Thank God for Matt Hancock

John Crace is a sketch writer for the Guardian, so as a rule his articles are humourously critical of the Government (how humourous being a matter of taste, of course)

Here he is actually praising Hancock quite a bit for his press conference, even suggesting it as an exemplar for how do so such things.

Just worth noting in passing, I feel, that people are not just attacked because they are 'the other'.

There are still lots of holes in the government stance: a target of 100,000 by the end of April is all very well, but I could have a target of being a millionaire by the end of April: Targets without plans to achieve them are not enough, and at the moment the plans are not too settled:

Speaking to Good Morning Britain, [Matt Hancock] said: “We haven’t put in a breakdown of the different type of tests.

“It is a 100,000 goal across the five pillars of the testing strategy. I haven’t actually pencilled any in for the home test – the antibody tests – and the reason for that is because we so far haven’t found one that works and so I’m not going to pencil any in, but if we do find one that works obviously that will be great.

So well done to Matt Hancock on the performance last night. It needs to be kept up and brought to fruition. But it is also important to stick to what he implied in that extract: the tests need to work. I would far rather we only got 50,000 reliable tests than we got to 100,000 but using tests that did not really work. I think that is a trap the Spanish may have fallen into: caring about the numbers more than the quality. We have to avoid that.