 So the conservative response to coronavirus has been chaotic, but it's undeniable. It's easy to find some constant themes. So first failure, this country has had more excess deaths than anywhere in Europe and the deepest recession in the G seven second blame shifting. So when something goes wrong, the government doesn't put their hands up and say, sorry, we made a mistake. They try and find anyone else in the country or outside of the country, of course, to blame for it. I suppose a prominent example here is when the government blamed the huge deftoll in care homes, not on their policy to not stop people going in and out of care homes or to stop agency workers going between care homes without enough PPE, but on care home workers themselves and third, cronyism. So again, a prominent example here, we've talked about it recently. Government advisors being handed millions of pounds to provide PPE that just doesn't work, doesn't fit requirements, never gets used. But millions of pounds finds its way from the public coffers into the pockets of people who happen to be quite close to this Tory government. Now, I have a story for you which rolls up all three of these issues, all three of them. So on failure, we're going to get straight into this. Britain's response to coronavirus was obviously you all knew it hampered by poor testing, poor capacity back in March and April. Now, the obvious reasons for this, you had a government which has slashed the funding for public health England. It was slashed about 25 percent since 2015 and the government's failure to prepare back in January, late January and the whole of February when Boris Johnson missed five Cobra meetings when there had already been a pandemic warning from the World Health Organization and Britain was still dragging its feet. Now, you know, the British government has recognized now, finally, that that was a mistake, that we should have had more capacity then. But they don't want to admit that was because of their own austerity policies or because of their own complacency. Now, they want to blame it on a different institution and what they've come up with, you know, as the as the scapegoat for this issue is public health England. So the government have announced that they're going to scrap the body public health England, which is in charge of things like testing and general public health, very important organization. The implication is that the catastrophic response to covid is not the fault of a prime minister who missed all of these Cobra meetings, but this organization cronyism is the practice of giving out contracts to people, contracts and jobs to people who aren't necessarily qualified for those jobs or those contracts, but who have connections to the government. And, you know, friends, associates, people who have given donations, perhaps that's often one and this comes back. This this this feature of government policy in terms of coronavirus rears its ugly head, because on Tuesday, Matt Hancock didn't just announce that public health England would be abolished. He announced that its successor, the National Institute for Health Protection, would have as its boss, this woman, Dido Harding. You might recognise Dido Harding from her government briefings. She was appointed to head the much criticised and circle run, so outsourced test and trace system before that Harding was head of telecommunications firm Talk Talk, which was the first company ever to be voted as having the worst customer services two years in a row by the money melts. This is someone who was put up to run the test and trace system background in corporations, not in health whatsoever. And her background in the corporate sector was not really covered in glory. Let's get this up. So this was when she was the boss of Talk Talk. This was her credentials to get this very high power job. Back in 2012, Talk Talk became the first company to win MoneyMales Wooden Spoon Award in consecutive years. So in the past, a winner has taken the wooden spoon as a wake up call and improved its customer service. But Talk Talk, led by Dido Harding, who's now in charge of public health England, evidently didn't improve them. She lost again. I think we can also see a picture and because you might want to question this woman's judgment, she actually appeared with a wooden spoon, took a picture with the wooden spoon, with the award for poor customer service. Odd decision to say the least. Back then, so if we're still looking at her credentials to run a major public organization, it wasn't just poor customer service that got Talk Talk in trouble. They were also fined £400,000 and ultimately lost 95,000 customers because they breached the data of, I think, 4.2 million people or they put 4.2 million people's data at risk, 157,000 of those had their details stolen. I'm including 15,000 whose bank accounts were compromised, not necessarily someone you want in charge of a test and trace system, which is going to have very important, personal, sensitive data about all of us. But there you go. These sort of deficiencies, let's say, in Dido Harding's CV have been recognized by some in the mainstream media and by the opposition, for example. And what I want to show you now, though, is Matt Hancock this morning being questioned about Harding's record on the BBC. And there has been some criticism about the appointment of Baroness Dido Harding to be in charge of this new body. One expert said, Dido Harding's appointment makes about as much sense as Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, being appointed the Vodafone Head of Branding and Corporate Image. Why is she the right person for this job? Is she qualified for it? Yeah, absolutely. She's simply the best person who could be doing this job now. She has enormous experience, both in the private sector, running very large organizations, and this is a very large organization now, with a budget of over £10 billion. Also in the NHS, she's been the chair of NHS Improvement for the last over three years. She's been expanding and building that testing capacity, the test and trace system that we talked about, and that is so effective in finding people now and asking them to self-isolate. So we're very lucky to have her giving this public service at such a critical time. He's the government minister who always looks the most uniquely terrified of any of them. He goes on TV. He almost seems like he's apologizing for what he's saying. He doesn't believe it himself. Anyway, the evidence he gave there as to why she's the right person for the job is she has three years' experience in the health service. Now, fine, three years' experience in the health service, whatever. But this isn't someone who... There was no open process by which you could apply to this job. She didn't sit an interview. So to give this job to someone without any kind of transparent formal process, I think their, I suppose, qualities have to be a bit more exceptional than just three years in the health service. Let's give her the most important job in British public health. He put there also as his sort of example as to why she's the right person for the job, the apparently extraordinary success of the test-and-trace system. Now, I'm not going to give you my amateur assessment of how successful that's been. I'm going to give you John Edmonds. So he was one of the top modelers, or still is, the top modeler, in fact, that sits on stage of the government's scientific advisory group. This is him speaking earlier this month on Newsnight. So this idea that we were going to a world-beating system was nonsense. Honestly, I couldn't care less whether it's world-beating or not. I just want it to be virus-beating, and it's not. That was Edmonds on test-and-trace. He doesn't care if it's world-beating, he just wants it to be virus-beating, it's not. So that's supposed to be our extraordinarily successful test-and-trace system. Edmonds is not the only stage member with concerns about the test-and-trace system. We can go to some quotes from Stephen Riker. So he's also a member of SAGE. He was a member of the subcommittee advising on behavioural science. And in the Guardian this morning, he said this of Harding's test-and-trace system. So first, it was based on a high-tech app, Now Junked. Then it was organised around a centralised telephone system rather than tried and trusted local public health systems, an approach that has also now been semi-junked. From the outset, this was outsourced to various companies, such as CERCO, which provided call-handling staff and with which ministers have previous associations. This approach was entirely the government's choice, implemented by their chosen appointee, Diado Harding. It was transparently ideological and demonstrably inefficient indeed. CERCO's telephone traces were around 50% successful in reaching contacts. Public health traces were over 90% successful. So we've got here two top scientists. The one high-profile job this person has had in science in pandemic control, which didn't perform particularly well. Now you might be asking, how is it the case that this person who's worked in public health for three years before that she worked in the corporate sector and oversaw some pretty disastrous crises in a telecommunications bid? How does that person get appointed as the head of public or the replacement for public health England without an interview? Now, I'll give you some clues or some evidence. Obviously, I can't draw definitive connections here, but you can make your own mind up. And when I tell you some of the, I suppose, non-professional backgrounds of Diado Harding, some of the context that I think is important to understand here. And that's because whilst Harding might lack experience in public health, she does have other things going for her. So when it comes to landing government jobs and it just so happens that Diado Harding is a conservative peer in the House of Lords for the conservative party. She also, as it happens, is the daughter of a hereditary peer. So she's no stranger to the second chamber. Harding also just so happens to be married to a current Tory MP and former Tory minister, John Penrose. So he sits, this husband, on the advisory board of the 1848 group, which is called for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system and for public health England to be scrapped. So husband, ex-Tory Minister and an ex-Tory Minister who sits on the board of an organisation which is called for public health England to be scrapped, public health England then gets scrapped and his wife gets appointed the head of it. Why does this matter? Now, it probably doesn't need explaining that for the government in the middle of a pandemic to scrap our chief public health organisation primarily just as an exercise in blame shifting and then to replace the leader of that organisation in the new organisation, create as a leader someone who is someone very closely connected to the government, a Tory peer, married to a Tory minister to be put in charge of the next phase of our pandemic control. It's obviously, I mean, it's clear why that's corrupt, basically. We might as well use the C-word here. But it is also a bigger problem. You know, it's not just that this wasn't a fair process. It's not just that she wasn't necessarily the most qualified person for the job. Even though there have been these huge fuck-ups and it doesn't seem like there was a fair, transparent process in employing this person, I've got no idea if she's competent or not. It could have been coincidence that when she was in charge of Talk Talk, thousands of people got hacked and they ended up getting the largest fine in the history of the telecommunications business. That could be a coincidence. But there is a broader problem even if you give her the benefit of the doubt on all of these issues. And that's that if this pandemic, if this crisis has shown us anything, it's that we need people in positions of authority, positions of scientific, and in crucial positions in the implementation of a COVID response. We need them to have some independence from government so they can speak truthfully and honestly about how everything is going. So if there are mistakes being made, they can be rectified. And we have seen that the government have been very intentionally trying to suppress that. Even though it's obvious, I don't need to explain to you that it's important to have scientists and leaders of public health organizations who are able to tell the truth. The government have been actively suppressing that. I told you already, when the chief nurse was going to speak at the daily press conference and she was going to say that Dominic Cummings probably should have followed the rules, she got scrapped from that briefing. And what it looks like to me is that in putting Dido Harding, someone who is, she is a conservative peer. She had married to a conservative MP. Apparently it's quite close friends with Matt Hancock because they both have a pension for horse racing. It's supposed to be typical there. She is someone who, what you can assure she will have is blind loyalty to the government. And what that means is that if there are features of the public health system of our pandemic response, which go dramatically wrong in the future, she's not going to stand up in the public and say it. We're not going to know about it until after the event. And in fact, actually, as Stephen Riker said in that piece that you can check out, I recommend it, it was in the Guardian this morning. And he said the test and trace system which she is currently overseeing, one of the big problems with it is that it doesn't collect any statistics whatsoever on how many people are following the advice. So how many people once called stay in? And one possibility is that not many people are doing this because the government hasn't provided any means, any financial capacity for people to stay at home and not go to their jobs. They're probably just going to lose out on money, especially if they're self-employed. And to find out those statistics would be slightly embarrassing. So it's best not to know. So that's, I mean, it seems the approach that Dido Harding has brought to test and trace. And, you know, I think it's pretty likely she's going to bring exactly the same catastrophic approach to the successor to public health, England.