Peter Rhodes on police photos, Covid statistics and a degree of suspicion about excuses

If pensioners are jailed for blocking motorways in their campaign for household insulation, will they be old lags?

If you believe the official figures, deaths following a Covid-19 diagnosis on recent Fridays were 121, 180, 164, 147 and 114. Yet the deaths on recent Sundays totalled 43, 58, 56, 56 and 61. Are Fridays up to three times deadlier than Sundays? Of course not. Right from the beginning of this pandemic, the calculating of diagnoses and deaths has been a national disgrace. If they can't count accurately at weekends, why bother at all?

Just over a year ago I noted the arrival of the new BT email system: “In the hallowed tradition of e- progress, it is worse than what went before but probably better than what is to come.” And so it seems. The useful “Keep Me Signed In” function, eliminating the need for endless logging in, has suddenly started signing me out. This is a common problem and there is plenty of online debate and grief from BT customers. But there's no explanation and no fix, and the “Live Chat” person I contacted was alive and chatty but not much use.

Unintended consequences. As part of the ongoing campaign to convince us they are doing something, police used social media to post thousands of images of knives seized by officers in London. But a member of the capital's police and crime committee claims these “frightening images” may prompt some people to “upgrade” their weapons for something bigger, sharper and more lethal. It raises the question of what sort of images – if any – police should post on Twitter.

Why, for example, did police choose to “share” images of a car on its side after a recent collision in Sussex? Would they release images of my car in a similar situation? Or your car? Or the chief constable's car? What makes this particular car different – except that it was driven by Katie Price?

In the New Tory Jerusalem, if I understand Boris correctly, wages will be higher, skills will be keener and we won't plug the gaps in the economy through mass migration. I'd like to see a society in which tradespeople were valued as much as graduates, on one tiny condition: they turn up when they promise to. Under the present system it seems every craft course includes a module in Creative Excuses. Honest, squire, the lad's been abducted by gorillas. . . .