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This time was personal. The spokesperson should be unbiased, but just hours before Matt Hancock answered an urgent question about the government’s handling of the coronavirus testing systems it had issued, Lindsay Hoyle tweeted that many of her constituents in Chorley were experiencing serious problems obtaining information. a test.
Like a warning shot through the health secretary’s arch, it could hardly have been more explicit. This time, Hancock was expected to come to the Commons with some real answers.
But like almost the entire cabinet these days, Hancock has become a law unto himself. He is a man so close to the edge that he is genuinely incapable of taking responsibility for anything that happens during his tenure, because to do so would inevitably lead to total collapse.
Thus, the reports that testing was not available in 10 of the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus were at best complete fiction and at worst just hype. A leaked email that private labs couldn’t handle capacity even when things were relatively quiet during August was simply alarming.
Instead, Hancock continued to insist that the UK testing system was the envy of the world, people actually traveling shorter distances to get tested than the week before, presumably because more people had sensibly decided that a one-way trip And the 700 mile drive to Aberdeen was not worth it. effort, and that he had always prioritized acute clinical care and social care.
What will have been a first for those who were expelled from hospitals and admitted to residences without evidence. And nursing homes still struggling to get tested.
Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth calmly and patiently tried to introduce Hancock to the reality of the situation. It wasn’t just troubled Labor MPs whose constituents didn’t have access to evidence, it was also Tory MPs who were trying to grapple with the consequences of the government’s lack of planning. Wait to hear what your own supporting judges had to say.
What made it even more tragic was its utter inevitability. Matt knew there would be additional demand in the fall, but he hadn’t done anything over the summer to prepare.
It was as if we lived in La-La Land. The government would introduce a target – Typhoid Dido testing, phone apps, and track and trace – that would invariably be overlooked. Culminating in the absurd £ 100bn “Operation Moonshot” that would test 10 million people a day.
But instead of apologizing and trying to fix the mess, Door Matt would allow Boris Johnson to go out with an even bigger and less feasible goal.
This had been going on for months, Ashworth said, and it was time to stop. The government’s new definition of “world beating” sent our tests for analysis in German labs because all the UK postgraduates who had been doing them had gone back to university.
Still, Matt refused to accept the evidence from MPs from all areas of the country. A record number of people were getting tested and those who were missing were extremely unlucky. It was also the fault of all those people who agreed and got tests that came back negative.
If they hadn’t wasted so much NHS time and resources on their imaginary symptoms, it would have meant that those who really needed the tests could have done it. In the Door Matt world, the only good test for coronavirus is a positive test.
Hancock ended up with a known Boris trope. Rather than complaining when the government made a mistake, Labor should congratulate it for not killing more people.
That, although it was only the beginning of Matt’s troubles. The chair of the health selection committee, Jeremy Hunt, noted that Hancock had promised him a week ago that the testing problems would be solved in 15 days. So he was in time to fulfill that promise within seven days.
An internal circuitry in the increasingly simple software of Hancock’s brain crashed and the health secretary found himself unknowingly telling the truth. “It could be a matter of weeks,” Matt said sadly. Any number of weeks like a week was just a human construct. Or possibly months, as Hancock went on to describe him as one of the world’s natural optimists. I guess it needs to be. The problem is that the country needs a minister who knows what he is doing.
The remainder of the session consisted mainly of MPs from both sides of the house trying to convince Matt to come out of his deceptive state. But all Hancock could offer when he was told about the many voters who had not been able to get tested was to refer to the 23 lucky ones who did. Municipal Democratic Rep. Munira Wilson noted that the only way Twickenham residents could get tested in the area was if they had to enter an Aberdeen zip code.
Would it be helpful for everyone to enter a zip code hundreds of miles from where they lived to get tested on their doorstep? “No,” Matt said irritably. The trip would do them good. If they came back alive, their symptoms couldn’t have been that bad.
Inevitably, some Conservative MPs were eager to seek clarification on the rule of six. Was it possible to introduce some exceptions? It was not. If Boris was not allowed to see all of his children at the same time, except in one grouse session, then the same rule had to apply to all. This was the first time. Normally, most of the rules don’t seem to apply to the prime minister.
It was time to get serious and Door Matt was with Priti Patel. The law was the law and it was the duty of a citizen to comply with anyone who broke it. In which case, there will be a large number of Conservative MPs in court for violating international law next week.
