ou could tell the news wasn’t going to be that great when we got the cast list. If the new track and trace system had been an overwhelming success, there would have been every chance that Boris Johnson would have rolled out of bed to take the credit. Instead, we got Matt Hancock, everybody’s favourite punchbag, still wearing his favourite pink tie that has so far brought him nothing but bad luck. It’s hard not to feel just a little sorry for Matt. His vaulting ambition that led him to ignore all his gut instincts about having nothing to do with a Boris Johnson government has brought him nothing but hubris. He knew Boris was a wrong ‘un from the off. He even said as much during his short-lived campaign to be Tory party leader last summer. But when faced with a choice of acting on principle or grasping whatever cabinet post was going begging, Mattbeth chose the latter. His eyes are now dead, his shoulders slumped. The enjoyment of being on TV at the Downing Street press conference – The lights! The greasepaint! – has long since worn off. Because he knows he only ever gets the crap gigs. The ones that no one else wants to do. And even Westminster’s very own Mr Tigger, a man who could once achieve orgasm just by polishing his enamel NHS badge, can’t even muster a veneer of enthusiasm. The briefing is just a chore to be rushed through while giving away as little information as possible. Matt began with the usual white noise. Although the number of cases was actually up from a day earlier, the figures continued to fall. Er, hello? It was clear that neither Matt nor the person who had written this crap had bothered to make sure if it made any sense. He had a plan and it was working. It would just have been nice to know that the government had been hell-bent on killing more than 50,000 people – and counting – right from the start of the pandemic. Having dispensed with the daily platitudes, Hancock moved on to the results of the first week’s track and trace programme. It had gone brilliantly because it had managed to miss 75% of the contacts, though if you counted the few thousand people it had managed to contact then you could fiddle the statistics to make it look as if 85% of contacts had been traced. “It is your civic duty to participate,” Matt said sternly. Though obviously not if you happened to be Dominic Cummings. Then you could take the system or leave it. “The system will be world class,” he added hopefully. This sounded like more of an aspiration for some time in the future and certainly a significant downgrade on “world beating”. Nor was there any attempt to explain why it was taking so long to implement the system. Most other countries had seen test, track and trace as an essential weapon in fighting coronavirus back in February; we had only really got round to thinking about it seriously a month or so ago. Matt ended with a final plea. He understood people’s anger about Black Lives Matter but could people please stick to the rules and keep to small, socially distanced groups of six. Not for the first time during this public health crisis, satire had to take a back seat. Because the person the health secretary was about to hand over to was Dido Harding, the new chief executive of track and trace, who in a previous job on the board of the jockey club had let the Cheltenham festival go ahead when many other health experts were suggesting it should be cancelled. So it’s going to take Typhoid Dido quite a while until the number of people she’s prevented from getting the coronavirus outweighs the number she’s helped to infect. Which might help to explain why at least one third of the people who had been tracked down refused to give any details of their contacts. But on the plus side, they had manage to pick up about 32,000 contacts which meant that the 25,000 track and tracers had managed to make just over one successful call each over the past week. Making Britain Great Again. Come the questions, Door Matt got noticeably tetchier as journalist after journalist expressed their disappointment in the new system. Wouldn’t it have been better to wait until track and trace was working properly before easing lockdown measures? “No,” said Hancock. Because when it was world class it would be world class. There was no arguing with that. Nor could he give any further updates on his world beating app which only a month ago he had insisted would give the UK the edge in beating coronavirus. Matt just pretended he had never said the app was going to be any great shakes and that it would be ready when it was ready. As in never. Typhoid Dido did briefly try to come to the rescue. She was sure things would improve and that the track and tracers would soon be able to get hold of at least two people a week once they had learned to stop sending contacts texts at 3am. Teething problems and all that. She also said she had had one call from someone who had been delighted to be contacted as that had got him out of a barbecue. That must have been from someone on the Isle of Wight who had been due to go for drinks at the deputy editor of the Spectator’s house, where the guest list had included Tory MP, Bob Seely, Brexit chairman Richard Tice and journalist Isabel Oakeshott. Being told you had to self-isolate for 14 days would be a small price to pay to avoid that particular nightmare.