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AAt the Downing Street press conference on Wednesday night, the prime minister had assured the nation that Matt Hancock would give an update on the government’s plan for hotel quarantine the next day. Only, come Thursday, it turned out that there was still no plan. Or none that the health secretary would like to share with the rest of us. Boris Johnson had made a mistake (at least no one could accuse him of being inconsistent) and had confused the illusion with government policy. So the hotel plan that the government had been talking about as if it existed for the past 10 days had been shelved until at least next week.
But Westminster abhors a vacuum, so instead of Hancock we had to settle for a coronavirus update from Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi. It’s safe to say that this was a statement that hardly anyone was looking forward to. Even in these Covid times, I’ve never seen the Commons so empty. Zahawi was literally the only deputy present at the government banks; by comparison, the opposition seats were filled with just three MPs, one of whom was shadow public health minister Alex Norris. We can’t be too far from the moment when a full session is done remotely.
Not that Zahawi seemed overly upset by the absence of a live audience. Partly because he was as aware as anyone that he didn’t really have much to say, but mostly because he was having too much fun. It’s fair to say that the vaccine minister is living his best life. When Zahawi was first appointed to his new job, he probably feared the worst: that he would stumble from one part of crisis management to the next, forced to come up with increasingly outlandish reasons why the government had not met its objectives. vaccination.
Instead, the minister is on a wave of goodwill and gets credit for something over which he has had little control. It was Kate Bingham’s working group that was in charge of identifying and purchasing the different vaccines, and it has been the NHS, with the help of the military, pharmacies and volunteers, that has been in charge of managing the vaccination program. Nothing has been outsourced to Serco to screw things up, so all Zahawi has to do each day is wait for the vaccine supply to remain more or less stable and watch as the number of people vaccinated surpasses the mark of the 10 million. For the moment, at least, he’s the minister with the golden touch.
To his credit, Zahawi seems to acknowledge his good luck. There are countless MPs deluded enough to imagine that the success of the initial launch was all their work, but the minister was happy to share the love while reciting the statistics (90% of those over 75 vaccinated, etc.) that were already public. knowledge. This was a tremendous joint effort, he said, but we must not be complacent. Infection levels were still extremely high and although I would continue to implement the program as quickly as possible, we would not be totally sure until everyone was immunized. He would like to teach the world to sing.
Norris was quick to read his reply, as though aware of the futility of his situation. In almost every measure, the government, either by luck or by trial, finally did something right in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and all it could really do was offer its support and congratulations, something rare for a minister in the shadow in Westminster. He kindly asked if the key workers could move up the hierarchy, but seemed more than satisfied with Zahawi’s answer that the levels had been decided by the joint vaccination and immunization committee, again nothing to do with him, to target 99 % of the country with the highest risk of death. It is a difficult statistic to dispute.
And that was the hardest thing things got for Zahawi. He was able to tell Jeremy Hunt, via video link, and Labor’s Kerry McCarthy, that the vaccine would be effective against most of the known variants and that teams of scientists were working 24 hours a day to combat different mutations. Some MPs just wanted to make sure their districts weren’t left behind in the grand triumphal display (it was enough for Zahawi to bestow his blessing) and even the most complicated lockdown skeptics of the Covid Recovery Group seemed unwilling to make waves and were content with the assurance that things would return to normal as soon as possible.
Hancock is never so lightly taken. But then, the health secretary does not have the aura of the chosen one. This is Zahawi’s moment. Some men are born lucky, others achieve luck, and still others are lucky. What could have been a poisoned chalice has turned out to be the highlight of his career to date and he seems determined to enjoy every second while it lasts. And why not? Things are unlikely to get much better.
