No.136 - "Test, Test, Test!"

Dear James,

It was painful to watch. Yesterday Mr Alok Sharma and his supporting ‘expert of the day’, Dr Yvonne Doyle of Public Health England, fronted the daily Coronavirus Press Conference at Downing Street. These conferences are designed primarily to convince everyone that the government is in charge of events. They are supposed to stimulate confidence in our leaders in times of crisis but, as usual, we saw the same old ‘Tory culture’ at work. That culture is designed to show us that the Tories have ‘bottom’, that everyone can depend on them. It attempts to reassure us, to project control, to appear unflappable, to confirm that they are born to rule. Content is secondary. Projection is essential. Yesterday, all this, under the honest and focussed questions of our free press, became blatently clear. The government’s failure to increase testing, a few weeks after it had ruled out such a strategy, was laid bare. Yesterday was a disaster for your government James. All we got was the understanding that there is no one with a strategic grip of the situation. That there is no leadership.

The press asked the questions on everyone’s mind. Beth Rigby of Sky, not quite as circumscribed as the BBC’s Laura Kuenesburg, asked the ‘killers'. ‘How many NHS staff have been tested so far?’ and ‘What proportion of the total NHS staff does that represent?  Mr Sharma, pretending patrician unflappability, passed the buck directly to the hapless Dr Yvonne. Only 2,000 out of some half a million frontline NHS workers in England have been tested. She told us that the "intention" was for testing for frontline staff to increase from "thousands to hundreds of thousands within the coming weeks". But that is the problem. Your government is full of ‘aspirations’, ‘intentions’, ‘rallying calls’, ‘exhortations’ for ‘ramping up’ anything and everything. It is all puff James. All hot air. They tell us ‘Our capacity is…’ but fail to tell us why that capacity is not being used! And humiliation of humiliations, we were compared with Germany where they are testing 70,000 of their citizens a day. James, your government, if it ever had it, has lost the plot.

But imagine the panic at No.10 as they watched yesterday’s press conference. They knew it had bombed. Watching from his own self-isolation Dominic Cummings must have been spitting nails. Within moments he would have been shouting his usual expletives down the line, cursing Sharma and the incompetence of our health bureaucracies. ‘Get off your arse Boris, do something man!” Poor old Boris, locked away in the dream world of his own self-isolation, was kick-started into making his own emergency video to the nation. In his classic ‘Bunteresque’, breathless ‘wizard idea’ bombast, he came on saying that ‘We’ve got to get NHS staff tested’ because testing is the solution to "unlock the puzzle" of coronavirus – this after weeks of playing down the need for testing. It came as the UK had its biggest daily increase in deaths – 563 yesterday. The UK's overall death toll from the virus is now 2,352.

When even the Daily Mail is talking about the ‘testing shambles’, there must be something seriously wrong. Having a clear strategy is the key to clarity of presentation and clarity of communication. Without that clear strategy, you lose the most precious commodity of all. Trust. Trust was the main casualty of yesterday’s press conference, James. It was all so sad. 

OK, so everyone is ‘trying to fly the plane while we’re building it’ but at least the government should be open with us rather than playing the usual game of pretending to be in charge. We are all grown ups Boris. Just level with us all. Tell us you don’t really know what you’re doing but that you’re doing your very best. Only then might thinking people begin to take you seriously.

The first step to solving any problem is to identify the problem to be solved. Only comprehensive testing can give us that clarity. Today COVID 19 is spreading like a bush fire across our country and our doctors and nurses are going in blind, facing life or death as we speak. Much of this can be put down to absence of strategy, grip and firm leadership. We need ministers who understand ‘content’ not ministers who pretend to understand content.

“Test, test, test!” said the WHO over three weeks ago. How much longer before your party begins to deliver on that exhortation James?

Kind regards,

BH - Your Concerned Constituent