The scandal is out and running

So, after weeks of ignoring it by Fleet Street, several papers this morning carried the PPE procurement scandal on their front pages, and that a middleman from Florida was paid £21 million for arranging some transport. And yet there wasn’t money to feed poor children over Christmas.

Reports now are using the figure of £14 billion pounds spent on PPE with using proper channels and sent out for tender, and that there was a “fast track” process for friends and party backers.

Meanwhile, Felixstowe port is jammed with containers arriving from the Far East packed with PPE, so much so that the viability of the port is under threat, so up to a thousand containers a week are being moved from the port to abandoned airfields around East Anglia for storage, so the piles of containers rise like multi-coloured pyramids over the ploughed fields. Most of the contents have a limited life and will never be used. All money wasted, and goods which the Government happily paid well above market rates for.

The National Audit Office’s report into this is pretty damning, and should and cannot be ignored. It speaks of lack of transparency and conflicts of interest. “The NAO also criticised the lack of transparency and inadequate record-keeping as Johnson and his ministers scrambled to buy PPE and awarded £10.5 billion on contracts without a competitive tender process.” Among those whose leads were prioritised were “government officials, ministers’ offices, MPs and members of the House of Lords, senior NHS staff and other health professionals”.

Excess deaths in England and Wales are 113% above normal with COVID accounting for 71% of those. So far, the peak week figures for France, Sweden and Germany are much lower, ranging from 7% to 53%.

Eeek.

Johnson, meanwhile, has to come up with a working plan for what happens after the lockdown ends on December 3rd. A plan on how there is testing capacity for all, and track and trace for all positive cases, whose results are provided in under 24 hours. Time is very much of the essence in all these issues. A trial in Liverpool of a new testing regime showed far higher numbers of people testing positive with no symptoms. If this were to be a nationwide situation then millions more could be infected.

And Johnson being the PM is perhaps the biggest problem, and man with talents, I suppose. He can speak fluent Latin and rustle up a classical reference in a heartbeat, but actually be able to manage a single issue facing the country, let alone three, he is possibly the worse person for the job, other than me.

The target, the only target is apparently that everyone can have a “normal” Christmas. Because, as we all know, viruses take five days off at the end of December to celebrate mid-winter, so normal rules on social distancing and meeting size need not apply.

Of course, in reality, a surge in infections, then hospitalisations followed by deaths would merge with the ongoing omnishambles that is Brexit for the first weeks of the New Year to make the nation pine for the stability of 2020!

Of course, it might not be that bad. Or it could be worse.