• THE attitude in Downing Street during lockdown, and the parties routinely held at the end of a working day, have been commented upon by people who could not be with those they loved who were dying or organise funerals in the way that they would have wished.

Perhaps most striking have been the comments of hospital staff who spent their days sweltering in personal protective equipment yet did not think it respectful to have so much as an ice lolly in a hospital car park with their exhausted colleagues at the end of a shift.

But what astonishes me (and I thought I had lost the ability to be astonished by anything that went on behind a door to what appears to have been a different world) is that on the
death of Prince Philip 10 Downing Street announced its flag would be flying at half-mast.

Yet such was the culture that the staff there thought it appropriate to hold a party with cases of booze on the evening before the state funeral; a funeral at which, as the world watched, Queen Elizabeth sat alone in a pew of St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

It’s hard to forget the television pictures of that small figure, respecting the regulations to the letter, while people in Downing Street may well have been nursing their hangovers.

If the prime minister and his staff have so little respect for the monarch, how the Hell can we expect them to have any respect for us, the electorate?

ALIDA BAXTER, W1