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men the past few months, Westminster has slipped through the looking glass so much that there must be a severe shortage of psychedelics for sale on SW1. Forget, just for a moment, that the government now openly boasts of breaking international treaties in its attempt to become a failed state and start worrying about the smallest things. On Tuesday, the health secretary gave a statement to the House of Commons in which he completely forgot why he was there and only revealed what he had wanted to say about the extension of confinement restrictions through leaks to journalists more late that night.
Never mind. The next day, the prime minister gave a press conference in Downing Street in which he simply repeated all the things that Matt Hancock had said on Twitter the night before. So there was something completely predictable with Matt returning to the Commons on Thursday to repeat all the things he had wanted to say on Tuesday, but which were already in the public domain thanks to his own Twitter leaks and Boris Johnson’s press conference. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if # 10 did another press tomorrow to clarify what Hancock said today.
One of Matt’s glories, which makes him a nearby national treasure, is that he has no idea that it is the seriousness with which he now takes himself that makes him a laughingstock to the rest of us. There was a time early in the coronavirus pandemic when Hancock was a normal guy. Not the smartest minister on the block, even at such a low bar, but a man of a certain decency who was clearly committed to trying to do the right thing. But in recent months, the more mistakes he’s made about late shutdowns and junk test-and-trace systems, the more he’s come to believe in himself as the archetypal Nietzschean superman. A mini-Boris.
Hancock began by repeating all the things about the “rule of six” that he and Johnson had already told everyone several times and, for the most part, they listened to it with polite boredom. It was when it came to Operation Moonshot that there was open laughter from both sides of the chamber.
The idea that the government could get to a point where 10 million people can get a test result every day in 20 minutes is, even with Tigger’s natural enthusiasm, a patently absurd proposition. Like the idea that the government’s goal of 500,000 tests a day could be reached by the end of next month, given that the current test and trace system is performing worse week after week and people are encouraged to take 700 – Thousands round trips just to get poked a stick. Good thing Jacob Rees-Mogg wasn’t on camera to put the health secretary right on some details. There, again, the leader of the house is in self-isolation as one of his children has shown symptoms of Covid-19 and is still awaiting the results of his test five days later.
But for Matt, the laugh was an excessive humiliation. Breaking his script, he jumped into a strange spiel about how the whole world was against him. How I had just tried to do everything possible, how the wrong people had been showing up for testing even though it was government policy for anyone with any doubts as to whether they had coronavirus, including those who might be asymptomatic, to get tested. . Everyone who laughed at him was just naysayers. They had laughed when he had set previous goals and they would be laughing from the other side of his face when he did not meet his new goals either.
Shadow Health Minister Jon Ashworth kindly pointed out that Labor actually supported the new lockdown restrictions. It was just the rest of the doggybollox on how well the test and trace system was working and the game-changing Operation Moonshot that he had a problem with. How much did you think it was going to cost (the leaked documents suggested £ 100bn) and how likely was it to go into effect in the next few months? There was also little comfort to Tigger from his own banks when Jeremy Hunt, chairman of the health selection committee, asked how many of the technologies required for Operation Moonshot actually existed.
Matt now suffered a mini breakdown. His eyes became the circle of doom of a computer. He had spent at least £ 500 million on Operation Moonshot, he said defensively. Which left him another £ 99.5 billion, more than the entire defense budget, to find in the coming weeks. Piece of piss. Why were people so concerned about petty cash? And why so eager to dismiss what was clearly a game changer from the coronavirus when new technologies were coming into play every day? Even if they weren’t?
The session ended with several opposition MPs asking what powers the new Covid space commissioners would have. Would they be delivered with tasers and uniforms inspired by the pivotal 1970s sci-fi series Blake’s 7? Would they be allowed to break into houses and search for illegal relatives who would try to take refuge in closets for Christmas? Matt choked a bit, people should show a little more respect for the latest UK crime hunters, before saying that all of this was still a necessity.
What he didn’t say was that it was very clear that Hancock himself was not included in the list of what he needed to know and that he was simply making it up as he went along. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been the attorney general, Suella Braverman, who had to show his total ignorance of the law as he tried to explain to the EU that rogue states had the right to do whatever they wanted. Matt might have been embarrassed today, but nothing like the Braverman scale. It took futility to a whole new level. He probably wasn’t even capable of writing a legally binding resignation letter.
