Vince Cable: Covid-19 incompetence could cost the Tories their Red Wall seats

Writing for the Independent, Vince Cable notes that the public health measures necessary to curb Covid-19 are falling most heavily on the Red Wall seats that gave Boris Johnson his majority last year:

Residents in these afflicted areas would have no particular reason to blame the government for their misfortune were it not for one piece of serious incompetence. In most countries where there are areas with rising infections there is an effective test and trace system to isolate clusters and super-spreading individuals. Germany, Korea, Sweden, China and Japan are, in different ways, controlling the disease in this fashion. Highly targeted action can then follow whether supported by rules or voluntary compliance.

But in the UK, the test and trace system is proving a disaster because of a combination of poor design, over-centralisation, defective software, inefficient and predatory private providers and poor management under the politically appointed leadership of Lady Dido Harding (some say that pop singers Dido and Lady Gaga would combine to do a better job).

It's a long and serious piece, but I like the joke and topical reference that ends this quotation.