Out of touch with reality, the arrogance of some MPs during a time of national crisis is breathtaking – Simon Carter

Some jobs will make you a little unpopular; in a survey last year, lawyers had an 8.7 % untrustworthy rating and bailiffs 6.7 %.

Some will make you a bit more unpopular - bankers (22.8 %) and estate agents (14.6 %) among them.

Some will make you really unpopular - a 37.7 % rating for my industry (though anyone with a brain would say regional daily journos such as myself are far more trustworthy than those on the national red tops).

And becoming a politician will make you staggeringly, startlingly, sensationally unpopular - an untrustworthy rating of 78.1 %. Events of the past few months suggest that last figure would be even higher if a similar poll was conducted again.

As the weeks fly by, I seem to be ever more amazed at just how inept our current Government is, how completely out of touch, how breathtakingly arrogant, some Tory MPs seem to be.

Heard of Greg Smith? He’s the MP for Buckingham who last week contacted a local tea room to ask if he could help them pack the FREE children’s lunches they were handing out during the holidays to those in need. Call me a cynical journalist, but I’m guessing a photographer would have been on hand had the tea room accepted his offer. Thankfully, they turned it down.

If you didn’t know, Smith was one of 322 MPs who voted against a Labour motion to extend free school meals to holiday periods.. Voting against feeding hungry kids, but then wanting to ‘help’ a tea room do exactly the same, is arrogance on a quite phenomenal scale. But is anyone really surprised?

Another Tory MP, John Penrose, recently told one of his constituents that he blamed ‘chaotic parents’ for children going to school hungry. That is not an opinion a Tory MP should be making public. And, obviously, Penrose also voted against the Labour motion.

Meanwhile, in Walsall, the local council leader said low-income parents struggling to feed their children should shop at M & S, hardly a budget supermarket chain. ‘You can buy three meals for £7 there,’ said Mike Bird.

Ironically, the M & S in Walsall closed two years ago because local people couldn’t afford to shop there. Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up. And, of course, Bird is a Conservative councillor. Again, surely that doesn’t surprise you?

Now, as I was sitting down to write this column, news broke that a month-long lockdown of sorts could start on Wednesday. Details were patchy, but schools, colleges and universities are to stay open.

Hello! Surely the decision to open the doors to the universities in September was the single biggest reason behind the infection rate rising, certainly more of a factor than the Eat Out To Help Out scheme which has been blamed for helping to spread the virus.

Look at Portsmouth: Lots of students reporting positive, but I haven’t read of any clusters caused by the EOTHO scheme. I used the 50 per cent scheme regularly and - barring one exception - social distancing rules were rigorously enforced.

But some will still use the EOTHO scheme as another stick to thrash our inept Government with. After all, Johnson and Sunak were happy to find over £500m to help people eat out at restaurants in August - and generally those who took advantage of the scheme, like I did, could afford it anyway - but 322 MPs weren’t so happy about finding roughly £20m a week to feed starving children during holiday periods.

If you stop and think about it, that is a disgrace. But then, so is the Government’s handling of virtually the entire pandemic so, yet again, we shouldn’t be surprised.

I studied politics during my Sociology A level course at college, and I’m glad I did, it was really interesting. Politics should be interesting, fascinating even. What it shouldn’t be is a shambles, an embarrassment, but all too often since mid-March it has been just that. With, sadly, thousands of needless deaths the end result.