No. 169 - Moonshot or Moonshine? Boris is at it Again!
Dear James,
Your leader is at it again. Last Wednesday he launched ‘Operation Moonshot’, a £100bn plan for mass coronavirus testing. Ten million people would be tested each day and countless millions of a new type of test, saliva based rather than swab based, ‘simple, quick and scalable’ and delivering ’results within 90 minutes’ would be available across the nation by next Spring. Now, while not wishing to be a Cassandra, haven’t we heard all this before? Way back when, I remember his plans for a vast international airport on the Maplin Sands in Essex. It never happened. His dreams of a ‘Global Britain’ or a rejuvenated ‘Anglo-sphere’ remain highly speculative to say the least. The twenty mile bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland collapsed into a munitions dump in the Irish Sea and ‘A World Beating Test and Trace System by Summer’ – well don’t let’s go there. Some may call Boris ‘visionary’ but there is a vast difference between vision and pragmatic possibility. Politics used to be called the art of the possible. Today it seems to have become the graffitti of the impossible. Boris is good at dreaming but lousy about almost everything else. Just like Trump in the USA with his dreams of a ‘border wall’ and much else, I fear that Boris’s ‘Moonshot’ operation is just another to add to the lists in his fantasy world. His moon shot is more likely, moonshine.
Even as he launched this latest fantasy, the medical experts standing next to him at his podium, expressed doubts. The government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said the new technology needed careful testing and that it would be "completely wrong to assume this is a slam dunk". Boris looked down, his vision scrambling over the papers in front of him. It was like two different speakers from two different planets. One focussed on Planet Reality and the other on some distant satellite planet lost on a voyage into deep space. Meanwhile, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, said it was unclear how Operation Moonshot would work given the “huge problems” currently seen with lab capacity. He added that the idea of opening up society based on people testing negative for the virus should be "approached with caution" because of the high rate of "false negatives" and the potential to miss those who are incubating the virus.
But that is Boris’s way. Ignore the naysayers or the doomsters and gloomsters under which appellation he consigns the rest of thinking, evidence based humanity. The trouble is most people are tired of the same old nonsense. There are some in his ‘base’ who still trust his blundering certainties and promiscuous turn of phrase but each time that he utters another hyperbolic claim a little bit crumbles from his ample profile. Double down on each fib you tell. Ignore the facts. Ignore the careful, criticisms of Sir Kier Starmer - at each PMQs our Prime Minister rarely answers a question and has to resort to sneering and name calling. The rule of law itself seems to have been thrown out and most right minded people see him for what he is. A mountebank. A Fraud. Even Tories of old now wince at his platitudes and lack of respect for the values which were once the bedrock of his party. The Tory Party of new is akin to the Republican party of new in the US. They are too embarrassing for their traditional supporters and yet only the very few MPs of principle are prepared to stand up and risk their seats.
Unfortunately you, James, are not amongst this courageous band. You are either keeping your powder dry or are a fully paid up member of the Boris fan club. I think you and I know which it is. You have moved so far from the mainstream public James, that you’ll find it hard to find your way back!
Kind regards,
BH – Your Concerned Constituent