Matt Hancock’s car crash Tony Abbott interview buried another ridiculous government plan – and it’s worse than you think

One upside of Matt Hancock’s bone-judderingly awful interview with Sky News’s Kay Burley on Thursday morning is that it is distinctly possible that neither he, nor Kay, nor anybody watching any longer has a clue what it was meant to be about.

So mesmerically excruciating were the exchanges on “misogynist” and “homophobe” and “also an expert on trade” Tony Abbott, that the entire purpose of Hancock’s little morning TV interview round has already been forgotten.

And that’s just as well. “Operation Moon Shot” is the informal name by which the government has very deliberately allowed it to become known. This is to involve a Covid-19 testing regime of several million tests per week, or even per day, with results that come back in 20 minutes using technology that does not currently exist, and thus allowing life to return almost to normal.

It will never happen, of course, but that’s beside the point. What “Operation Moon Shot” really represents is the final, inevitable collapse of Boris Johnson’s coronavirus public information Ponzi scheme.

A very well known corporate strategy is to underpromise and then overdeliver. See, for example, Ryanair’s scheduled arrival times, which are now fully an hour later than the journey is meant to take. But, what do you know – you touch down 40 minutes late, and off sounds the maddening trumpet jingle, because, on their watch, you’re still 20 minutes early.

It is unfortunate that Johnson allowed himself to get stuck in a kind of feedback loop of overpromising and underdelivering. See, for example, sending the coronavirus packing in 12 weeks. The “world-beating” test and trace app, due end of May. Once one entirely unattainable promise is not going to be kept, only a bigger one will do to cover it up. And so here Johnson is, frantically bringing new bulls**t in to the scheme to keep the old stuff quiet, a political Bernie Madoff whose victim is his entire country.

Trouble is, it appears to be falling apart. The once vast poll lead has collapsed. There is only waffle and bluster left. Max Hastings, Johnson’s editor at the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s, has said how, “The shtick grew tiresome, like an overfamiliar vaudeville act.” Anyone who’s spent any time up close to UK politics for a little while would tell you the same. And now it would appear that the public has grown tired of it too. It was inevitable.

What is hard to know is who was actually meant to believe the talk of “Operation Moon Shot”. The notion that this particular government might set itself an impossibly difficult challenge and then succeed. It is not immediately clear who exactly was meant to be fooled. It is increasingly clear, however, that nobody has been.

In politics, broken promises have a tendency to go away. Coronavirus politics seem somewhat different however, at least for the time being, and before any kind of vaccine.

The countries and the leaders who have emerged from all this with their reputations enhanced are the ones who have been open and honest from the start, taken their people with them and admitted they’re doing their best and that there’ll be mistakes along the way.

Our government was eventually semi-forced into this way of doing things, but it has done so in pastiche form. There is, for example, nothing wrong with meeting unforeseen problems when trying to award A-level results to half a million students who haven’t sat their exams. But there is a problem in simultaneously admitting things went wrong by sacking the senior civil servants involved, and denying all responsibility for it by keeping the minister, Gavin Williamson, in place.

Trust was squandered a very, very long time ago. Now all that remains is to bulls**t one’s way to the dark side of the moon, and hope to somehow find your way back again.