How Boris's ‘Operation Moonshot’ can get off the ground

Jack Kennedy’s 1961 declaration ‘We choose to go to the Moon’ was treated with a little more enthusiasm than Boris Johnson’s ‘Operation Moonshot’ pledge this week. Both caused eyebrows to be raised, on cost and practicality. But the former was done, eight years later; the later is, at best, a work in progress – at worst, it is just another pipe-dream.

The siren voices, some better informed than others, have already dismissed it on scientific and economic grounds. Others say, like Lenin and the Duke of Windsor, that ‘something must be done’ to scale up rapid and reliable testing if we are to avoid losing a race somewhat more pressing and more vital than the space-race of the 1960s.

What worked for Kennedy were three things: a national purpose, limitless credit and Eisenhower’s ‘Military Industrial Complex’. Somewhere out there, in the jungle of negativism, fear and scepticism, remains a national purpose to make the nations of the UK safe from coronavirus.