Toby Neal: Was Captain Sir Tom's generation the greatest of all?

Had your jab yet?

For people of a certain age, it seems to have overtaken talking about the weather as an opening topic of conversation.

Among the older generation there is a sort of evangelical fervour at the moment thanks to the astonishing vaccine rollout programme, which has become a unifying national effort of which we can be proud in these dark times.

I acted as a vacci-taxi for my elderly aunt this week, although she doesn't self-identify as being elderly, only being in her mid-80s. We got there about 15 minutes early, she had her jab right on the appointed time, and was out in about another 10 minutes.

I have heard one or two stories of people having to wait four hours, or being offered the jab many miles away, but it seems if they hang on and do a bit of searching they can generally get one a lot closer.

When the Government announced that it had a target of vaccinating 15 million people by mid-February I was like, yeah, tell us another one.

But fair dos. Almost all the old folk I know or talk to have either already had the jab, or are down to have it very shortly.

Spirits have been markedly uplifted. Even though it's too soon to see the impact of the vaccination programme, February 2021 is going to be a historic and pivotal month in the battle against Covid-19.

In a couple of weeks we are going to start to see things filter through into the figures and an ever-improving picture, new variants permitting.

So it's a case of keeping our heads down because, while there is never a good time to get coronavirus, catching it now just when there is hope of protection would be the worst time of all.

Waving the flag

Meanwhile on the political front a leaked Labour strategy document suggests that the party “make use of the (Union) flag, veterans and dressing smartly."

Maybe that explains why we're starting to see Sir Keir Starmer with a Union Jack backdrop (don't bother writing in with all that guff about jacks only flying from ships, the Admiralty itself says Union Jack is correct), although in fairness he has always been a smart dresser.

This is a contrast to the Corbyn years when Jezza gave the impression that he thought Britain a bit of a rubbish place in dire need of his socialist reforms.

The thrust of the document has been controversial within Labour ranks as there is more to patriotism than waving a flag, but in any event Sir Keir is at that stage of his leadership where he has to move from his approach of saying the Government is too slow on everything and isn't doing enough, and to start to come up with an attractive Labour vision, which means beginning to unveil clear and distinct policies.

That may be what is behind his suggestion of getting teachers vaccinated in the next part of the rollout. It is at last a distinct Labour policy, and one which demonstrates he is on the side of teachers and parents in a desire to get the schools back as soon as possible.

Nevertheless if I were a politician, it is not a policy in which I'd feel easy carrying the can. Rightly or wrongly, it could be seen as teachers queue-jumping in a nation in which jumping a queue is not going to make you any friends.

And then there is the When Things Go Wrong principle which can see such policies become orphans in an instant. To show how this can happen, I bring you a headline-topping BBC report from a month or so from now:

"A school mum has criticised the Government for its policy of vaccinating teachers after her 51-year-old father died of coronavirus while still waiting for the vaccine.

"Surrounded by her weeping children, Mrs Jane Doeburry said: 'My dad died and my children have lost their grandfather for the want of the vaccine, while the 24-year-old PE teacher who is so fit that he played basketball for England and a 19-year-old student teacher at their school were given the vaccine before him when statistically they are at substantially lower risk.

"'How can that be fair? How can that be right? The Government promised that those at highest risk would be given priority for the jab.'

"The BBC has asked a Government minister for a comment but no-one was available."

The greatest generation?

Lastly, all hail Captain Sir Tom Moore. Like many others, I went out to give him a clap. Not everybody did. Sinn Fein signally did not join in the tributes and according to a Church of England cleric from London "the cult of Captain Tom is a cult of white British nationalism."

That's up to them. They are free to have their views, although personally I abhor bad manners.

But if I may speak some heresy of my own, it does trouble me that we are building up Sir Tom's generation, which happens to be the generation of my late parents who also both served in the war, as "the greatest generation."

I suspect that they would themselves have seen the greatest generation as the one which came before them, the generation which went over the top on The Somme.

And for all I know that generation might have thought the greatest generation was the one before them. And so on.

Frankly if you had told me a year ago that this 21st century British generation would willingly go along with being effectively locked up for months, I would have had my doubts.

Look at the vaccine rollout, and the way the community has pulled together and endured lockdown amid truly terrible death figures, and the current generation isn't doing all that badly, is it?