We’re being run by a bunch of Walleys.. and there’s nothing funny about it at all
How it started.. How it’s going..
Obviously, with the pandemic and a No Deal Brexit looming and the US election getting closer, every week feels insane at the moment. But, and speaking as someone who has written about some very insane weeks in the last few years, this week felt particularly insane.
Ready to have your blood boiled? Good, come on…
First, Boris Johnson announced a “three tier” coronavirus system where the lowest tier was medium. So that was a good, clear start. (It seems that Johnson has already quietly abandoned his plans of just a few weeks ago for a £100billion “moonshot” that would cure all of our coronavirus problems. Presumably after it was patiently explained to him that this was utterly insane. Well, as an anonymous Tory source said: “Boris isn’t really a details person. He’s more of a picture painter.” He also likes making models of buses. Remember that? God, that was a long time ago, eh?)
Who could travel between the different tiers depended on where you were going in the country and on what your grandparents did in terms of childcare and on how old your children were and… It soon became clear that the complexities of the system made it incomprehensible to even chess grandmasters.
Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said it was unworkable. Dominic Raab said the Government was “following the science”. Whitty is in charge of the science. So that’s all nice and clear.
Then it leaked out what the science was really saying.
SAGE – the
Scientific Advisory
Group – advised the
Government weeks ago that it should lock the whole country down again. “No thanks,” the Government said. Raab told us that they “took a view” on this advice. That’d be the view to not follow the science in this case… Meanwhile, over at Test and Trace, things are falling apart so badly that a Liverpool family were told to take a two-anda-half-hour car journey to northern Wales for a coronavirus test. When they got there, they were told that the centre was closed because it had run out of test kits.
It’s like when they finally get to Walley World at the end of National Lampoon’s Vacation, except it’s not even remotely funny, because this poor family had spent £ 40 they could ill-afford on the petrol to get there.
Meanwhile, the Government’s Tsar of Testing and Tracing, Dido Harding, someone for whom 40 quid wouldn’t be a problem, claimed her system was, in fact, highly efficient. Indeed, she’d just handed a contract worth TWELVE BILLION POUNDS to Serco to make sure of this. Why? Well, because Serco are the best company for the job, of course.
Well, it quickly transpired that Serco’s CEO is Rupert Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill and the brother of ex-Tory MP Nicholas Soames.
His wife Camilla is a Tory party donor and Serco’s ex-head of PR is now a Tory health minister. Are you
starting to suspect this might all be a bit fishy? No problem, you can take your concerns straight to the Government’s Anti- Corruption Champion, John Penrose. Who might mention it to his wife, Dido Harding.
The woman who gave Serco the contract in the first place.
Over in the nightmare that is Brexit Land, the Government was berating the road haulage industry for not being ready for the new regulations that will come into force on January 1.
The Government seemed to forget that, out of the estimated 33,000 EU haulage permits that will be required, only a thousand or so are ready.
And the border control software needed for January 1 now won’t be ready until April. Neither will “the world’s largest lorry park”, under construction in Kent.
However, thousands of Portaloos are going to be installed along the motorways of the Garden of England, for the comfort of drivers caught in the 15-hour tailbacks.
The week climaxed on Friday with Raab going on breakfast television to threaten Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester.
In true Trump style, Raab told Burnham that if he didn’t comply with the Government’s (unilateral) decision to shunt Manchester into Tier 3 (the most extreme lockdown tier, or is it the bottom one? I honestly can’t remember any more), then the Government would move in (presumably with the Army) and do it for him.
When asked by the interviewer if this was a threat, Raab said: “It’s just the facts of life.”
So, demonic levels of Tory corruption, open warfare between the north and the south, rampaging sickness, the Garden of England being transformed into the Toilet of England… I’m sure there’s a Brexit metaphor in all of this somewhere.
I’m just too exhausted to work out what it is.
Don’t forget.. Boris also likes making models of buses