Britain is being managed by the B Team of bodgers…

Nightingale Hospital London for Covid-19, Via Flickr (cc)

From The New York Review of Books:

Seeking to regain some ground, the health secretary promised tests for all essential workers (not just health workers), but on its first day the website offering appointments was over-subscribed in under two minutes. “It looks like the demand is there,” trumpeted the minister, as though this humiliation constituted a species of success. Meanwhile, the home-testing kits ran out in the first hour; Her Majesty’s Government, we learn, managed to spend $20 million on antibody tests that don’t work; and while we do now have mass testing, there is no one to trace and track people’s contacts.

It is not just this Won’t-Be-Told refusal to take expert advice or participate in international cooperation, for we now face the starkly sad fact that the Brexit infighting resulted in a culling from the front ranks of the Tory Party of nearly all those with cabinet-level experience. Almost by definition, anyone of any real ability could not support Johnson’s hard-line, promise-stomping approach to the European divorce settlement. Britain is now being managed by the B Team of bodgers. As a re-enactment of the pre-Dunkirk strategy, it makes painful viewing.

“From Brexit to Covid: A Very British Debacle”, Jonathan Myerson, The New York Review of Books