Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Lest we forget, Tory twists and U-turns on our road to freedom
JIM Royle had a saying about Chris Evans when he was never off the television.
“He’s everywhere, him. Like dung in a field.”
A phrase that comes to mind whenever I switch on the telly these days to be greeted by Matt Hancock’s face. The face of an overpromoted Scout leader.
He’s been on the box most days this week, when, drawing on a show his namesake Nick used to present, his political career should have been kicked into Room 101.
How can the Health Secretary still be a lecturing presence in our front rooms when the UK’S medical regulator is investigating a £30million NHS contract he handed to his former pub landlord to make medical supplies he had no experience of making?
How is he allowed to talk down to us when a High Court judge ruled he broke the law by failing to publish details of PPE contracts on time like the £252million one he awarded to a
Mauritius hedge fund? Even worse, instead of offering his resignation, he offers the brazen defence that Britain didn’t run out of PPE in the first wave of the pandemic so the nation should be thanking him for his sterling work. That’s despite the countless horror tales of frontline doctors wearing out-of-date masks and nurses placing bin bags on their heads, while contracts were being fast-tracked, unchecked, to Tory cronies with no experience.
Forget all that, says Hancock, and just be grateful that your natural-born rulers were in power when this pandemic struck.
Thank the Lord for the five COBRA meetings Boris Johnson missed, the desire for herd immunity, kicking infected hospital patients back into care homes, abandoning test and trace, authorising eat out to spread out your germs, telling scientists who called for an autumn lockdown to sod off, and sacrificing thousands of lives by bowing to backbench pressure to try to save
Christmas. The Tory response to this national crisis was as criminal as the austerity policies they implemented to starve the NHS of funds, which left it struggling to fight the pandemic.
Hence the worst per capita death figures of any major nation.
When Boris Johnson called his route out of lockdown the One Way Road to Freedom I hoped he was referencing Nelson Mandela and admitting he deserved 27 years in jail.
Unsurprisingly, it was a devious, long-game Tory ploy. They know any inquiry into their failings will come years down the line, especially if they are still in power.
So their hope is by the next election voters will have forgotten about the negligence and cronyism and only remember the vaccine rollout and the cautious way our wise and caring leader took the country out of lockdown.
They want us to blur the PPE and testing scandals with the vaccination success (which is down to scientists and the NHS) and, like workhouse wretches handed a bowl of gruel, be grateful to them, our masters.
Sadly, they are being aided by a Labour leader who is failing to lay a glove on them, who even thinks Hancock’s law-breaking should go uncensured. That has to change.
To adapt the kind of military phrase the Tories are fond of stealing: At the going down of the death toll, we will remember them.
Hancock wants us to be grateful they were in charge when Covid hit