Andy Richardson: 'The end game is in sight'
After the missteps, the failed exams and the error-strewn Covid response, the Government has a new challenge.
It is this. Deliver a vaccine to the UK before spring. And then, after a year of turmoil, we will begin to exit our collective Covid nightmare.
Experts predict a high level of success from a new vaccine, which will allow some semblance of normality after a year in which ‘normal’ has been watching goats walk along a North Wales street as residents hide behind the curtains, or observing the Government dish out billions of pounds in an effort to prop up an economy devastated by the pandemic.
Now, the end game is in sight. Doctors will be removed from frontline duties as the UK is encouraged to get the jab.
The nation has the first volunteer firmly locked in its sights, a certain Mr B Johnson, of 10 Downing Street, London. Though the idea of a politician being first in line to reassure public health concerns calls to mind the hapless former Agriculture Minister, John Gummer, who fed his four-year-old daughter a burger in the midst of the mad cow disease crisis. Not for nothing did Mr Gummer become Britain’s then-most-derided politician.
Donald Trump has no plans to eat burgers for the cameras, though he is planning a coup. Trump would love to pull off a coup d’état but he doesn’t have the ability.
Pinochet had the army with him. Trump couldn’t even strongarm Ukraine (a vulnerable country) without getting caught and stopped. Trump’s skill is lying and controlling the narrative.
As though 2020 couldn’t get any worse, the Leader of the Free World is behaving like a despot.
Here’s where we are: The President denies he lost the election. The Secretary of State lies to the world. The Attorney General launches a sham investigation. The Defence Secretary is fired. Top Pentagon officials are replaced with loyalists.
This is the making of a coup.
Still, we should rest easy. It’s only called a #Coup if it originates in the D’État region of France. Anything else should be referred to as a Sparkling Autocracy.
And we ought still to be grateful to Don for organising a presser at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which is now selling T-shirts with the logo: Lawn and Order, or Make American Rake Again.
