It’s not Boris’s fault that UK caught COVID, Piers

IN olden times, reporters used to ask their subjects questions and duly wait for an answer.

If they thought the answer was unhelpful or unclear, they would press forward for an answer with more clarity. Not any more. Now – and this especially applies to broadcasters – interviewing a minister is not so much about asking them to explain something but merely just shouting at them instead.

I have little time for anyone inside this government of intellectual lightweights, but the incessant shrieking and jumping up and down by the likes of Piers Morgan and everyone at the BBC and Sky News is actually making me become more sympathetic.

Governments across the entire planet have been royally buggered by this pandemic.

Not a single one of them saw it coming.

Because that’s the trouble with highly contagious deadly viruses – they are never polite enough to give you advance notice of their doom-laden arrival.

But the way our telly interviewers act these days, you’d think Boris and his cabinet had spent their first couple of months in office early last year sat around a witch’s cauldron, stirring up the fatal COVID-19 brew.

I’m just waiting for Piers (above) to demand how many “legs of toad” Priti Patel piled in, or whether Matt Hancock goes home at night on his gnarled hag’s flying broom.

It’s all great fun for them, of course, because then they find their best “gotcha” moment, clip it, post it on Twitter, and then sit back with a semi-on awaiting social media applause.

The problem is that for the average punter at home, we learn NOTHING. For instance, you’ve probably read the same headlines as me about “record” numbers of virus cases.

What you won’t have learned – certainly not from watching GMB, Sky or the BBC – is how many of those cases actually result in death.

Which would, y’know, give us mere mortals a chance to weigh up the evidence ourselves and decide what course of behaviour is, or isn’t, acceptable.

People are going nuts about lockdowns, because they curtail our freedom and liberties.

But it’s not Boris’s fault that Britain got the coronavirus.

He and everyone else can only do what the rest of the world has done – which is to try to tackle it in any way possible.

Colossal mistakes have already been made, yes. No doubt there will be more to come.

But there is no magic wand against this virus, even if the new vaccines offer hope.

And demanding ministers appear on TV simply so some jumped-up hack in a tie can imperiously shout them down like a Victorian headmaster gets us absolutely nowhere.