Cross Purposes

The Commons public accounts committee has taken a discouragingly simplistic approach to the world-beating Britishness that is the Hancock and Harding test and trace system, even going so far as to imply that its "main objective" had something or other to do with public health. Matt Hancock, with his well-known expertise on the female form, appointed as its head the ludicrous Dido Harding, an amateur marketing executive whose tenure at TalkTalk cost the company millions because nobody bothered to check whether customers' data was secure. When faced with such trivial matters as helping people not to die of a pandemic, Harding took a similarly relaxed attitude; but her zeal in throwing NHS funds at private profiteers was justly praised. Nevertheless, the Commons public accounts committee persists in the pretence that a Conservative secretary of state for health might have mere biological health on his mind when setting the gravy train in motion.