Is it just me or are men milking the lockdown? asks FEMAIL's guest columnist RACHEL JOHNSON

• Rachel Johnson and her family are spending lockdown at their farm on Exmoor 
• Presenter said her husband has dubbed 2020 'the happiest year of his life' 
• She claims men are milking the nanny state advice to avoid going out  

We’re nine-and-a-half weeks into lockdown. Nine- and-a-half weeks of rural isolation in a remote river valley in torn tracksuit bottoms with my husband, 26-year-old daughter and dog, talking about what we are going to eat for all the endless, greedy meals.

And drink. (I can’t get into the larder for the boxes of empties.)

The fact we were already staying at the family farm on Exmoor and, therefore, had to stay put (save for essential journeys to London to present my radio show because I can’t do it from here) was serendipitous. But still, I mourn the ghost entries in my diary — the lost lunch parties, seeing family members new and old.

Summer has been cancelled. Everything I was looking forward to has been replaced with the most unlovely, unnatural thing. I refer to Zoom quizzes, Sunday family FaceTime and enforced social distancing.

A life unlived, two metres apart if at all, which goes against my human instincts. Joyless. I miss the smells, the hugs (I so want to hug my mother), the gossip.

Lockdown hasn’t been easy for anyone, but multiple polls show it’s hardest for women. Six out of ten of us are ‘struggling to stay positive’, while 77 per cent of women say the idea of seeing friends and family fills them with hope compared to 68 per cent of men.

I love nothing more than going to a party and am in terrible cold turkey now. Meanwhile, my husband regards it all as a lovely surprise, an unwonted Golden Age. He has taken to lockdown like the proverbial duck to water.

He says 2020 has been ‘the happiest year of his life’. He has become a newbie gardener and born-again twitcher (he has erected a hideous structure I call ‘birdseed village’, a sort of Bicester for our feathered friends). He may never go out again.

I can’t count the numbers of tanned, newly-bearded, well-fed middle-aged men who announce, to my irritation: ‘I love lockdown and never want it to end.’ Then proceed to expound on the deep, animal pleasures they’ve taken from the Stay At Home order.

I put this division of the sexes down to one reason. Almost all private social events are instigated and enforced by women. We are the producers; men the consumers. As a result, men often feel they only go to things because we want them to.

Now the nanny state is telling them they don’t have to, they can legitimately refuse till the cows come home. No wonder men are milking lockdown.

At the start, I admit I mistook l’affaire Cummings as a bat-signal that lockdown was basically over and the country must get back to work to fill Rishi’s coffers, and that (Allelujah!) we could begin to see people again.

As things stand, with foreign travel off, the main thing I am looking forward to over the staycation summer is limited ‘bubbling’ with friends and family.

But men (top of the blacklist: my husband) don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to do that either. Lockdown has turned blokes into Uncle Matthews — the crusty paterfamilias in the Nancy Mitford novels, who refused to go out on the grounds he had a perfectly good house of his own.

PSST! 

I have a quick question, Prime Minister, on Dominic Cummings’ dash to Durham. When you said Cummings acted ‘like any father’, were you saying any father would panic at the prospect of having sole charge of his only child rather than coping with your everyday Covidchildcare catastrophe like normal people?

Until things go back to normal — and they won’t, as life can’t be made 100 per cent safe — our menfolk can continue to shield behind ‘the science’ when it comes to future socialising. They can even say they could ‘kill people’ if they do go out, which sounds deeply mad. It’s clear that those men, addicted to lockdown, must be encouraged out into the world again.

Last week, I drove to the moor with my daughter to swim. I got chatting to a woman with three small children, at a safe distance, on the grassy riverbank.

‘I feel as if I’ve been incarcerated, I just had to get out,’ she said. ‘Even though I’m shielded.’

I asked her why.

‘I’ve got cancer,’ she told me, as her children splashed happily in the Barle. ‘But I don’t want to stay indoors in a flat. That is not life. I want to live my life.’

That’s the attitude we need right now.

Women of Britain say GO!

Diary of a PM’s sister!

Confession: I felt a stab of jealous rivalry when I read the deal sealed by the writer Sasha Swire for her snitch-and-tell, called Diary Of An MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power.

My own book about failing to become an MEP last May was published on March 19 just as every bookshop in the country shuttered.

I also felt bitter when told how fantabulous Sasha’s book is, based as it is on two decades of a secret diary she kept while being a plus-one to former Tory minister Hugo Swire.

My book, Rake’s Progress, majoring on my epic fail of a one-month political career, is out in the U.S. next spring. If Sasha Swire’s does as well as predicted, I might change the title to Diary Of A PM’s Sister. If I can’t beat her, I might as well copy her!

From West Somerset to Westminster, how our top dogs stay in touch

As readers may be aware, my family has been blessed by a new blonde bundle of joy during lockdown.

Yes, we were delivered of an apricot, black-nose cockapoo puppy and in the fullness of time we expect Ziggy will be partner-in-crime to her older cousin, Dilyn, a Jack Russell cross, who turned one this week.

Sadly, Ziggy and Dilyn have not yet had the pleasure of sniffing each others’ rear ends, thanks to the restrictions. The wonders and marvels of technology, however, mean they have actually ‘met’ even though Ziggy is on Exmoor and Dilyn is in Westminster.

Yes, the puppies have been FaceTiming. Here’s to hoping that the two dogs and their careful owners might be permitted to go walkies soon — the regulation two metres apart, of course (as if).

Sam Cam & Co have coaxed me out of joggers

Some nice retail news at last. Two friends of mine run their own labels. Permission to name drop?

They are Clare Hornby, founder of Me+Em and Samantha Cameron, who founded Cefinn. Clare says sales of trackie bums, hoodies and athleisure have suddenly tapered as we’re sick of slobby clothes.

It’s all about filmy frocks again, while Cefinn’s crisp stripey shirt dresses are cool classics.

Given these two women have kept their businesses afloat from their kitchen tables — and even though I have no parties to go to ever again — I am buying one from each.