The worst that can be laid at the door of the government is a failure to prevent deaths. And even that is arguable. If the virus is going to be endemic then the best the government can do is to delay some of the deaths 
I am not sure I would agree there, Nigel, unless you are invoking the truism that we will all die eventually. Every death delayed is potentially a life saved when we eventually get a vaccine. So I would argue that not overwhelming the NHS is not an ambitious enough target. You should be aiming to have the level low enough that most non-covid NHS treatments can continue and the number who die is as low as possible while we await a vaccine.

And actually the 'Whack-a-mole' strategy could have done that if it was not simply used as an amusing quip. It is essentially what New Zealand has done: get the number of cases really low, then put as many resources as you can muster into a serious detect, test, trace and isolate effort. Testing is irrelevant with effective isolation so this concentration on numbers of tests without the rest is pointless.