From super-spreader Boris to Classic Dom's eyesight: daily press conference hits
Version 0 of 1. As No 10 announces Covid-19 press conferences are to end, here are some world-beating moments The daily Downing Street coronavirus press conferences, watched by millions since early March, are coming to an end. Here are some of the most memorable moments. 3 March Boris Johnson wandered into the first press conference, flanked by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, looking surprisingly chipper. As if he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about the coronavirus. “We have a four-point plan,” he said. Contain, delay, research and mitigate. He forgot to mention the fifth strand of “doing almost nothing”, which had been the plan up until the previous weekend. Everything was probably going to be more or less OK for most people, he continued, though for some people it would undoubtedly not be. Which was just one of those things. Just wash your hands and sing happy birthday. After Whitty and Vallance had observed the coronavirus might be rather more serious than Boris had let on, the prime minister sent everyone on their way by saying he had visited a hospital and shaken hands with everyone. The UK had its first super-spreader. 6 April After telling the country that everything was going swimmingly, the stand-in prime minister, Dominic Raab, was obliged to give an update on the health of Boris Johnson, who had been admitted to hospital with the coronavirus. Boris was on top form, in excellent spirits, Raab said. In fact, he was having such a good time running the country from his bed in St Thomas’ hospital that he was planning to extend his stay to an extra night. Here was Raab trying to persuade us that despite having a high temperature, a cough and breathing difficulties, Johnson was fit for anything. Being prime minister was actually a piece of piss that anyone could do from hospital. No big deal. Raab then let slip that the last time he had spoken to Boris had been on the Saturday before he had been admitted to hospital. Within hours of the press conference ending, Johnson had been transferred to intensive care. 27 May Sent out on the day after Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference, Matt Hancock was under pressure to explain away not only the special adviser’s Durham adventures but the failure of his own “world-beating” track-and-trace app. And this was the day he cracked. The breaking point was a question from a Brighton vicar that Matt clearly thought was going to be a nice softball before the journalists got to have their say. Instead, the vicar, Martin Poole, asked if everyone who had been done for travelling with children like Cummings could have their fixed penalty notices rescinded. Matt’s eyes widened and darted about in panic. “Er…” he said. Perhaps that might not be such a bad idea. He’d have a word with the chancellor. It was now clear that there was no law Classic Dom might have broken over the past 20 years that the government wouldn’t be willing to review, just to keep the de facto prime minister in his job. 28 May The day Boris Johnson tried to turn the UK into a banana republic. The prime minister might not have had much of a reputation left to protect, but Whitty and Vallance most certainly did. Yet to save what now passes for his career, Boris went out of his way to trash the reputations of both the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser. Given this was the first time that the CMO and CSA had been allowed out in public since Cummings’ moonlight flit to Durham had come to public notice, most journalists were keen to know if they endorsed Classic Dom’s course of action during the end of March and the first two weeks of April. But before either had a chance to speak, Boris effectively silenced them. They wouldn’t be commenting on this, he said, before preventing Laura Kuenssberg from asking a follow-up question by muting her. Almost every other journalist had similar questions. And each time Boris either ignored them or repeated that Whitty and Vallance couldn’t get involved in political issues. It’s possible that both men had only agreed to stand alongside Boris on the proviso they were allowed to say nothing. If so, that was a huge mistake on their part, because reputations that had taken decades to build were shredded in a matter of minutes. 30 May The day the scientists realised that the government was using them as much as human shields as for their wisdom and chose to fight back. The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, probably thought he was in for a fairly easy ride on a low-voltage Saturday night press conference in which he would be announcing the return of football. England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam had other ideas as he urged the country to stick to the rules and not to pick and choose the ones they most fancied. During the briefing Van-Tam was asked to comment directly on Cummings and, unlike Whitty and Vallance, he replied that he would be only too happy to do so. “In my opinion the rules are clear and they have always been clear,” he said. “In my opinion they are for the benefit of all. In my opinion they apply to all.” Dowden looked on in horror, as if the dog had just thrown up on the carpet and the relationship between the government and the scientists never quite recovered thereafter. |