As the cock-ups continue to pile up, some people bizarrely still seem to think it’s all part of an ingenious strategy
Another dignified week for Boris Johnson’s administration, which now wishes to override its own Brexit deal by claiming not to have understood what it was signing when it signed it. Traditionally, this excuse is used by people who’ve just been subject to 72 hours of police beating; or by the harmless local weirdo who’s been tricked into confessing to a highly complex sex murder; or by the children of 96-year-old petrochemical tycoons who’ve left the entire family estate to a teenage stripper.
It is now being used by the British government’s alleged mastermind, Dominic Cummings, and by its sheepdog mascot, Johnson, who no longer even looks housebroken. Meanwhile, the same government would like you to believe that it would be notionally capable of pulling off the most sophisticated testing programme on the entire planet. This is the so-called Operation Moonshot, which would see Matt Hancock – literally Matt Hancock – preside over a hyperfunctional system for carrying out 10 million coronavirus tests a day using technology that hasn’t yet been invented. Leaked Whitehall papers estimate the cost at £100bn.
