Alok Down!

The Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, stepped to the fore yesterday. More likely he was pushed, in the light of his previous performance. But, the Government is struggling at the moment. And, so am I, I really should be painting.

Johnson's cabal of bigots and dogmatists seem uniformly incapable of mustering any semblance of leadership or competence, in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. But, we shouldn't be surprised, Johnson and Cummings hand vetted the bunch of bigots and entitled-types for just the one purpose, and that purpose has been snatched from their grasp, as the distraction of pandemic death spirals ever further from their understanding!

So, who else is there? Clearly, Robotic Raab- who's exit was more like a break in transmission- has entirely too much of the terminator about him. And, do we think that Skin-deep Patel would be capable of suppressing her smirk for the duration of the daily death counts? Even Michael Gove doesn't believe what Michael Gove is saying. Matt Hancock wasn't even capable of waving, when he was so obviously drowning. Andrea Leadsom... no, move on! Liz Truss, seriously? Nicky Morgan's previously all-too-painfully demonstrated her woeful inability to count... although, maybe this is just what we've been looking for. James Cleverly, a man who's name doesn't even finish it's own misinformation statement. Grant Shapps, Jesus Christ! At least Rees Mogg has the right hat for the spiralling death counts, but it's unlikely that he'll be able to keep that note of triumphalism from rising to the fore, or is it just misplaced 'superiority?'

No, it had to be Alok Sharma again, the man who even other members of the cabinet do not seem to recognise. Maybe he's an example of 'last in first out' in enactment? Perhaps he would be able to circumvent the word, 'unprecedented.'

Not quite!



Instead, we were treated to a self-satisfied schoolboy opening delivery on the merits of 'business opportunity in a crisis.' For those at home, surviving care of 'drinking games,' anyone using 'business' or 'businesses' as a trigger, lot's of water, sit quietly in a darkened room, paracetamol... smaller measures next time? Twenty times the bugger squeezed the word into his opening salvo. Twenty bloody times! So desperate was he to push the government's economy sub-plot that he never had the wit to substitute 'firm' more than the once.

What did we learn, that this government's mantra has 'always' been, 'Test, test, test!' Except when it wasn't, when it was instead to cease testing immediately and instead sacrifice half-a-million people, so that the vastly slimmed down British population could steal a run upon genetic engineering, with Cummings's 'herd immunity' damnation!

And then we got to the bit where ministers are required to either evade or instead to pretend that they've been asked an entirely different question. As awful as this is, both to witness, and to have to live with the consequences of, it wouldn't be quite so God-awfully life-draining if the questions ministers pretended they'd been asked were instead actually answered.

Kuenssberg led with the ongoing lack of PPE for frontline staff, the elusive specifics of quite how many masks have actually arrived, and the morning mists duly rose about the Business Secretary and his medical fielder, Yvonne something-or-other. ITV's Peston wanted to know about the elusive- bought-but-not-employed- antibody tests. The usual floundering escalated! Professor Doyle, PHE Medical Director, visibly winced as the ball was repeatedly thrown into her ill-prepared lap!



Paraphrasing slightly, Professor Doyle spoke again about, "A bad test being worse than no test." She did not elaborate upon this by saying that, "Worse still, might be a blind, money saving, reliance upon herd immunity," which the whole team are now forbidden to even acknowledge. Almost as if it was never actual stated policy in the first place. The UK is now expected to yet again demonstrate 'herd amnesia.'

Painful as the briefings are, made all the more painful by the news of the rising death rate, there was still something ever-so-slightly valuable that occurred. Perhaps it has already occurred to others.

I thought that the most well considered question was put by The Evening Standard's Joe Murphy. He wanted to know why it currently is that Germany appears to be so much better at dealing with just about every aspect of this pandemic? He asked why they were so much more 'on it,' so much better at starting and accelerating testing and at targeting testing? He wanted to know why Germany had managed to procure so much more of the reagents required, in order to build more testing kits. Joe wanted to know if the British Government's apparent incompetency was actually a governmental choice? Had we chosen to allow so many people to contract Covid-19 and to die? Obviously, he didn't bother to go on to compare twenty years of German investment with twenty years of British slashing! Small steps.

Obviously, he wasn't answered. Alok Sharma, Business Secretary, thanked Joe for his question, before completely failing to answer another far easier question.

So, I learned this. As the UK government clearly has a united approach to the pandemic- at least this is the face they wish to present- so the questioning journalists should form a united approach. Imagine, wouldn't it tell us a great deal more about 'our' government, either how they are really tackling (or not) the pandemic or, far more likely, how far they are prepared to go in order to deceive the public? The journalists should ask the same question repeatedly, each journalist precisely the same question. Perhaps they could, in turn, refer to a shared tick chart and escalate the rhetoric by prefixing each repeat with something along the lines of, "Minister, as you have failed to address ******'s question regarding ********, I would like to repeat... " See, how many times the chosen face can thank the journalist for further highlighting exactly the same governmental inadequacy?

Governments that (pretend to) represent a democratic population should be held to account. Otherwise we end up with a bunch of utter (Brexit) incompetents!

This virus does not discriminate, it will attack thinking Remainers as well as well as attention-deficite Brexiters.