Priti Grim

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description.

Anthony Trollope – Barchester Towers (1857)

Priti Patel today backed police to confront people outside supermarkets, on park benches, stop cars to check if passengers are all from the same household and knock on doors to hunt for parties as officers pledged to fine everyone breaching Boris Johnson’s lockdown laws.

The Home Secretary spoke out after Scotland Yard revealed officers will quiz citizens about why they are not shut away in their homes after four friends were fined £800 for travelling in the same car to McDonald’s in Northamptonshire.

And yesterday police in Maidenhead in Berkshire stopped drivers outside Tesco and handed them leaflets asking: ‘Why are you here?’ in a clampdown on non-essential travel – despite shopping for food being allowed.

Ms Patel says that police should stop people who are outside to ask them why they are not at home and ‘explain to them they should not necessarily be out unless it was for key reasons’, adding that it is ‘right’ that the police confront people sitting on park benches. In the past two weeks more than 800 fines were issued for ‘egregious’ breaches of the coronavirus rules, she said.