerged from a shadowy Whitehall psy-ops committee, the mask mandate seemed to have more to do with the politics of fear than with practical disease control. 

It struck me as an attempt to make the population cower and thereby to increase the power of officials and scientists who had plunged us into a ruinous lockdown.

If you doubt the economic damage it did, just look at your recent tax bills. Just look how little we can spend on national defence.

Lockdown was socialism in action. Freedom was sacrificed to some elusive notion of a wider good, which in reality only reduced our defences and damaged businesses. No wonder Labour loved it.

Anyone who resisted masks was soon denounced on social media, or by the tricoteuses of breakfast television, as some sort of homicidal maniac. Dissent was smothered. 

It was reported this week that the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, ‘silenced’ advisers who questioned government policies during lockdown.

I was then writing for a different newspaper and I was left in little doubt that criticism of masks was unwelcome.

Many of our fellow citizens plainly put their faith in, and even enjoyed wearing, masks. They derived a virtuous kick from being, in the words of Mr Elkeles, ‘very good’. 

To this day you can still see a few such saps on the streets, faces covered like dental nurses. 

Rather more of us, I suspect, hated being told to wear masks. What horrible things they were, suffocating and dehumanising, manky and damp.

They set off my asthma. I was a serial mask-refusenik, regularly being told off by prigs in the street. 

On the empty trains that I took to London every week (we parliamentary sketch writers were classified as ‘key workers’, I’ll have you know) I was repeatedly scolded by the British Transport Police for being unmasked.

When I pointed out that there was no other passenger in the carriage, officers agreed that the rules were crazy. 

When even the police think the law is dumb, something has gone awry.

In Spain I was kicked out of a cavernous cathedral by a furious verger for not wearing ‘una mascarilla’. 

Excommunicated! We haven’t bothered to go abroad since. 

At home we had our larder necessities delivered by Morrisons and I avoided shops that were fussy about masks. Saved me a fortune.

Government scientists said that not wearing a mask would make us ‘vectors of infection’ but masks themselves were vectors of economic decline. 

And all for what? Their efficacy was questioned even by top brass within the World Health Organisation and Public Health England.

If Mr Elkeles has his way, here we now go again. Will it soon be back to ‘hands, space, face’ and ‘stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’?

Wouldn’t the authorities love that? Never were they so powerful as during the pandemic. Masks, to bureaucrats, are an instrument of control and self-justification. Same with all those council Covid marshals.

Do you remember the funeral where a crematorium manager halted proceedings because two tearful mourners were huddled too close to one another?

Officialdom went madly, wickedly didactic. It was springtime for goose-steppers. As is now accepted, lockdown did terrible damage to children’s schooling and to public self-confidence. 

Call it mental health if you like. And yet our bureaucratic class is unable to accept that it was wrong – and now they want a reprise of that terrible time.

Meanwhile, masks have morphed. Today, they are worn on political protests by yobs who want to hide their faces. Everything about them gives me the willies.

The elite hates our scepticism. It wrenches hold of medical misfortune and exaggerates problems – ‘a tidal wave’ of flu! – to try to reassert its fading grip on our obedience.

Do you remember that film Bedknobs And Broomsticks? In it, a ghostly army of faceless, armour-clad knights takes on the Germans. 

The Jerries shoot them with machine-guns but the bullets go straight through them. One knight just unscrews his hollow leg and empties the shells from it.

Our finger wagging boss-ocrats are not so different from those faceless figures. Their arguments are shot through with holes yet still they march forward, making their authoritarian claims, refusing to accept that they were wrong. 

The only difference is that in Bedknobs And Broomsticks, the unbeatable army marches to the cry of ‘victory for England’.

The stuff being spouted by Daniel Elkeles and his ilk is unlikely to lead to anything but a sense of quivering, craven national defeat.