Welcome to Johnson’s alternative reality – where care home workers get the blame

Can it really be three months ago that Matt Hancock responded to the government’s failure to provide care home workers with adequate PPE by announcing what he called “a new brand”? This, you might dimly recall, was a small lapel badge for care home workers. Its prophylactic properties were unclear, though it was certainly intended to throw a ring of steel around Hancock, who at least managed to get his hands on one. Unfortunately, owing to a second supply problem, the government promptly struggled to even provide care workers with the badge. Despite all this, plenty of people dismissed critics of the badge-based response as sneerers.

We must hope to hear from them again now the government is officially blaming care home workers for the deaths of people in care homes – and, presumably, blaming care home workers for the deaths of care home workers themselves. According to Boris Johnson, a Cobra-dodging handshake-nut who was blamelessly “mugged” by the virus himself, “too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have”. Oof. This is quite the blame-game from a government that operated a formal procedure of discharging more than 25,000 people from hospitals into care homes without testing them for coronavirus. You could say that care home residents are still living with the consequences of that decision, were it not for the fact that so many of them ended up dying from it.

Either way, the prime minster’s shithousery led to a veritable explosion from Mark Adams, the chief executive of leading social care charity Community Integrated Care, who said this morning : “We’re almost entering an … alternative reality where the government set the rules, we follow them and they don’t like the results and they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best.”

A statement with which my only cavil is: enterING? I fear we have been plunged into this alternative reality for some time now. If you’re looking for “a new brand”, call it the Mattrix. Needless to say the government’s next weaselling out of responsibility has been to say that Johnson didn’t mean what people are saying he meant, even though those were literally the words he said. Perhaps they’ll get away with it. In fairness, the prime minister’s oratorical style increasingly provokes questions. Namely: can you feel your arm? Does your vision seem affected? Can you name the current prime minister? (I’m going to shock us all: it’s actually you.)

So yes: we are where we are. And yet: need we be? Is it too much to want to live in a country where the government doesn’t describe its own pandemic response as whack-a-mole? I mean, guys … Go to the fairground. No one wins whack-a-mole. Only people who’ve had 12 pints of scrumpy believe they can execute a precise and targeted approach to emerging outbreaks of mole. That’s how the circus folk have set it up: you’re never going to win the giant teddy, yes? You’re going to flame out below the threshold for a tiny teddy, shake your head, think about asking the carnival operator for your money back, have a look at him, think better of it, then make the same mistake all over again trying to shoot some ducks through a gun barrel with a 20-degree bend in it. Whack-a-mole? You might as well describe your contact tracing strategy as Find the Lady.

Speaking of which, no sooner have the pubs opened than the first few are forced to close again, after punters tested positive for coronavirus. A number of pubs are now beginning the process of contacting people who spent “Independence Day” with them. Please take a moment to enjoy the bathos. A few months ago, government ministers were honking daily that we were going to invent our own world-beating test and trace app, a state-of-the-art public health strategy that has now been delegated to the manager of the Fox and Hounds in Batley.

Still, it was interesting to see how enthusiastically the British government promoted last Saturday as “Independence Day”, considering that what is traditionally celebrated on Independence Day is the pleasure of no longer being ruled by the British government. If only the British ruling class of 1776 had thought of it, they could have placated the 13 American colonies with a haircut and some Jägerbombs.

Ultimately, it will stand as a lasting tribute to Johnson’s priorities that he opened the pubs before the schools. Perhaps the government’s hope is that if you ban education for long enough, you drive it underground and make it someone else’s problem to administer. Perhaps even now, pubs are beginning to operate illegal education stills. To gain access to the old speakeasies, customers in the know would often pass a book across a decoy store counter. Our best hope now is that children are entering pubs and ordering a pint of snakebite, which is the signal for the bar staff to furtively slide back the spirit optics to reveal a door to a hidden cellar classroom where illicit learning is being dispensed. The alternative reality is that the future of an increasingly lost generation of schoolchildren is still in the hands of Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson. What an intensely sobering thought. You can see why this is an administration that reflexively understands theirs is a governing style best enjoyed very drunk indeed.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist