As the WhatsApp revelations are daily drip-fed to the public, the leader of the opposition refuses ten times to disclose the chronology of his discussions with Sue Gray and the government prepares to make a fool of itself, yet again, with another futile plan to end illegal immigration, it becomes transparently evident that Britain’s once vaunted system of governance has collapsed into incoherence and worse.
It would be inaccurate to say that the WhatsApp insights into the incompetence and infantile infighting among politicians and civil servants during the Covid pandemic have shocked the public: disgusted, yes, but when it comes to issues of government and the politicians who conduct them, the public is by now unshockable, though its distaste for the political class is growing exponentially.
When a torrent of revelations establishes that, in a time of national lockdown, Boris Johnson was the least worst performer among the many actors in that farce, that tells us all we need to know about the calibre of our political class. It would be unfair, however, to deny Matt Hancock his pre-eminence among the nasties and incompetents whose chief preoccupation was to tighten control over the population and deny the public any access to the truth.
