oris Johnson cannot offer blood, sweat or toil. What he has got is some tiers. Tiers of a clown, but that’s what’s on the table. Lick ’em up and look grateful. On Monday night the prime minister unveiled his latest batch of coronavirus measures next to a chief medical officer who took great pains to stress that they already would not be enough. “We should not have any illusions,” intoned Chris Whitty, standing beside a man who has spent his entire adult life lost in them. Still, which Covid house are you in? Despite clear advice by Sage not to, Johnson has divided each and every corner of the nation into what he thinks best suits them. Think of him as the Sorting Twat. This may yet be the least successful divvying up of Britain since King Lear had a crack at it. The hours leading up to his announcement offered a feast of lowlights. Johnson failed to bring Greater Manchester to heel, but reiterated it would need to get with his programme “in return for support for local test and trace”. “It’s absolutely bizarre that you condition test and trace money,” one senior Greater Manchester figure told the Manchester Evening News. Only one of Sunderland’s MPs was invited on to a conference call with ministers – a whole minute before it was due to start – during which she informed the government that there were in fact three elected representatives for Sunderland. Dominic Cummings is, somewhat famously, from the north-east of England. Yet for much of yesterday his information-led government appeared unable to drill down into the data as to where the north-east even was. Then again, where are any of us? We cannot say much other than it is in the uncharted lands beyond the shitshow, beyond the omnishambles, beyond the blunderdome. Have you thought of retraining as a cartographer? When I was at school, a man once came to teach us self-defence for a morning, during which he said that you must never take any action halfheartedly, in the hope it might warn your assailant. Do it like you really mean it, because otherwise you just make matters worse for yourself. Back in April, Boris Johnson described coronavirus as “an unexpected mugger” we had to wrestle to the ground. Hand on heart, the mugger is a little more expected the second time around. Yet with this latest set of plans, I can’t help feeling the prime minister is not so much wrestling coronavirus, as warning the virus he will wrestle it if it’s not careful. His government specialises in measures that become outdated and inadequate about 30 minutes before they’ve even announced them. They are always the Amstrad Emailer of public health responses. Had Johnson been captaining the Titanic, his last words as the icy North Atlantic waters finally closed over his head would have been: “Fine, I give in – close the Irish bar. But leave the Hawaiian lounge open, because that place coins it like a bastard.” Not that I am suggesting shutting bars is even the right way to go on the UK Titanic – merely that people have a right to know on what basis bars are being shut, given the scientific evidence appears unclear. The time where our leaders were entitled to unquestioning trust from a benighted people has long passed – yet they persist in the delusion it should endure. And they do so successfully. Last night the government overturned an amendment which would force foreign trade deals to meet UK animal welfare and food safety rules. They did so on the argument that they’d made “a commitment”, and therefore enshrining it in law was wholly unnecessary. Can you take a commitment from this government to the bank? Only time will show. And yet, also last night, Sage’s document dump suggests the science no longer wishes to be used as a deflection by a government which repeatedly falls between every stool there is. When the public inquiry does finally come – too late to save the people who will die in the second wave when more competent systems might have saved them, and too late for the businesses this Conservative government has failed – there should be a long section devoted to how this summer was spent. Huge amounts of time were lavished at the very highest level on vanity obsessions that were entirely ludicrous in the circumstances: blowing up the civil service, or starting facile culture wars, or launching some wheeze to reorganise the armed forces, or refusing to press pause on a Brexit that will now hit in the deep midwinter grips of the second wave. In fact, Johnson and Cummings pressed rewind on Brexit, opting to relitigate bits of it they had told us were nailed down. All of this time would have been better spent focusing all energies on establishing a decent test, trace and isolate system for the £12bn they’ve spent on it. Meanwhile, as well as earning the condemnation of their natural enemies for the above, the Johnson administration has now also contrived to infuriate even its natural supporters – the likes of desiccated Floridian Richard Littlejohn, and rugby-shirted White Walker Tim Martin. The Wetherspoons boss has delayed publishing the company’s results till Friday, during which the prime minister can expect a glass to be raised. Unfortunately, towards his face. Back to those Sage documents, though, and it doesn’t feel remotely surprising to learn that three weeks ago, the government’s scientific advisory group recommended a two-week circuit-breaker national lockdown. Nor that Johnson rejected the call in favour of these belated and byzantine measures, which will surely mean a circuit breaker lockdown is in our future – only much harder and lengthier than it needed to have been had they done it sooner. If only some lessons from the first wave had been learned by people in government, and not just the health workers at the frontline of it. Or to put it another way: it won’t end in these tiers. This has always been the crucial point with this government, wherever you place yourself as far as the so-called “health or economy” debate goes. People still wanging on about this false binary don’t get that the two are far more closely entwined. For instance, “optimising for the economy” by not locking down at all can result in having to lock down for much longer, thus unoptimising for the economy. There are no simple answers: the problem is that Johnson doesn’t even look capable of asking the right questions in time. Alas, much of Britain has yet to come to terms with the implications of the fact it elected a newspaper journalist to run it. I honestly can’t believe Boris Johnson has turned out to be a clinical procrastinator, a short-termist headline grabber, and a total chancer who only really responds to the need to do his job three minutes after deadline. If only there’d been some clue, you know?