Paris’s top cop has told us that if we catch Covid-19 it’s all our own fault for not listening to the wise counsels of the government.

In a video filmed on Friday, Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, a man who has the permanent look of someone who has just sucked on a lemon and acts accordingly, declared that “ … the people who are in hospital, who are in intensive care, are the people who didn’t respect the lockdown when it began”.

He was forced to apologise after doctors pointed out that some patients certainly fell ill before the government finally got round to ordering the lockdown – after failing to call off the first round of council elections, if you remember – and that many others are residents of old people’s homes or workers whose jobs are deemed essential, doctors and nurses for example.

I suppose one might become a bit impatient with people who break the confinement rule if one had spent one’s Friday stopping people who had taken it into their heads to go off on a spring break, as Lallement and his troops did.

But the prefect has form. Last year he caused uproar when he told Yellow Vest protesters “We are not in the same camp.” Indeed, the “centrist” Macron government seems to have picked him because he is so nasty.

There are 180,000 cops on the streets to stop people taking an Easter holiday this weekend.

I suppose Lallement could argue that it’s tough love, which is my excuse for nagging my 95-year-old mother continuously about the anti-virus precautions.

Sometimes she remembers that she’s supposed to wash her hands regularly, sometimes that she should cough or sneeze into a tissue or her elbow, although the latter is judged impossible.

But remembering the rules and observing them are two different things and, given that she frequently forgets about the pandemic’s existence, she clearly thinks that I have become a hygiene fanatic just to annoy her.  

The most difficult rule is not touching your face. We all have difficulty observing that one but for her it is particularly difficult, given her habit of taking her false teeth out and wiping them during the course of a meal.

The authorisation form you have to fill in to leave your home will be available to download on your phone as from Monday.

France’s Covid-19 recorded death toll stands at 8,500. There are 63,633 confirmed cases, 6,662 people are in intensive care and 14,000 have been discharged from hospital.