Whilst people are dying, our clown PM finds time for a joke
Boris Johnson has largely managed to cloak his clownish persona when leveling with Britain about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak. But the prime minister reportedly slipped back into bad habits on a Monday night conference call with manufacturers, who have been urged to join a national effort to produce more medical ventilators for the impending medical crisis. Politico reports that some of the business leaders were “less than impressed” with Johnson’s conduct on the call, with one saying: “He couldn’t help but act the clown, even though he was a on call with serious CEOs from goodness knows how many companies.” The same unnamed business leader is reported to have said the prime minister “joked” that the emergency project to build more life-saving ventilators could be known as “Operation Last Gasp.”
This shows the level of thought of this buffoon in charge. But it also underlines an even deeper flaw of thinking. The government has not shown any sign of urgency in dealing with stopping the infection other than social isolation. The military should be deployed in helping in distribution food to prevent people from unnecessary shopping journeys, hotels should be requisitioned to isolate mild case in quarantine. But of course Johnson’s focus on the high tech end of things, respirators, which are so much down the line and would be better sourced from manufacturers with proven track records and licensed products, instead of by turning to companies in which the Tories hold shares for a bit of diversion of the main issues showing the incompetence.
As the WHO urged from the outset, nothing can substitute for testing, testing, testing, and also isolation.