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TAt the end of his interview on the Today show, Matt Hancock was asked if Kate Bingham, head of the UK’s Vaccine Task Force, was right in handing over £ 670,000 in PR contracts to some of his old muckers. Of course, the Health Secretary insisted, because she had done a great job in obtaining possible vaccines. Then Matt doubled over. “I would do my best to thank Kate Bingham,” he said. The £ 670,000 in unnecessary media advisers was just a sideshow. A political distraction.
“She has given six months of her life to help the government,” he concluded with a flourish. It would be nice if everyone received so much gratitude from a government minister just for doing his job. But I guess you win something and lose something. And to be fair, not many people have gone out of their way to praise Hancock for the work he has done. Again, he has not always done so well.
Which brings us very well to Dido Harding, the chief executive of the misnamed NHS test and trace, given that most of the contracts have been outsourced to private companies. It’s fair to say that testing and tracking have failed even on the mediocre metrics that have been set under Harding’s leadership. And yet somehow it is untouchable.
If someone else had presided over this mess, they would have at least received one last warning, but Typhoid Dido continues serenely. It probably helps that, like Bingham, she’s married to a Conservative MP (there must be a lot of Conservative partners upset that she missed this path of promotion), but what counts most in her favor is that at least she’s doing it. Not at all. Call it charity work. And it’s hard to moan too much if someone is useless when they are paid nothing for being useless.
However, Typhoid Dido is still responsible for what is one of the most important strategies to control the spread of the coronavirus and today it was found giving evidence to select health and science committees on the progress so far. Or rather the lack of it. To his credit, Harding is at least an assayer. He has the appearance of someone willing to put in hours, even if they are not always put to obvious use.
The session started with some objections about the numbers. How much of the testing and tracing was done at the national level and how much at the local level? Asked Greg Clark. “We have a team of teams,” Harding replied, “and they are locally run but nationally supported.” At the very least, Typhoid Dido masters the nonsense of management. Clark tried to pressure her on the exact numbers. “I’m afraid I don’t have the exact numbers on hand,” he shrugged. This would become a constant refrain during the two hours he was before the committee.
Jeremy Hunt was the next to press Harding on the details. By their estimates, the test and trace should be in contact with 177,000 people a day, but were approaching the 5,000 mark. This was a success rate of only 3%. Typhoid Dido thought this was a bit unfair (people would be more inclined to isolate themselves if they were paid to do so) and that his organization was achieving a 10-20% success rate. Hunt pointed out that even this wasn’t much to brag about and could explain why Sage had described the test and trace as having a marginal effect in September.
For most of the rest of the time Typhoid, Dido seemed to do her best to contradict herself. Yes, they knew a second wave was coming, but it had been impossible to predict how bad it would be even though all the people and their dogs had foreseen the chaos when the schools and universities returned. He also tried to lower expectations for test and trace – “we are just a small part of the national effort” – before claiming that he had built an organization larger than Asda. The difference is that Asda delivers. If the supermarket had been run as a test and trace, it would have stopped working years ago.
Graham Stringer de Labor was one of the few who tried to point out the obvious flaws in Harding’s responses. If it took three days to get the test results, then the system was dead in the water. Even Harding’s claim that more than 60% of results were obtained in two days was no reason for bragging. Typhoid Dido was silent. “If you want to be effective, you have to provide some answers,” Stringer observed. Though that was more like Harding had ever remembered to ask the questions first. As expected, the meeting ended without anyone knowing about it. Was test and trace an inherently flawed and poorly designed system, or was Harding just a desperate CEO? Or both?
Hancock was in an unusually good mood at the Commons. But this is often the case when he reaches the camera without much to say, as there is not much that can go wrong. He vowed on his life that no Danish mink would infect a single Briton, before repeating the news about the vaccine that the prime minister and others had released the day before and ending by re-announcing that the rapid-result lateral flow test being testing in Liverpool was to be extended to another 67 regions.
Not even shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth could object to that and basically gave Door Matt the go-ahead. Like everyone else. After months of nothing but bad news, MPs from all sides could use something vaguely positive. No one knew if the vaccine would work or if lateral flow tests would be of much value, but just for today they were going to take a break from shit banging on the fan and allow themselves a moment of hope. However slender.
