No.149 – Where are They All?
Dear James,
Where are they all? Unprecedented times, require unprecedented leadership but with Covid-19, all we have is an unprecedented parade of sub-standard, Tory ministers tramping across our tv screens like characters in search of an ultimate tragedy. Ultimate tragedy? Yes. But unprecedented leadership? You must be kidding!
So who is in charge? Where is he or she? A long time ago we were promised a cabinet of all the talents. Then came Boris's night of the long knives when the real talent was stripped from the cabinet and replaced by a team of ‘also-rans’. Today, faced by the coronavirus, it is the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, who is pushed onto centre stage to face the crisis and the public alone. Moment by moment, we watch him enduring the long, painful process of self-destruction. He lives on day by day, promise by promise, failure by failure while the rest of the cabinet is deathly silent. His latest utterance that “Right from the start we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes … we’ve made sure care homes have the resources they need.” is clearly a blatant lie. Occasionally the smooth tongued Mr Raab, with the unflappable bedside manner of Dr. Death, puts his head around the tombstone to reassure his patients that all is well. But where are the rest? Where is Mr Gove, Mrs Patel, Mrs Truss? Well, Gove’s been removed for some sort of psychic rehabilitation and Mrs Patel seems to be skulking in some backroom cupboard after her recent appalling fights with the civil service. As for Mrs Truss, she’s been in America at the head of a delegation negotiating a trade deal with the Trump administration. In their absence we have been rewarded with the barely credible new boys, Mr Sharma, Mr Eustace, Gavin Williamson and, lastly, Mr Schapps, the irrepressible, undeflatable cheerleader of cheerleaders. At least, he can be relied on to put sunshine into the gravest of situations. And this situation is grave indeed.
Even the one shining light of the cabinet is staying in the shadows. Mr Sunak, the new Chancellor, is the one point of intelligence and understanding in the government but he is keeping his powder dry ahead of the Great Reckoning and, of course, his elevation to the top job when Boris finally succumbs and retires to be ‘the best daddy in the whole wide world ’ to little Wilf.
But the biggest absentees of all are Boris himself and Dominic Cummings, he of the call to wierdos, the three line shibboleths, and the determination to destroy everything to allow reform to take place. On Saturday, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, talking about last Sunday’s Boris fiasco said, “Far from a planned, safety led approach, this looked like another exercise in Cumming’s chaos theory.” But the chaos continues. Secrecy, paranoia and the stench of a fermenting blame culture are already abroad. Yesterday the blame game started in earnest when the government put the decision to quit the ‘test, check and trace’ decision at the beginning of March at the door of ‘the scientific advice’. Last week, the government suddenly dropped its daily comparison of global comparisons of deaths because of, guess what? We were winning by a mile! And again, yesterday you announced the adding of the loss of taste and smell to the list of notifiable covid-19 markers, long after it has been included by other governments around the world. Prof Tim Spector has warned that Britain’s failure to list all 14 primary symptoms of the virus means that between 50 and 70,000 people with Covid-19 have been wrongly told not to self-isolate. Today the ONS (Office of National Statistics) reports that total excess deaths in the UK reached almost 55,000 by May 1st. This appalling figure confirms the UK as top of the league of Covid-19 deaths in Europe.
Is it any wonder then that your leaders are missing in action, James? Remember Cumming’s idea to be the spider in the middle of the web? Well there is no spider and there is no web. Instead there is a great big black hole in the middle of Downing Street which can be summed up in the latest polling figures. A +42 point net approval rating for Boris’s handling of the virus in March has plunged to -3. YouGov’s +51 net approval rating for Boris on March 27th has plummeted to -2.
There is however, some good news, James. You may or may not be relieved to know that Sir Keir Starmer’s personal approval rating overtook Johnson’s last week. Dare I suggest that the nation might have, at last, found its leader in waiting?
Kind regards,
BH – Your Concerned Constituent