Editor

Over the past 10 weeks, I have watched the government’s ‘handling’ of the Covid crisis with a mixture of frustration and disbelief.

Faced with the worst pandemic to strike the United Kingdom in almost 100 years, it has been the country’s misfortune to be led by a group of ministers who convey the impression of being completely out of their depths.

These politicians were appointed to the Cabinet for one reason and one reason only, namely to ‘get Brexit done’. No consideration appears to have been give to whether they possessed the necessary ministerial skills or experience for high office, and we have paid (and are continuing to pay) a terrible price for it.

From an initial unwillingness to take the virus seriously; to failure to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for our front-line health workers who have performed miracles in desperate circumstances; to the shambles of the abortive attempts to buy PPE from Turkey and the botched purchase of PPE from the European Union (allegedly for political reasons); to the failure to foresee the catastrophic effects of the virus on care homes and to take the necessary measures to protect our elderly citizens, all coupled with the repeated changes in message delivered by hapless ministers at the daily press briefings, this has been a catalogue of disasters.

The consequence is that we currently have the second highest death rate of any country in the world and the third per head of population.

And now the latest twist in this dreadful saga is that an unelected senior government advisor who has clearly been in breach of the lockdown rules that he himself was partly responsible for drawing up, is telling us that his 500-mile round trip from London to Durham to self-isolate was entirely appropriate to his family circumstances and was completely within the ‘rules’ (as he interpreted them).

Once this matter had come to light, anyone with a shred of integrity would have tendered his resignation; failing that, he would have been sacked. But the extraordinary thing is that rather than being dismissed, Dominic Cummimgs has been supported to the hilt by senior Cabinet ministers and by the Prime Minister himself.

What message does this send to the country and to those in our communities who have stayed within the regulations, even when it has meant not being able to be with family members during their last hours in hospital or to be present at their funerals?

And no contrition from the man at the centre of this scandal: no apologies, no regrets for what he has done, nothing! As Nick Baines the Bishop of Leeds trenchantly observed: ‘do we accept being lied to, patronised and treated by a PM as mugs?’

Before the General Election I wrote to the Cambrian News explaining why I considered Boris Johnson unfit to be Prime Minister. Everything that we have seen since this virus took hold has confirmed me in that view. It gives me no pleasure to say, I told you so.

Mike Walker

Dan-y-Coed

Aberystwyth