No. 137 - 100,000 Tests by the End of April?
Dear James,
You have to feel sorry for any politician who puts their head above the parapet in this era of Coronavirus. Especially if that politician is ambitious, as without a doubt, Matt Hancock is. Yesterday, after the Sharma disaster of the day before, he appeared at the daily conference rostrum looking as if he had just been whipped and beaten by a gang of political hoodlums, which of course, he had. To be fair he was just recovering from a period of Covid 19 himself poor bloke, but nevertheless, he looked strained, his eyes were bulging as if confronting a herd of charging aliens and he seemed over anxious to please. This was a man who had to succeed no matter what. He was going for broke.
Politics at the top is a rough old game. Particularly if your party is desperately trying to please so many different constituencies from the anti-EU fanatics of the ERG through to the new recruits of the once Labour voting north. And on top of that he had to please a population hit by the biggest medical and economic crisis for many generations. Nevertheless, when in doubt, call upon a real genius. I am talking of course about Dominic Cummings. Dominic has little time for doubters and yesterday one could see the scorch marks and bruises upon the psychological person of poor old Mr Hancock. He looked as if he had just undergone several sessions of bastinado (the beating of the soles of the feet to extract compliance) followed by further torture, including a beating while hanging upside down from a ceiling hook. The final twist, no doubt was the threat of being hung, drawn and quartered should he fail at the rostrum.
Of course, Hancock is just the fall guy here. He is the lightning conductor who will go down in flames if he fails but the guy whom he is protecting is, of course, Boris himself and, by definition, his senior adviser Mr Cummings. Boris and Cummings have both been in isolation recently but soon we will be seeing Boris again on the rostrum. Or will we? Apparently he is being detained further because his ‘mild symptoms’ have persisted. Another reason of course could be that he is relieved to be sheltered from the questions. They are getting too technical, too near the bone and the risk is too great for our straw Churchill to be exposed to more public humiliation? I hope I am wrong but suspect otherwise.
Yesterday it was Hancock’s role to manage our expectations in an upward direction. He gambled. He put a number to it.100,000 tests per day by the end of this month although at the moment we are only achieving 10,000 per day. To achieve this, the government has belatedly decided to use a lot of smaller laboratories rather than just the Public Health England labs. The 100,000 applies just to the swab tests – the ones that will show you whether you have the virus now. The antigen test, the test that tells you if you have the anti-bodies i.e that you had the disease in the past, has so far failed to materialise despite several bold attempts by companies to win that particular race. However to add credence to yesterday’s presentation Mr Hancock added a bonus of ‘five pillars’. And to sweeten the pill even further he allowed secondary questions from the journalists and gave the session all the time it needed instead of the normal regimented time slots. Here was a guy who really wanted to communicate.
Matt Hancock will live or die on the promises he made yesterday. If he fails to deliver, whatever public confidence in him and the government exists, will evaporate. The government has been persistently behind the curve on this pandemic. Community testing was never envisaged despite warnings from the WHO and, according to the ‘Guardian’, the earliest UK death occurred on February 28th, a week earlier than previously admitted. In a pandemic every day and hour counts. And it counts in the darkest of all numbers. The number of deaths.
James, I sincerely hope that Mr Hancock succeeds in achieving his 100,000 tests by the end of April. I’m afraid however, that yesterday’s presentation smacked of something straight out of Mr Cummings’s playbook. Tell them what they want to hear and then make your excuses later. It is, after all, the story of Brexit writ large. Impossible messages on the sides of a bus and then, much later, just a shrug when challenged.
Who cares about the truth when untruth can win you power? How about that as the slogan for the New Tory Party James? What do you think?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent