Boris slams into the glass again

I REMEMBER some time ago, in a youth hostel dormitory, watching a bluebottle fly attempting to navigate through a sealed skylight window, with absolutely zero success.

Presumably punch drunk, the bulbous creature hurled itself at the window time and time again, and got the exact same results until eventually it gave up and went and did something else.

A quick Google tells me their top speed is about eight miles per hour, and I’m fairly sure most people would only need to run at a window once to work out it isn’t a fun or productive endeavour.

Incidentally, the same website also tells me that each fly can lay as many as 600 eggs. Speaking of prodigious numbers of offspring, Boris Johnson’s latest windowslamming routine has been particularly predictable. By the time the fly had flown at the window 99 times, I was fairly sure it was going to do it a 100th time.

When Boris said on Sunday there was “no doubt in my mind that schools are safe” you could be 100 percent certain he was going to have to close them.

Leading a country through a pandemic is not an enviable task, and throughout the last nine months there has been no correct way of doing things.

But, as we Britons have found out, there are an awful lot of bad ways to do things.

I know we’ve all become armchair virologists, but you really didn’t need to be Jonathan Van Tam to work out that schools were going to have to close.

So why on Earth go out one day before the announcement and declare categorically that they were safe, and allow them to open for one day before closing them? That’s next-level ineptitude.

Again and again, with the mindnumbing stupidity of a bluebottle, this Government has backed itself into corners completely avoidably, and then refused to learn the lessons.

Cummings’ eye test, the A-level fiasco, the PPE from Tory donors scandal, the £22 billion “worldbeating” track and trace system – the list goes on.

In July, the upturned-toiletbrush-in-chief said Britain would return to normal by Christmas. Wildly off the mark. For no reason at all, he then said just before Christmas that everything would normal by Easter. Not a chance.

People can take being given bad news. What people don’t like is being promised the Earth when it’s patently obvious nothing of the sort can be delivered.

When the Government has acted it’s been lethally late, when it’s made promises they’ve been shattered, and when they’ve set targets they’ve whistled by.

The history books are unlikely to look kindly on this Government’s handling of the coronavirus.