Boris bunglers haven’t a clue!
IT’S been just over a week since Matt Hancock boasted we’d soon be testing 10 million people a day. Fast forward to THIS week and now he’s telling us tests will have to be rationed. So is he actually stupid? Does he not know what’s going on in his own department? Or has he totally lost control of it? Because that’s what it’s looking like. Three months ago Hancock told us we were going to have a world- beating test- and- trace system that would be the key to everything – getting us out of lockdown and back to work.
Today we’re an international laughing stock testing a mere 150,000 a day with a 185,000 backlog and 250,000 awaiting tests. Scores of schools are already in semi- lockdown and huge numbers of doctors, nurses and care home workers can’t go to work because they can’t get a test. And the much trumpeted £ 11million Test and Trace App we were told would be a game- changer has also been dumped because it didn’t work.
All this from a government that farcically told us: “The country is extremely well prepared to cope.”
Clearly, we’re not. Then there’s Baroness Dido Harding – nope I’d never heard of her either until Thursday but apparently, she was appointed head of the Test and Tracing in May. She hadn’t been seen until yesterday when she popped out of her hidey hole to tell us, “No one saw the demand for tests coming.” Really? Every day the Government’s been scaring the hell out of us about a second wave and she didn’t think that would translate into a rise in demand for tests? For that alone she should be sacked. She then went on to blame SAGE for getting its predictions wrong and said testing capacity had been built on its recommendations. I’m sorry but she knew schools were going back in September, she knows the Government has been screaming for people to get back to work – you don’t need a posse of scientists to tell you we’d need more tests.
This was a totally avoidable problem because the Government knew precisely what was coming but just like the first time round, they’ve done nothing to properly prepare for it. This week infections crept back up to 4,000 a day and we’ve been slammed back into shackles with the Rule of Six. So why haven’t we been stockpiling these tests? Did Hancock and Co learn nothing from the PPE fiasco?
Boris told the nation this week: “We’ve failed,” over the testing – well thanks for stating the bleedin’ obvious. We know you have. We know that 46 of the country’s 49 Covid hotspots have no tests to offer which is shameful because in the last six months this Government has repeatedly told us: if in doubt get a test. We did what we were told – and the system has collapsed.
I’ve always believed this little country of ours could handle itself in a crisis. And the fact is the British people have more than done their bit but we’ve been appallingly let down by second rate, not very clever people who couldn’t organise a youknow- what in a brewery. It’s been one cock- up after another. The policy seems to be: look at what other countries successfully containing the virus are doing – and then do the opposite. The terrifying thing is we don’t have much time to get a grip on this before the second wave explodes. I pray politicians and those Whitehall mandarins currently putting the British people at risk get their shambolic act together before Covid roars back to claim even more lives.
LOVED all the Happy Birthday Harry photos posted on social media by the Royal Family this week. There were laughing pics of Harry having fun and games with Wills and “big sister” Kate, photos of him laughing with the Queen. Pics of him in stitches with Dad, Charles. It’s worth noting that all the photos were taken before he met Megan – a reminder, perhaps, that life was sweeter, simpler, and a whole lot more fun before he hooked up with the Hollywood dame!
THE BBC says it can’t afford to give the over- 75s free TV licences but apparently it CAN afford to give presenters like Zoe Ball a £ 1million- a- year pay rise despite her radio show haemorrhaging a million listeners – that’s a quid for every one lost.
So, Ms Ball, who was already paid more than the Prime Minister, gets rewarded for failure and is now the highest paid presenter at the BBC. Yet hard- up pensioners ( who are THE most loyal of all BBC viewers) have to find £ 157.50 for their TV licence.
This is hypocrisy writ large. After vowing to cut its bloated overpaid middle management the BBC now has more staff than ever and its argument that top- paid presenters would be snapped up by the commercial stations if they didn’t pay them the big bucks is tosh. Because which TV company would reward the terminally irritating Zoe Ball with a £ 1million pay rise for failing? It’s time this Government banned the licence fee altogether.
Let the BBC fend for itself then it can pay its presenters what it wants.
But I’m betting when they – not the taxpayer – are stumping up their own cash for the Monopoly style salaries they’ll be no more!
WHEN Phil Schofield made a big song and dance about outing himself on national TV, he said he’d done it because living a double life had been “consuming” him for years. But seven months on there’s little sign of that new life he tearfully told us he so desperately wanted. Instead he’s converting a garage at the family home into a luxury flat for himself.
Which seems mighty selfish to me. Because having “come out” he can date who he likes. But how hard will it be for his wife Steph to carve out a new life out for herself with her old man living at the bottom of the garden?
Schofield wants the best of both worlds – the comfort and support of the woman he knows loves him and is on tap whenever he needs her AND the freedom to date men. If outing himself on This Morning was so he could have a new life – why is he still clinging so tightly to the old one?