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Chambers reflects on the just-breaking UK news of the acquittal of four people charged with the willful toppling of, and damage to, a widely despised statue of eighteenth-century slave trader Edward Colston that had stood in Bristol England city center since the end of the nineteenth century. It was in the aftermath of Bristol's Black Lives Matter rally that the extraordinary event occurred in which Colston's statue was summarily de-plinthed and finally dumped over the quay to take its place among other detritus. The contemporary British artist Mark Quinn had wasted no time in constructing and erecting on the vacated plinth a statue of Black Lives Matter protestor Jen Reid, rendered in black resin. The toppling of Colston's effigy, together with the removal of statues in the US has now obliged, or encouraged, far greater numbers of people to take an active interest in statuary erected in what is, purportedly, public space.

The experience of Covid-19 has taught us many things, not least the consequence of what John Milton termed ‘gibberish law’. Law drafted amidst the ‘throng and noises of irrational men’. The closer purpose of this article is the attempt to regulate ‘gatherings’ during the coronavirus pandemic, including the re-invention of a bespoke crime of ‘mingling’. A jurisprudential curiosity which, it will be suggested, is symptomatic of a broader malaise. An assault on the integrity of the rule of law which is only too familiar; much, it might be said, like the arrival of a pandemic. The first part of the article will revisit three particular gatherings, in part to debunk the myth of the unprecedented. But also to introduce some themes, literal and figurative, of masking and muddle. The conjuring of what Shakespeare called ‘rough magic’. The second part of the article will then take a closer look at the jurisprudential consequence of this conjuration. The final part will venture some larger concerns, about the crisis of parliamentary democracy in the ‘age of Covid’.

On Sunday 7th June 2020, sparked by the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protestors marching to support the Black Lives Matter movement tore down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the city's harbour. This dramatic action in Bristol thrust the city onto the global stage and put it at the forefront of last summer's bitter culture wars. Caught in the eye of this storm was Bristol's mayor Marvin Rees, the first directly elected mayor of Black African heritage of a major European city. Born and bred in Bristol and himself a descendant of enslaved people, how would he hold the city together in the face of rising tensions that threaten to explode into violent confrontation?