A week of mourning, a season of spring-cleaning, a lifetime of service 

This week marks an important milestone in our national life. It is, first and foremost, a period of mourning. Prince Philip was a man who simultaneously embodied the best of Britain’s past

and a pioneering, springtime spirit that always looked forward to the future. Though only the Royal Family and a few close friends will attend his funeral in person, the ceremony will be

broadcast to the world. But live-streaming of funerals is no longer reserved for royalty. Over the past year, due to the pandemic, “Zoom send-offs” have become normalised; in a sense,

everyone now has a royal funeral. In this sense, the Duke’s obsequies will symbolise another stage in the democratisation of the monarchy.

Today, too, our high streets will be thronged again with shoppers, cafés and restaurants will serve up delicacies to those brave enough to dine al fresco, while millions toast reopening time

at that great British institution, the pub. The gradual relaxation of Covid restrictions is turning this spring into a slow-motion rediscovery of much-missed pleasures. Perhaps this

enforced self-denial will help us to appreciate better the good things in life. Just as familiarity can breed contempt, so unfamiliarity fosters gratitude. 

This is also the week, however, when the vaccination programme will reach a crucial target: those aged 50 and over, all 32 million of us, should have been offered the jab by April 15. This

marks the end of the first phase of the programme, with all nine priority groups, representing nearly half of the adult population, having received their first dose. Second doses are now

being stepped up, with nearly half a million people receiving theirs on Saturday. Those in their forties will start receiving their first jabs this week: the younger half of the population

will benefit from newly authorised vaccines, beginning with Moderna and moving on to the single-shot Janssen jab as soon as it receives approval in the next few days. 

The irresistible progress of the vaccination drive has inspired most of us with awe, as indeed it ought: nothing quite like this grand national effort has happened before in our history.

Just as in wartime Roosevelt dubbed the United States the “arsenal of democracy”, so in this pandemic the West has become the “pharmacy of democracy”. We should not take it for granted.

Nor, for that matter, should we allow what we have learned in this plague year to be quickly forgotten. It has reinforced our sense of the fragility of life, especially wildlife, and the

need to conserve and protect the natural world. Those who play their part as custodians of the Earth deserve to be rewarded; those who recklessly lay waste to it must be deterred.

Governments should, however, be more discerning about how we go about our environmental housekeeping. Subsidies can do as much harm as good. 

Markets are usually more efficient in the environmental as in every other sphere — but only as long as they are obliged by law to take account of “externalities”. These are the hidden costs

that private companies cause but have not incurred. They will generally seek to turn these costs into public liabilities — but only if the law allows them to do so. The pandemic itself could

be defined as an externality, in the sense that the Chinese state, which was responsible for its emergence, has only incurred a small fraction of the global cost. After the First World War,

the economist John Maynard Keynes quoted the later Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s description of the new intake of MPs in the December 1918 election: “A lot of hard-faced men who look as

if they had done very well out of the war.” Baldwin’s words are apt to describe the tycoons who have enriched themselves to the tune of trillions over the past year. The pandemic has

produced its own profiteers of prophylaxis, many of them exploiting state spending sprees induced by panic. By now the Treasury should have worked out how to recoup some of the largesse that

it has lavished on firms that were not genuinely in need. 

Spring cleaning is a practice that has largely fallen out of use. But it is a good metaphor for the refreshment of British public life that is already under way.  We need a spring clean of

Whitehall and Westminster to do away with corruption and waste. We need a spring clean in the City and the wider business world to ensure that the economy bounces back as strongly as

possible. And we need a spring clean at every level of society to restore a sense of duty to our national identity. 

In short, like the late Prince Philip, we should be generous to the deserving, but not suffer fools in high places gladly — or at all. In her heartfelt tribute to him, Princess Anne sums up

the mood: “My father has been my teacher, my supporter and my critic, but mostly it is his example of a life well lived and service freely given that I most wanted to emulate.” As a nation,

we too should aspire to emulate these “no nonsense” qualities, which Anne has exemplified no less admirably than her father. As we emerge from the ordeal of Covid, we could do worse than to

meet the inevitable challenges of recovery by asking: “What would the Duke have said about that?”

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