Our frontline workers must be seasick from such high praise and low pay

Just a day or two after his old boss Charles Moore body shamed nurses in the Daily Telegraph – “if we must be slim, why are so many nurses fat” – the lithesome Boris Johnson sashayed out of his Number 10 bunker with a very different message.

“We have seen more clearly than ever the heroic efforts of our public workers during this pandemic,” he declared, showering praise upon them.

It must be pretty confusing to be part of the nursing profession right now. First they’re heroes, being clapped on the doorstep every Thursday, then a pro-Johnson newspaper is comparing them to Mr Blobby in the wake of Johnson’s anti-obesity crusade, then they're once again the “pride of the nation” and presumably it’s ok to indulge in a KitKat at the end of a break-free, 12-hour-shift.

But it isn’t just nurses this time. “Fantastic” teachers’ heads must be spinning too, given the jabs they and their leaders were taking from ministers just a few short weeks ago as the government sought to shift the blame for its failure to get schools open when the nation’s bookies, zoos and clothes shops were throwing open their doors.

The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, fanned the flames and they were dutifully spread by the government’s obedient shills. While the Premier League was away, teacher-bashing briefly became the replacement national sport.

The turnaround isn’t as quick as the one nurses experienced from a Conservative Britain that puts the diss in dystopia, but they could still be forgiven for feeling a jot of seasickness all the same.

What’s behind all this is Johnson’s latest attempt to draw a line under his miserable pandemic failings by indulging in some of his trademarked sunny optimism. Congratulations, public sector workers, you've been nominated to provide the rays now we’re on a mission “to build back better – protect our NHS, make our streets safer, educate the next generation and unleash Britain’s potential”.

As Labour duly noted, this comes after a decade of real-term pay cuts. There has, meanwhile, been no let up when it comes to interminably long working hours, staff cutbacks, ministerial hectoring and snide Tory messaging that holds that public sector workers are there because they’re just not good enough to work in the city and rip off the nation.

The reasons for the volte-face actually go beyond Johnson’s desire to play Sun King like Louis XIV. With Priti Patel and her hard-right cheerleaders having pulled up the drawbridge, the phrase “staffing crisis” is something we’re all going to become a lot more familiar with.

Hence the 3,000 more university places for nurses that have been created, the ads extolling the virtues of the teaching profession with nary a mention of 12-hour days and truckloads of paperwork, with calls for those made newly-unemployed by the pandemic to join the party.

They will be needed. The government is also seeking 1,000 new probation officers in the wake of Chris “failing” Grayling’s botched privatisation effort. Yes, that’s right, they actually tried to hand the job of keeping first-time offenders on the straight and narrow to private profit driven companies, with the process overseen by a man who you wouldn’t normally trust with a child’s colouring book.

And while we’re at it, there are the 20,000 “new” police officers Johnson promised to put on the beat while failing to mention they’ll only just replace those the Tories cut.

Those that take up the offer to join one of these services are probably going to find out that the copper-bottomed pensions Conservative commentators are always grumbling about aren’t everything.

In praising public sector workers, Johnson was speaking with a tongue more forked than those of the Burmese Pythons currently engaged in strangling Florida’s everglades.

If he and his government really valued “fantastic” public sector workers, they’d have made sure chancellor Rishi Sunak put up some new money for the recently promised pay rises that beat inflation but don’t even come close to making up what was lost through the austerity years.

But he didn't do that. The extra cash has to come from existing departmental budgets which means more pain, more cutbacks, more of the same old… well I hardly need to spell it out do I?