It seemed at first that Matt Hancock was scrapping Public Health England in a bid to save his own political career. But the hapless Health Secretary appears to have bungled even this elementary piece of political theatre.
He has appointed Baroness Harding as the head of the new National Institute for Health Protection. Dido Harding?!? The Conservative life peer’s main claims to fame are presiding over the muddled response to a cyber-attack that affected tens of thousands of customers when she was chief executive of TalkTalk and heading up the government’s test-and-trace programme.
To date, the programme has proved almost comically disastrous. The much-heralded app developed by NHSX has now been abandoned – who could have seen that one coming? – and the manual system that’s replaced it is equally hopeless. Harding’s crack army of 25,000 contact tracers managed to track down a grand total of 51,524 people who’ve been exposed to the virus between the end of May and the end of July.
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