I made my weekly run to Tesco today. I was pleased to see that they are finally selling facemasks, though it is still the case that the vast majority of shoppers are not wearing one. The staff aren’t either, but I’m assuming that they have all been tested and are COVID-19 free which makes it less of an issue.

Talking of the virus, I’ve seen a few people posting in the last few days that they have had serious relapses. One was the TV historian, Dr. Janina Ramirez. I’ve been coughing quite a bit over the past week, which is annoying because I thought I was over that. Maybe it is something to do with the weather. Or perhaps it is just a case that if you get too tired the virus comes roaring back.

In Parliament today the Minister for Men and Inequality, Liz Truss, was required to take questions. Because none of the other political parties are prepared to stand up for trans rights, she got few questions on her plans for equality law reform. Those she did get, she bumbled past saying nothing of substance.

On the one hand that is good news. She could have said a bunch of awful things. It is also possible that yesterday’s letter-writing campaign had some effect. As of close of business today over 25,000 people had sent letters to Bozo via the Gendered Intelligence gateway that I wrote about yesterday. More people have written directly, or written to their MPs. Apparently some MPs experienced website crashes and overflowing mailboxes today.

I don’t expect that this will have any effect on the government’s plans. Truss did not come up with this idea by herself. Dominic Cummings will be patiently explaining to panicked Cabinet members that the whole point of leaking the plans ahead of time was to allow the public outrage to run its course so that by the time the plans are officially announced people will be tired of the subject and only those directly affected will complain. We will need to prove him wrong.

In the meantime there has been a public statement of support for the trans community from Angela Rayner, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Not from Kier Starmer, of course. He is sticking to his policy of not getting involved least JK Rowling stop donating to his party, but at least we have got Labour a little bit rattled.

And yes, as you may have noticed, billionaires are a very bad thing all round, regardess of which political party they support.