Johnson’s honeymoon is well and truly over

When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions. This has been a week in which pretty much everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong in the government’s epic battle against Covid-19.

Britain suddenly has the most recorded Covid deaths in Europe and the second-most in the world; fiascos surrounding getting PPE to frontline health workers have got worse with the discovery that a planeload of supplies, dubbed ‘Air Jenrick’ after the Communities Secretary, is largely comprised of duff stuff that cannot be used; the care home epidemic continues to intensify; the number of tests being carried out has fallen back; it has become increasingly obvious – to the point of undeniability – that community testing and pro-active contact tracing was abandoned in the early days much too soon, leading to many infection clusters spreading unchecked; the superstar epidemiologist whose modelling led the government to shut down the UK economy has had more holes blown in his credibility and resigned as an advisor after being caught breaching the lockdown.