or months now the government has been prefacing all its coronavirus briefings as world-beating when the only thing in which we appeared to be global leaders was our mortality rates. But now I’m beginning to think Boris Johnson and his cabinet may have been on to something after all. Because it’s beginning to look more and more as if we are genuine world beaters: if only in total incompetence. Check out the evidence. In Johnson we have a prime minister who lumbers from one screw-up to the next, blinded to his own failures by a narcissism that borders on the sociopathic. On Thursday, he was meeting President Macron to celebrate the 80th anniversary of De Gaulle’s speech to the French resistance: let’s hope he didn’t give Macron a copy of his book on why Churchill was exactly like Boris, in which he basically wrote off De Gaulle as completely useless. Then we have Dominic Raab. A foreign secretary who knows so little about foreign affairs and Black Lives Matters that he thought taking the knee was something out of Game of Thrones. At this rate it would come as no surprise to find that Gavin Williamson had been labouring under the impression that the free school meals campaign had been inspired by Grange Hill. What did we do to deserve politicians quite so dim as this? But all the recent U-turns and moronic posturing are as nothing compared to the ongoing humiliation of Matt Hancock. Poor Matt. He started out with so many good intentions of being a better health secretary than his two predecessors, Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt, but now just finds himself a worthy addition to the confederacy of dunces. His ambition easily outstripped his natural abilities and he merely lurches from crisis to crisis. You can see it in his eyes. His enthusiasm has been replaced by deep suspicion of everyone around him. He also looks dead on his feet. Mattbeth doth murder sleep. It was sod’s law of course that Matt was sent out to take the Downing Street press conference on the day both the latest fairly rubbish human test and trace figures were published and the “world-beating” app that had been promised for 1 June was finally consigned to the dustbin. Yet Hancock accepted his role and grudgingly took centre stage with Dido Harding, the chief executive of test and trace. There is no indignity that Boris could inflict that Matt wouldn’t willingly suck up just to be allowed to keep his job for a few days or weeks longer because he doesn’t have the self-worth to face Johnson down. Matt took a few deep breaths and tried to start off on an optimistic note. Although there was as yet no vaccine for the coronavirus, he had bought up massive supplies of all the ones that were being trialled just on the off chance that one of them happened to work. It was as good as an open invitation for any snake-oil salesman to come hammering at the Department of Health’s door. Then Matt moved on to the figures for the human test and trace, which even he couldn’t spin in a positive light as it appeared that the system was missing well over half the people with the coronavirus. Then he steadied himself and tackled the unhappy app situation head on. He had discovered months ago that the “world-beating” UK app was actually useless as it couldn’t connect with Apple phones, so he had secretly set up a second programme with Apple and Google to see if they could make their systems more effective. The Germans and Koreans might be happy with the distance at which the Apple system operated, but he wasn’t. Here we came to the real genius of Hancock’s cunning plan. Because faced with the choice of testing a system on the Isle of Wight that everyone knew didn’t work or one that could possibly be improved, Matt had opted to waste several months testing the one that was a complete non-starter. Brilliant. This was “world-beating” science at its absolute best. Testing the useless one was spearheading the international effort to show other countries precisely what not to do. It was an act of supreme “world-beating” self sacrifice for the UK to take one for the global team. The 60,000 Brits who have died of Covid-19 could rest assured they hadn’t done so in vain. Inevitably, Matt found himself struggling with the questions from journalists. All he could do was try to pretend that the “world-beating” app had never been that important – “the cherry on Dido’s cake” – and that people shouldn’t be too worried if it wasn’t working properly until some time in the late autumn at the earliest. This after both Boris and Matt had been insistent that the app was key to relaxing lockdown restrictions, which was already taking place. It was beginning to sound as if the prime minister and health secretary were actively trying to kill people. Mattbeth doth murder more than sleep. In desperation, Matt handed over to Harding. Unfortunately, Dido is an equally unreliable narrator having not had tremendous success with data breaches at Talk Talk and giving the go-ahead to the Cheltenham festival a week after many scientists had been pleading for a lockdown. The baroness is one of that elite club of chief executives who consistently manages to fail upwards. So her insistence that though the test and trace figures were basically crap they were still better than nothing wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been. The briefing ended in an uneasy truce, with Matt struggling to contain his tetchiness. There’s only so much embarrassment even he can take. What he needed was a “world-beating” hero on his side. If only he had a number for Daniel Rashford.