ell silly old me. Having listened in on more of the Downing Street daily coronavirus briefings than I care to remember, I could have sworn that the R value – which measures how many people a Covid patient goes on to infect – was a vital factor in any plans for easing lockdown. I distinctly recall only last month – and the month before that – Matt Hancock, Boris Johnson and other government ministers saying that R was stuck at between 0.7 and 0.9 and was far too close to 1 to allow any relaxation of the guidelines. Other than for Dominic Cummings who was free to do exactly as he liked. How things change now that the government has eased some lockdown restrictions and is hellbent on easing a whole lot more as soon as possible, having begun to concentrate as much on the long-term economic implications of the pandemic as on the nation’s health. Not that the health secretary was keen to frame the argument in those terms when Labour brought him to the Commons to answer an urgent question on R and the government’s handling of the crisis. Rather he was at pains to hide behind the science that it is increasingly obvious he doesn’t understand any better than most of the rest of us. As so often these days, Matt’s natural enthusiasm couldn’t quite paper over a general sense of fatigue and tetchiness. More and more he is reverting to type: a junior account executive at a large firm of management consultants who tries to conceal his ignorance in jargon – “I’ve been very front foot,” he said in irritation at one point – and gets easily narked when people pick holes in his ideas. Today he sounded like someone who had spent the entire weekend trying to come to grips with a stack of academic papers but had struggled to make head or tail of any of them. Matt began with his default mantra that he was proud of the government’s record. A death rate of nearly 60,000, when the chief medical officer had said 20,000 would be “a good result”, and a YouGov poll showing the UK joint bottom with Mexico in an international survey of approval ratings for its handling of the pandemic seem strange things of which to be proud, but he said the country had done the right thing at the right time. The rest of Europe must be mightily relieved that it had chosen to do the wrong thing at the wrong time instead and somehow avoided the UK’s disastrous public health outcomes. Having got all that off his chest – it’s become a kind of daily affirmation for him to remind himself that he could possibly have done worse – Hancock moved on to the more substantive detail. The number of new infections was going down, the coronavirus was in retreat and all that stuff he had said in the past about significantly bringing down R could now be ignored. All he had really meant was that as long as it stayed stable at just under 1, the government was free to relax its lockdown guidelines. At a stroke, R had just been reduced to near zero. At least in the level of importance to which the government attached to it. The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, was understandably sceptical. Hadn’t Prof John Edmunds, one of the government’s scientific advisers, only said at the weekend that the government had locked down too late and was taking a huge gamble on easing restrictions so soon? And hadn’t the health secretary also once said that another key instrument in relaxing health guidelines was to get a proper track and trace system in place? Something the track and trace programme director had said wouldn’t be ready for at least another three weeks. But Matt was adamant. He was being guided by the science. Because what he had learned from the whole pandemic was that if one scientist disagrees with you, it’s fairly straightforward to find another who will support whatever you want to do. So even though some epidemiologists were reporting R was higher than 1 in parts of the UK, he had some others who said it wasn’t. The time had come to take a punt on the nation’s health and go with the most optimistic science. Something he was sure the brand new Joint Biosecurity Centre would agree on when it finally came into existence. Inevitably it wasn’t long before Tory MP Harriett Baldwin brought up the Black Lives Matter protests. Shouldn’t the protesters have made more effort to socially distance rather than get so up close and personal with one another? Matt nodded enthusiastically. If there was a spike in infections in two week’s time then we would all know who to blame. At which point R will presumably be wheeled out of retirement and allowed to take centre stage once more. The protests were also the subject of a ministerial statement from Priti Patel. It’s always a hard sell saying the government finds racism abhorrent when the prime minister once made a good living out of dashing off Daily Telegraph columns about picaninnies with watermelon smiles and women in burkas resembling letter boxes, but the home secretary did her best to gloss over the hypocrisy. She then – through gritted teeth – defended people’s right to protest before condemning violence against the police and criminal damage. There were no arguments from Labour on any of these last points. Violence and tearing down statues had no place in our society. And yet you couldn’t miss the faint whiff of hypocrisy on both sides of the house. Almost all those who were appalled by Edward Colston being dumped in the river had cheered when the statue of Saddam Hussein had been torn down. Nor was anyone calling for Colston to be reinstated on its plinth. Quite the reverse in fact, as many people in Bristol and elsewhere were rethinking the importance of figures with a murky colonial past in their cities. It was almost as if the protesters had done everyone a favour. They had got rid of a statue no one wanted and allowed the politicians to sound high-minded about the way in which it had been done. In Westminster they call that a win-win.