During the December 2019 General Election campaign, just as during the EU referendum campaign, Johnson was exposed as a liar and blunderer.  Nevertheless, they voted for him. Similarly, millions of Americans voted for an evil clown to be their President.

 

After 10 years of needless austerity, massive cuts, out-sourcing and privatisation, the NHS was woefully unprepared for Covid-19, although there were plentiful warnings that another highly contagious flu-like pandemic was bound to come.

“We are following the science”, ministers claimed at their daily press conferences.

 

This is bullshit. Science is never monolithic. They were choosing the bits of science that suited them and ignoring the rest.

The earliest warnings coming from China at the end of 2019 and in early 2020 were all ignored.

We were being peddled a load of English exceptionalist guff: most people will only get a mild disease; our stiff upper lips will see us through; we are fully prepared;  just wash your hands. We are the people of the British Empire.

The direst warnings coming from SAGE (the principal scientific advisory committee) were ignored.

By 3rd March, epidemiologists were advising against hand-shaking and similar close contact. But iron man Boris appeared on a morning TV show, shaking hands with everybody in the studio.

Going down with it and re-emerging as the battling hero could not have been a more fortuitous bit of PR for him.

.

On 9th March he first chaired a COBRA meeting.

10th to 13th March, 250,000 of race-goers from all over the world attended the Cheltenham Festival,  leaving that part of the country as a Covid hot-spot.

On 11th March, Budget Day, the nation saw on TV a packed House of Commons, all sharing one another’s infections.

On the same day, thousands of Spanish fans flocked to Liverpool for the Atletico-Madrid versus Liverpool match. Liverpool lost in more ways than one. They failed to win the cup but contracted hundreds of cases of Covid.

By then, Greece had closed its borders, intent on protecting the people and their battered health service from the pandemic.

Made of sterner stuff, we left our borders open.  During that week, I heard an interview on BBC Radio 4, with a man who had just flown into Heathrow from Islamabad with hundreds of other travelers from all parts of the globe.  There were no checks at either airport. I wrote to my MP, Bob Neill, asking whether Grant Shapps was aware of the pandemic.

The government abandoned the idea of large-scale testing and tracing, although it was proving very successful in  South Korea, pinning its hopes, instead, on herd immunity. In other words, let the contagion run free, infecting lots of people, many dying, but survivors supposedly having immunity.

Did Johnson’s electorate know they were merely a herd? Did they know that he was prepared to see many thousands of them die? There was no excuse for ignorance. They watch enough tele.

Eventually the penny dropped and we got lockdown. The scientific advice is that, if the lockdown had started one week earlier, 40,000 lives could have been saved.

The Dominic Cummings affair was a vivid illustration of Johnson’s arrogance and his contempt for the British people.

We have suffered more Covid deaths than almost any other country in the world.

Still the government goes on boasting how wonderful they are. There is totally inadequate provision for testing and their much-vaunted testing-and-tracing scheme is a joke.  This has been  another  stark example of ministerial inefficiency. Offers to augment Covid testing provision came in from Oxford University and the Crick Institute, among others and simply disappeared into a black hole. Test samples sent off to the USA  for analysis might as well have been sent to Disney World.

Ministers  told a string of lies about a PPE supply coming from Turkey and when it eventually turned up, it was useless. But still the lying and exaggeration goes on. While the rest of the human race considers a pair of surgical gloves to be one usable item of PPE, Matt Hancock counts it as two.

In order to free hospital beds for Covid patients, elderly people were moved out to care homes without even being tested.  That thousands of care home residents and carers subsequently died for lack of testing and lack of PPE is probably the biggest indictment of this callous, careless,  perfidious government.

Justice should see it dumped. At the height of the crisis,  Labour was pursuing a bipartisan policy.  That  has been amended and now must be halted.  There must  be a full inquiry into the government’s slipshod handling of the pandemic. It has cost over 40,000 lives. Lessons must be learned before the next such crisis. Covid-19 is not vanquished yet and there are more viruses waiting in the wings.

If you cannot make something work, reorganise it and re-name it. The NHS Public Health England (PHE) Coronavirus Testing Advisory Centre (CTAC) has been newly named Test and Trace, with the acronym TAT. How ironic. How befitting.