The recent VE Day celebrations were preceded by a large number of TV documentaries covering the perilous situation our country faced in 1940 with the entire might of the German war machine bearing down upon us.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill promised the British people nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ and that is exactly what they got and lots of it.

Whole neighbourhoods were obliterated by German bombers, in one night alone Nazi aircraft dropped 100,000 tons of bombs on London 80 per cent of which were incendiaries.

Mr Churchill, who urged the British people to fight on until the last drop of blood, refused to move his office out of the Capital insisting he visit the towns and neighbourhoods affected.

The King and Queen were offered safe refuge in Canada but chose to remain at Buckingham Palace, which was hit seven times by German bombers.

So…what’s the point? The point is those telling the British people to stand firm and never surrender did exactly that. They led by example, Mr Churchill even sailed the Atlantic to meet president Roosevelt at the height of German U-Boat attacks before flying to North Africa to boost the morale of British troops after their defeat by Rommel.

What Churchill and the Royal Family did not do was ask for a devotion to duty they were not prepared to make themselves.

Fast forward to the current corona virus pandemic and what we have are leaders insisting we accept sacrifices they have no intention of making. Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s chief medical officer, resigned after press disclosure she had twice travelled to the family holiday home totally against her own policy.

The Housing Secretary has been accused of flouting lockdown rules again after it emerged he travelled from his London residence to his ‘second’ home just days after urging the nation to ‘stay at home’.

This week Neil Ferguson, head of the department of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London, was seen breaking the social distancing rules he helped design to meet his ‘lover’, who lives in another area of London.

These were people in key positions insisting the public stay home and avoid personal contact with their loved ones while doing the exact opposite.

They advocated a policy that inflicted all kinds of distress and hardship on the general public with no intention of making the same sacrifice.

I suspect history will fully acknowledge their hypocrisy in the coronavirus crisis of 2020.