To repeat

Ministers are accountable. They have to make the decisions in the end otherwise what is the point in Governments. To do that they use special advisers as well as Civil Servants.

For information they spend at least £10m per year on that.

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The most expensive appears to be Lee Cain, a British former journalist who currently serves as Downing Street Director of Communications under Boris Johnson. I don't think anyone can claim the recent communications have worked well and I also don't think you can blame - or at least not exclusively - senior civil servants.

They also use a plethora of management consultants at vast cost. I know because I was involved in the restructuring of the MoD on more than one occasion. For example the Department of Health spent £12.4m in 2017/18. Preparing for Brexit has cost £97m in consultancy fees.

Forgive me, therefore, if I don't buy Mr Cummings' line that it's not the Government's fault when things go wrong but an endemic problem with the Civil Service. Or with SAGE. Or PHE. Or Ofqual.

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We have a bunch of little boys and one or two girls trying hard to do a grown-up job, but failing.

Nope

The Minister is accountable. A civil servant may be responsible. And almost certainly other advisers as well.

Looking at A levels, this has been made far worse by the removal of AS levels. Concerns were raised at the time:

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That was Michael Gove, who freely admitted he had taken advice from many sources. So not primarily civil servants.

If you take on a job as a leader you show leadership and it is your judgement that is key. End of.

I don't accept that. Any decision can only be made on the evidence or advice that is available. If the person providing that is wrong then they have to accept some responsibility as well.

One more point

True, for all of the sometimes fair criticism, our numbers have remained pretty steady since opening back up and people appear to have achieved a sensible balance for now.

We are notifying at 13.1 per 100,000 in the UK for 14 day incidence reports. That is higher than 15 of the other EU and EEA countries but lower than 15. So bang in the middle. Luxembourg, Romania and Spain are way the worst. Sweden is at 30.7 by the way.

I am struggling to understand why we now appear to be performing at an average level when it was so poor early on. Maybe the policy really was one of herd immunity and we achieved some element of it. If so, at a pretty huge cost in lives up front. Had we really flattened the curve and now be having higher incident levels, at least we would have have learned much about how to cope with the disease and have a credible drug to help. Taking a big hit early on gave the medics little chance.

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Edited by Mapletree (21 Aug 2020 3.47pm)

Spot on about SCS