Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or perhaps not. Matt Hancock had been expected to give the previous day’s Downing Street press briefing but got pulled in favour of Rishi Sunak, following the publication of Office for Budget Responsibility’s report suggesting GDP was set to tank by 35% over the next three months.
So you might have thought the health secretary would have used the extra 24 hours to fine-tune his announcements on social care.
Not so much. Over the past few weeks Hancock has been one of the few cabinet ministers to look even vaguely competent, but today he let his department down, he let his country down, but worst of all he let himself down. And there’s nothing worse than a Tigger who lets a Tigger down. The best he can do now is go home to watch a replay of his press conference and cry himself to sleep.
Hancock began by praising 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore for raising £7m for the NHS by walking round his garden. As well he might. For that £7m probably represents roughly the sum of what the Conservative government has taken out of the NHS each day over the past 10 years or so. Certainly, the legendary Chris Grayling has managed to waste twice that in a single visit to the despatch box in the Commons.
Thereafter it was all downhill. I am here to tell you the next steps in our social care package, Tigger bounced. Which was news to everyone as up till now even the first baby steps had been kept a closely guarded secret.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister he assured the country he had a social care package ready and waiting to go. To go precisely nowhere, as ever since we’ve heard precisely zilch. Nada. Social care for the elderly still appeared to be the government’s lowest priority even during a coronavirus pandemic that disproportionately affected old people.
So here was the deal. More workers and care home residents would be getting tested and there would definitely be more personal protection equipment available. Though starting from a baseline of near zero this wasn’t quite the earth-shattering announcement that Hancock had led everyone to expect.
But luckily, Tigger was planning on saving the best till last. Because he knew that what social care workers really wanted wasn’t testing, PPE, more money or a home secretary who dismissed them all as low-skilled. It was a shiny new green badge, saying CARE, that he was proud to model.
A badge. A sodding badge. Even the writers of the TV series The Thick of It wouldn’t have dared come up with something as crass as this. Especially as it was a badge that had already been launched a year previously to the general indifference of everyone in the care home sector.
This was Tigger’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire moment. He was sorry that no social care workers had won the jackpot this week; the producers were withholding the £1m top prize because they suspected cheating had taken place as there had been a lot of background coughing during the recording of the show – but as a gesture of goodwill, and to make sure no one went home empty-handed, he would be giving every contestant a badge. And a Tigger cuddly toy.
Hard to believe, but the badges really were the high point of the entire 45-minute briefing. Hancock looked genuinely dismayed that the media weren’t quite as wowed by them as he was – Fighting Corona, a Badge at a Time – and he rather went into meltdown during the question and answer session.
First he made out that the reason testing levels had actually fallen in recent days was because NHS workers were far too busy sunning themselves in the park during the Easter Bank holiday weekend and they couldn’t be arsed to come in for a test. You can only imagine the conversations that must have been taking place all over the UK. “Shall I go and get the test for which I’ve been begging for for weeks? Or shall I just not bother and top up the tan?”
Hancock also appeared to be clueless as to why the government was seemingly unable to give even a hint of what criteria it would be using when considering a possible relaxation of the lockdown rules. There was no strategy to have a strategy. The best he could come up with was that different governments were at different stages of preparation so it would be wrong to make any comparisons.
The strong implication was that our government was still at the “completely hopeless” stage of preparation so we shouldn’t be holding our breath for any news any time soon. This is a decision that appears to be well above everyone’s pay grade, including the prime minister’s.
Even that wasn’t the nadir. Matt can’t go out to meet the press without having a plan of action involving numbers. Last time out he had a five-pillar plan, almost none of which had yet to happen. So why should anyone believe a word he said now?
Laura Hughes, of the Financial Times, gently pointed out that he had promised 25,000 daily tests by the middle of April and we were still down in the 16,000s. Which made the 100,000 promise in two weeks’ time look totally unrealistic.
Here Tigger lost the plot. It was all a big lie. A conspiracy. He had never said 25,000 tests by the middle of April. FAKE NEWS. He had said 25,000 by the end of April which he had then increased to 100K. So just wait and see. He believed he could fly. He believed he could touch the sky. Mystic Tigger. Unaccountably, Hughes was the only journalist not granted a supplementary question in which she could nail the inconsistencies in his memory. Instead, he bounced out the room, kissing the badge in triumph. And there we all were thinking it was the bear who had the little brain.