Hancock struggles to answer questions on testing and quarantine

Matt Hancock has the air of a student who, having boasted about how great their final dissertation will be, has just realised that they have days to research and write the whole thing. When asked if he is going to meet his target of 100,000 daily tests for coronavirus by the end of the month, the Health Secretary continues to insist that he will, while struggling to explain how. 

He gave a statement in the new hybrid Commons this afternoon in which he was repeatedly questioned both by MPs who were in the Chamber and those on video link about what was going wrong with the testing target. He struggled to give any answer beyond that the government was steadily increasing capacity and that the UK was one of the first countries in the world to develop a test. The government had, he argued, kept ‘its foot on the gas’ on this matter.