STARKEY’S HISTORY IN A DUSTBIN RIP Stupor Saturday

That is the shocking reality reported by the Office of National Statistics.

Starkly, it means at least 10,000 people might have died because the Government got it wrong.

If Ministers had ordered regular testing in care homes, who knows how many more might have survived.

All the necessary evidence was that the elderly and frail were most at risk.

But the policy was to go the other way – to order hospital patients with the disease out of their beds and into the homes.

Often without checks, but also, against its own initial advice, for patients known to be carrying the virus.

The aim was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed.

It was a policy paid for by loss of life, the gravest of errors in the Government’s catalogue of failure.

From this week, all care home residents over 65 will be tested at least once a month.

It’s a belated step in the right direction.

But, as Mark Adams, chief executive of one of the country’s biggest care charities, warns, it’s not enough.

More frequent testing by experienced nurses of residents and, critically, of agency staff visiting multiple homes is vital.

If the Government is serious it needs to include supported living premises too.

We’ve had one scandal, and there must be a reckoning for that.

We don’t want another.

WHAT with people roaming the streets looking for dusty artefacts of our shameful past to tear down and throw in the river you would think historian David Starkey would have had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

Alas, he did not. Popping up on some show or other to give his racist views an outing. A horrifying spectacle. I am not going to repeat his abhorrent views here. I am a fan of free speech, of course, but not of hate speech – and the distinction is important.

Starkey has increasingly made a career out of professional controversy, relying on outrage and offence to pay the bills. But after his latest rant he has been dropped by his publisher, resigned from his university, and now, hopefully, will fade into obscurity.

A relic is something that survived from an earlier time and is of historical interest. In Starkey’s case that is half right.