I’m a teacher. I spend a lot of time assuring kids - especially the younger ones - that what matters is that they try; that they do their best. In a classroom that’s entirely appropriate. In other situations, not so much. Air Traffic Control. If it’s somebody’s job to get me down from 30 000 feet (remember the days?) to a strip of tarmac in an aluminium cylinder then, frankly, I don’t care how hard he’s trying: I want him to get it right.

Similarly, if I’m slipping under in surgery before a triple bypass it will reassure me little that the surgeon will “do her best”. It will positively piss me off if I awake to find I’m missing a leg and she proclaims the amputation represents a ‘apparent success’. In life-or-death situations what matters is that people get it right.

So where is the ‘apparent success’ that Boris Johnson claims with regard to the COVID pandemic? Official figures today say that 30 000 people have died of this virus with estimates based on ‘excess deaths’ suggesting the actual figure could be half as much again. If this is ‘success’, I shudder to imagine what apocalyptic images informed Johnson’s ideas of failure. 

There is no metric, no massaging of the data, no manipulation of the facts that can conceivably portray this catastrophe as anything other than failure; a failure that can, to some extent, be laid at the door of the Prime Minister. What possessed him to make such an asinine claim for ‘apparent success’- a claim that must have rung hollow in the ears of the bereaved?

But this is typical Johnson. He is a tub-thumping rabble-rouser whose stock in trade is unfounded optimism and jingoistic flag waving. His lexicon is stuffed with superlatives like ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘wonderful’ but his relationship with reality has rarely been close. He is a dilettante game-show host who has found himself caught in the headlights of a disaster that no amount of John Bull bullshit could avert.

This has been his - and our - undoing. In the weeks before lockdown wiser heads around the world were looking on and wondering - asking bluntly - what on Earth the UK was doing. We knew what was coming. We had seen pictures of mass graves in Italy and in Iran. We heard horror stories from Spain of production-line funerals. I am tired of hearing the excuse made for this government that “nobody could have known” what was heading our way. They did.

Johnson’s response was to speak of ‘taking it on the chin’. Yes, I know he pfeffled around that a bit but the language is telling. It’s the language of English exceptionalism; the old gung-ho spirit. What ho, chaps! Keep a stiff upper lip and with a little English pluck, we’ll give this bug a biffing and send it off to...wherever. For all the talk of herd immunity, this is what lay behind Johnson’s failure to act, behind the holding of the Cheltenham festival, behind Johnson’s boast of ‘shaking hands with everyone’. It was the insouciance of exceptionalism: Keep Calm And Carry On.

The consequences have been calamitous. That two week-delay has cost us all dear. So has the lack of PPE equipment for front-line medical staff. I am tired of hearing the excuse that the government couldn’t have known what was required. If only some exercise had been carried out to ascertain what would be required in the event of a pandemic you might say. Oh! Wait! That’s exactly what happened in 2016. Project Cygnus carried out exactly that analysis and its findings were shelved by the government of which Johnson was a member. As was Michael Gove who revealed he hadn’t even read it until last week. Let’s not talk about that, though. Let’s accept the story that provision of PPE has been a ‘logistical nightmare involving thousands of competing care providers’. Hold on! I thought that, according to Dominic Raab and Matt Hancock, the NHS was ‘too monolithic’ and needed ‘breaking up’. Hasn’t that been Tory policy for the last forty years - breaking up the ‘monopoly’ of the health service and introducing the private sector to provide ‘competition’?

Still, some would say, now is not the time to voice such criticisms. Now, they will say, it is time to rally round the flag, put our collective shoulders to the wheel, get behind our leaders, sing a couple of rousing choruses of ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ and accept that ‘ours is not to reason why’.

When will it be time? After how many deaths? After how many fatal mistakes? After how much misery? When will it be time? In matters of life and death it doesn’t matter how hard people are trying or that they are doing their best; what matters is results. When will it be time to look at the results - the tens of thousands of deaths - and ask, “How in Hell did it come to this?”