It’s come to something when Dominic Raab is quite clearly the best person available for the job. With Boris Johnson likely to be out of action at Chequers for the coming weeks, Robert Jenrick getting stuck in transit between any of his three houses, Michael Gove being unable to explain why his daughter is a higher priority for a coronavirus test than a frontline NHS worker – has any situation ever been improved by Mikey not staying at home? – and Priti Patel being Priti Patel, there are few obvious alternatives to Raab to front up the daily Downing Street press conference.
Which isn’t to say that Dom is by any means an ideal choice. Practice hasn’t made perfect, but it has made him a bit less rubbish. He’ll never be totally relaxed – his missing-person habit is hard to break – but he is a lot less sweaty and nervy than he was last week when he was visibly struggling. There’s almost a swagger. Albeit one that barely disguises his low threshold for boredom. Because Dom is not dim – well, not compared with many of his colleagues – and the tedium of having nothing new to say has already got to him. He can’t even bring himself to go through the charade of appearing interested. The briefing is just a half-hour ordeal to be endured.
Stifling a yawn, the foreign secretary began by thanking NHS staff. Not just for saving Boris, but for all their efforts elsewhere. My guess is that most NHS workers were either too busy or too knackered to have paid much attention. If the government is sincere in its newfound gratitude for a health service that it has been happy to underfund and understaff for the past 10 years, it is going to have to be prepared to alienate its traditional low-tax Tory voters. Not to mention the Brexiters who want many of the immigrants who work in the NHS to sod off.
Raab then moved on the daily figures. The death rate was down a bit, but then it always is at weekends, as for some reason the person whose job it is to do the counting doesn’t work on Sundays. He was more indirectly straightforward – Dom can’t do anything without having first out-thought himself – on why deaths in care homes weren’t being included in the daily stats. Because if they were, then everyone would see that many more people were dying than he was prepared to admit.
Visibly losing the will to live, Dom also failed to adequately explain why, halfway into the government’s target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month, we were still only managing about 18,000. It was like this: the coronavirus was a tricky bugger that spread exponentially. So the only way to combat it was to be even more cunning. Start by doing almost no tests and then take it by surprise by testing exponentially. The reason we were apparently so far behind was to lull the coronavirus into a false sense of security.
“This is a national test,” Raab concluded. Really? The whole thing is just an Ant Middleton SAS: Who Dares Wins TV show, where the first country to break the lockdown gets thrown off the course. Silly, silly me. There was I imagining that what we were really dealing with was a global pandemic that required proper scientific evidence, when in reality it was a psycho standoff between us and the virus to see who gives way first.
Nor did the questions from the media produce much in the way of straight answers. The government doesn’t yet seem to have even reached a point where there is a plan of what criteria might need to be met to end the lockdown or which groups might be allowed out first. Presumably Raab is still banking on using his black-belt martial arts skills to defeat the coronavirus with a straight ippon. “I’m sorry, I can’t really hear you,” was as far as he got in offering an apology for Priti Patel’s suggestion that most NHS staff were wasting PPE protection at fancy dress parties. So no. He wasn’t sorry at all. Besides, no one was going to be seeing Patel again in the foreseeable future
Inevitably – because these briefings always do – the questions turned to why, even without the care home and death-in-the-community figures, the UK was heading for the worst mortality rate in Europe. Was this part of the plan? Raab’s face momentarily turned to panic. No one had ever called what the government had done up till now a plan. More like a “take it a day at a time and hope something turns up” approach.
Did the government regret not acting a bit quicker? A month ago, it was advising 250,000 people to get stuck in together at the Cheltenham festival when other countries were in lockdown. Dom was firmly of the “Je ne regrette rien” école. Never explain, never apologise. So what if the death toll was now over 11,000 and rising by hundreds per day?
We shouldn’t read anything into South Korea’s low mortality rates, he said, because they weren’t comparing like with like. We were excluding many more Covid-19 deaths than them. We were just doing them a favour to make them look good. But you could be damned sure if it was the UK that was at the bottom of the death charts, the government would be shouting about it from the rooftops. And I, for one, would be applauding them.
