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Well. This is a thing from Alan.
“The case for the defence of the Health Department during 2020 is that we backed a lot of horses,. The majority of them came home. Some of them had hiccups along the way.
“But ultimately the right thing to do was not to worry about the political and reputational risk of not all these things working. In the public sector, all too often, the attitude is, if we don’t know it is going to work for sure, we shouldn’t do it because it might not work —
And wouldn’t that be embarrassing?” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-going-to-have-a-great-summer-an-interview-with-matt-hancock
Embarrassing is the ‘mot juste’, which is not what I normally expect from The People’s Partridge.
What Alan has actually done is consistently lose the case for timely interventions when infections were evidently running high and the scientists agreed.
What Alan has actually done is outsource the essential Test And Trace (while forgetting wholly about Isolate and Support) to private sector organisations under the leadership of Tory peers Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Lord Bethell of Elephant And Castle.
And of course there was the fast lane for “ministers and MPs’ mates’ contacts”, as clearly described by the NAO.
And TAT has been tat, as I have rather extensively chronicled.
So, yeah, I think “embarrassing” is just about the perfect word.
Oh, this is heroic “Hancock says the past is no guide to the future”.
“Hancock would not deny that his optimism has sometimes got the better of him. It was down to him that the UK tried to develop its own contact-tracing app rather than working off the Apple/Google one. But it’s wrong, he says, to think of failed projects as wasted money.
‘Remember, every day that we shorten a lockdown by saves the country billions of pounds. You’ve got to think about the economics of managing a pandemic. To think: what are the resources of the nation? How do we marshal them best to get through this?’
AKA ‘my decision to do what all experts said was the wrong thing to do in developing an app that predictably failed was in fact right and far-sighted and visionary’.
“I hope that one of the consequences of this crisis is that it emboldens politicians to do the right thing even if it isn’t the immediately popular thing. Because that is what earns you respect.”
You could not make this shit up, without heavy-duty hallucinogens.
The app was the wrong thing. TAT was the wrong thing. Late, slow lockdowns each time were the wrong thing.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, Alan tells the Speccie “Now we are outside of the European Union, we have the opportunity to innovate”.
I’m sure we are all waiting with bated breath.
“Think of it like a car. A Range Rover where you change the wing mirror but it is still a Range Rover. So a vaccine where you change the target protein a small amount is still the same vaccine.” Is this Peak Partridge?
It is not: “Each day we’re adding more vaccination centres. So it’s like building more houses in Monopoly, you get more and more sources of income in Monopoly.”
Because of course vaccination centres bring you more income, just like in Monopoly.
For fuck’s sake.
Really, for fuck’s sake.
