Coming home to roost?

Overnight – in my terms at least, given my standard waking schedule involves me going to bed at 8.00pm and getting up for my day shift somewhere between midnight and 1.30am – the big “breaking” news has been centred around the massive row developing between the EU and Britain over the Covid-19 virus and the former’s parlous state of play regarding the bulk-buying and rolling out of the few vaccines that both work and have been approved by the authorities who determine whether they are safe for public human use.

Before moving to the relatively short and pithy observations I wished to offer, I feel I need to register a “qualification” upon what follows.

Firstly, I’m not representing myself here as a member of the professional news media and therefore Rusters will – or maybe I should add “should” – refer to their normal or preferred sources of news in order to receive their latest updates. Anything I mention is based upon my imperfect understanding of what has been going on and, almost certainly by the time most readers access this post, it may well have been overtaken by subsequent events.

However.

What we seem to have here is (what some might describe as) “manna from Heaven” for anyone of a Brexiteer and/or anti-EU persuasion.

The basic issue – as even Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe Editor since 2014, who normally seems to act as an unpaid EU press officer in the UK media, has admitted – is that the EU has made a complete horlicks of its vaccination roll-out planning and execution.

We all know that those in charge of the EU project are federalists – witness the recent row when the UK Government suggested that in future the EU ambassador to the UK might not have full “ambassadorial” status, which is officially only afforded to countries (albeit that the absurdist custom has arisen that ambassadors of the EU – which by both current definition and any stretch of the imagination is not a country – also receive it).

Even some UK diplomats and former political grandees have attacked the Government for this move, calling it “petty”.

However – the fundamental point is – de facto the EU is just a group of 27 countries with a centralised politburo-like bureaucracy that (inevitably?) is as inefficient and full of inconsistency, illogicality and cock-ups as any other political organisation or cartel.

This EU vaccination fiasco is a classic case in point. A satirical comedy scriptwriter could hardly have created a better fictional version.

Stepping back from the nitty-gritty of the EU’s self-inflicted crisis for a moment, one of the themes I often return to in observing politicians (and particularly British ones) at work is the extent to which they seek to capitalise upon – sorry, respond constructively to – every development “in the moment”, rather than from any previously agreed and published policy statement to which they may have nailed their personal colours.

How interesting it is to revisit the past – how inconvenient it is for them – in order to remind ourselves of what current affairs pundits, experts (never mind politicians of course) have previously said e.g. when they spoke in Parliament, or launched into print, or appeared on TV and radio … compared to the positions and confidently-expressed descriptions of “what they would do in the latest circumstances” now!

All the above is an introduction to my current purpose, which is to provide a link for Rusters today to a piece by Guy Adam, on those in the public eye who now have to suffer a degree of “comeuppance” because they got it badly wrong in roundly criticising the UK Government’s policies and actions in relation to the Covid-19 mass-vaccination project.

It appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL