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For the second time in six days, Grants Shapps was asked to face the house at the daily Downing Street press conference. Let that thought sink for a moment. Since Shapps is a man clearly out of his depth in a puddle, there can only be four explanations for this.
Relatively competent ministers, such as Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock, have said that they will work to rule from now on and limit their appearances. Or Boris Johnson knows that there are so many rags in the cabinet. Where is Priti? – That Shapps is the best he has.
Or Grant has managed to convince Boris that they are actually two separate people; that his Michael Green alter ego is a real person. Or, and this is most likely, the government has admitted defeat and has chosen to turn the briefing into a Dadaist work of art. The coronavirus deconstructed through interpretive dance.
Not that Shapps is not a trier. His natural level is as a vendor who whips dodgy cleaning gadgets into the graveyard slot of an online shopping channel. But for press conferences, he’s struggled to improve his game by posing as Chris Tarrant in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Stuck smile, boundless enthusiasm and a big round of applause for Emma de Walsall, who is going home tonight with a prize of £ 2,000.
Shapps started with the difficult terms and conditions of the current coronavirus competition. Some 126,064 tests have been completed in the last 24 hours. Granted, some of them were in the same people and many of them were kits that had been mailed, but it was still a new record for the show, so everyone could show their appreciation.
The transportation secretary then mentioned the daily death toll. This was very sad, he said. He didn’t seem particularly sad, though. Mainly because difficult and negative emotions are not in your repertoire. I didn’t want the audience to be sad. So how about another big thank you to the UK that has the highest death rates in Europe? Just think of the business revenue they could generate if there were any companies left with extra money to spend on advertising.
After a brief recap of the new government messaging service (Stay Alert because the Stay at Home and Go Back to Work guidelines were completely confusing), Shapps got sucked into the game properly. He didn’t want anyone to go home unhappy, so how about thinking about all the happy things about the pandemic? Since no one used the trains, Network Rail had had plenty of time to upgrade the infrastructure and was now well ahead on some projects. And with far fewer people using their cars, the A14’s road improvements were completed seven months earlier. Felix de Felixstowe, you will go home with £ 16,000.
Who Wants to be a Billionaire? Shapps did it. That’s why he was able to announce a special cash bonus for roads and rails, with £ 1.7 billion dedicated just to filling potholes. In the back of the studio, the show’s producers had a minor heart attack. No one had told them that Chris / Grant was going to start spending their money this way. Within minutes, the transportation department had to issue a clarification. The minister had let himself go a bit. The £ 2 billion was not really new money. He was simply re-announcing the money that had already been promised. Still, no one would mind when the show replayed on ITV3.
Initial questions from the public turned out to be unusually complicated. Helen wanted to know if the universities would return in September and if her son should get a £ 9k loan for an education he was not going to get. Shapps smiled and sympathized. That is a question you would like to answer, since you also had a son in college. Maybe I could call a friend. As expected, Gavin Williamson did not answer his call.
Shapps also had to ask the audience when asked about nursing home deaths, as he had no idea what the answer was. Using Boris as your role model when preparing for a press conference may not be a good idea. “Um in Europe, the nursing home death rate is 50%,” he said cheerfully. “But in the UK it was only 25%.” So if older people did their part by dying a little faster, we would soon be as good as Italians and Spaniards. You can’t have Johnny Foreigner outdoing mortality.
The rest of the presser was just as dim. Shapps is a model of equal opportunity, knowing nothing about nothing. He didn’t know about the antibody tests, but was satisfied that it was a positive question. He likes positivity. He had no idea how many elective operations had been canceled, but since he had exhausted all of his lifelines, could you say that he hoped there weren’t really that many?
He also didn’t know what to do to rescue Transport for London. Shapps is as baffled as Boris because asking people to return to work and social distancing are often mutually exclusive hobbies. “I’m going to answer this question head-on,” he said confidently. Head-on as to avoid it entirely. When it came to the big question about camping and caravan vacation, Shapps decided to save what he had gotten. I would go home with 33,614. Although the actual number was probably closer to 50,000. Too bad the Covid-19 was dead and not pounds sterling.
