Moonshot to pieces

Covid triggers collapse of trust in government bereft of grown-ups

STORY of the week: a bloke sits down to have his dinner in France, tries to kill a fly that is bothering him and ends up blowing up his house.

Terrible really. No laughing matter. But what we can learn from the French Frank Spencer is that trying to solve a problem can explode in your face.

Over here, the problem buzzing around us at the moment is the testing system. It’s not working. We’re low on tests and people are being sent all over the country to see if they are OK.

According to the app, for example, my nearest testing centre is an oil rig just off Shetland.

At PMQS this week, Mr Starmer used the softest language possible to talk to the increasingly erratic Prime Minister about the problem, sounding like he was involved in one of those horrible early evening passive-aggressive exchanges that come up from time to time. You know? Where one of you has forgotten to take the bins out.

“Nobody is attacking here,” said Mr Starmer gently, and “I just want this fixed,” and “We do not need to have an argument”.

But Mr Johnson can’t answer properly because there are no proper answers. Mr Starmer said the Government was “lacking even basic incompetence”. He had to correct that, for some reason. But I think it’s pretty accurate.

The desperate flailing carried on as Matt Hancock dredged ed up Operation Moonshot. Under er this scheme, rather than sort out ut the mess we are in now, he pledged dged millions of tests a day at some point in the future. Various rious scientists and health professionsionals quietly explained how it t wouldn’t work. But Mr

Hancock will not be deterred. Who needs experts?

This is a government modelled on Trotter’s Independent Traders.

Testing? Don’t worry about that Rodney my old son, this time next year we’ll have millions of them.

The test and trace app is another example: first mentioned in April now due by the end of the month.

I had conversations early in the crisis with MPS worried that the way it was handled would call into question the principle of trust in government.

And it’s happening. People are beginning to lose faith.

This week has not helped. Both Sir John Major and former PM Theresa May laid into Mr Johnson.

Scary

Not over Covid, but the fact that he is in the process of reneging on the Brexit deal he signed in a move that will damage our standing in the world.

There’s nothing to worry about here, apparently. According to the Government it just breaks international law “a little bit”. So that’s fine. Although the head of their legal department immediately quit.

What are we if we can’t be taken at our word? It’s not a good look globally or domestically.

Mrs May was spot on when she said: “If we lose our reputation for honouring the promises we make, we will have lost something beyond price that may never be b regained.”

Spot Sp on, that. I never thought it would wo get so bad that I longed for h her return. But I do.

This Th is a scary position to be in. The grown-ups are truly gone, they went w a long time ago. They left le us Home Alone. We are

all Macaulay Culkin now.