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THérèse Coffey is normally a minister with a glass half full. Sent out to do the press round on Monday morning, she even managed to tell LBC’s Nick Ferrari that getting just 1,868 young people – out of a goal of 120,000 – starting positions in the government kickstarter scheme had “actually a great success”. I hate to think about what a massive failure would look like.
But even the Secretary for Work and Pensions ran into trouble when she took on Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Having first delivered the classic line that “the best way to fight this virus is to avoid getting it in the first place,” don’t tell me, Coffey made the elementary mistake of giving a direct answer to a direct question.
Other ministers have gone to great lengths to appear totally baffled and avoid saying why the UK has the highest coronavirus death rate in the world, but Coffey simply chimed in directly. It was because we had an aging population and an obesity crisis. So it was basically our fault and we were very clear about it. We lived too long and ate too much. If we had all died younger or half starved, then all of this could have been avoided. Humanity in its response was moving.
Morgan couldn’t believe his luck. So what you’re saying, he observed, is that we Brits were basically too old and too fat. Whereupon the minister lost it completely and accused Morgan of being an insult for repeating what he had just said. Only Coffey wouldn’t accept it. Apparently, there was no link between an aging population and aging people and a population that becomes obese and is fat. Or maybe she was simply irritated with herself for not mentioning a succession of government policy failures that had dramatically increased the death rate.
Whatever it was, Thérèse spent the next two minutes trying to distance herself from having brought up “old” and “fat.” Morgan was just trying to twist his words. What she had meant by aging was a major boom in the lives of older people. And by obese he had meant that under the Conservatives there was no longer anyone starving; it was just a coincidence that the poorest people tended to have the worst diets.
Realizing that what he hoped would be an easy interview had turned into a car accident, Coffey just flicked the kill switch on his Zoom call. It’s a way to end an interview, I guess. If not one that is generally found in the politician’s manual. Time’s up, we have to go, he said desperately before his screen turned off. “Wow,” Morgan commented. Wow, actually. It is not often that the television host is speechless. It had been eight months since Coffey had last been to GMB. Don’t hold your breath for another appearance in the next eight months.
How Coffey must wish they let her loose at number 10 sometimes, as Matt Hancock had a much more comfortable time in front of the Downing Street press conference. Largely because he had nothing new to say and because he could ignore any question that seemed remotely misleading. Rather, he, along with Deputy Medical Director Jenny Harries, and Susan Hopkins from Public Health England, made their way through the 45-minute session as if it were a cozy fireside chat.
Some stark reminders that the virus was far from being defeated and that people still needed to obey the rules, interspersed with the good news that more than 6.5 million vaccines had been administered and that the first evidence was that the vaccine was effective against the UK variant. .
This was the ideal concert for the secretary of health. It is usually sent when there is a crisis of some kind. But now we’re so used to being close enough to a crisis every day, that when things stay more or less the same and the death and hospitalization numbers are a little lower, it’s cause for celebration at number 10. Although the figures would have been considered completely scary if someone had mentioned them as a possibility even a month ago.
Disaster has become the new normal, so when things are no worse than they were the day before, it almost feels like you’ve turned a corner. And over the course of the pandemic, Door Matt has become quite adept at sounding reassuring but determined. Or maybe our expectations of him and other ministers have gotten so low that we now mistake mediocrity for comfort.
It also helps when no one asks tough questions. If Hancock had been asked the killer Coffey why the UK has the highest death figures globally, then he might have been in trouble. Instead, he was asked when lockdown restrictions might be lifted, though no one mentioned schools, and he was able to point out quite easily that it depended on when deaths, hospitalizations, variants, and vaccines lined up. It seems that the infection rate is no longer part of the equation.
He also hinted that he was in favor of quarantine hotels for all arrivals, not just those from areas with known variants, without having to specify how many beds they expected to need or why the government had taken so long to come up with this. idea. In fact, in the end, Door Matt even seemed to be enjoying the press conference. For the rest of us, it had been three-quarters of an hour of our lives that we would never get back. Still, there are days when even Hancock gets a balanced rest. And as Coffey will tell you, being boring has its advantages.
