Gilles Bourgeois, Ayn Rand’s ultimate disciple, seems to have disappeared from LinkedIn.

The one saving grace of the Trump onslaught on the US election results is that his preferred medium is still Twitter, which limits him to just a few words at a time. Ayn Rand’s heroes acknowledged no such limitation, but in his 57-page rant against government John Galt still had to acknowledge the need for a government of sorts. How to choose it? A problem he never addressed.

We have our own Ayn Rand. We have a Home Secretary cast in her image. We have Priti Patel.

Are schools and hospitals really in danger, as one modern-day follower of Ayn Rand claims, of being taken over by ‘unionised postal workers’? Should Covid-19 not have made us realise, if we hadn’t already, that postmen and women, delivery workers, shop workers, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers deserve both adequate pay and our respect?

Ayn Rand’s early novella ‘Anthem’ is often compared with George Orwell’s ‘;Nineteen Eighty-four’. There are some rather significant differences.

In a recent article in The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley turned his attention to the three people who are at this moment taking the UK wherever it is going (or, quite possibly, wherever its constituent nation are independently going).

It is often said in Ayn Rand’s favour that she was not a racist . But is that true?

One thing that a pandemic does is concentrate the mind on essentials, the availability of medical care being about the most essential of all. Here in the UK most medical care is provided to most people by the National Health Service, but ‘socialized medicine’ was, of course, anathema to Ayn Rand.

My step-son lives in Torino, which means he has been on lock-down or more than a month. But he is lucky, because his flat, like most flats, even old ones, in Mediterranean countries has a balcony.

What we are now learning to call Covid-19 is taking an ever tighter grip on the world. In every country, as cases of the disease are recognised, government intervention increases. What would Ayn Rand have made of it all?