I’ll give this celebration a miss, thanks

Health secretary Matt Hancock says you should not believe a word of this column. If I’m to be completely accurate – which as a journalist Mr Hancock says I must surely not be – he actually said not to believe what’s written in newspapers. He didn’t single out this column per se but, hey, what’s a few minor inaccuracies between pals? To be fair, most of the time it takes to write these is spent clumsily trying to marry parody and reality with the ultimate goal of confusing the reader into no longer being sure what’s real.

Now the Government does that for me. No sooner had Mr Hancock, who we should remember is the person in charge of the nation’s health, dismissed the print media for showing him up had he told veteran journalist Andrew Marr that 226,000 people were tested for Covid19 on Saturday. But the Department of Health had no idea from where he’d plucked that figure or even if it was one they still calculated. The DOH is, of course, headed up by Mr Hancock. Can you imagine any newspaper publicly distancing itself from the views of its editor? Meanwhile, Jacob Rees-mogg, who is also leader of the House of Commons, told people to stop “endlessly carping” about testing, which has descended past fiasco, and instead celebrate the Government’s achievements – I’ve been to some pretty lame parties in my time but I’ve a feeling that celebration would be almost pointlessly short. And above both of them is the actual Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who told the public ‘Operation Moonshot’ will deliver millions of extra tests a day before failing to “recognise” the Government’s own figure just days later. Is it any wonder, then, that crowds of - admittedly pretty odd looking - people descended on the capital for the ‘battle against lockdown’? I’m not justifying any of that but given the lack of anything remotely resembling competent leadership, is any of it really surprising?

Most of the time it takes to write these columns is spent clumsily trying to marry parody and reality... now the government does that for me