'it makes me angry that, just when the country needs leadership, we get serial incompetence. Six months in, a Cabinet chosen on loyalty alone shows no sign of having learnt any lessons from the crisis.
Here are two things I’ve learnt.
First, if you neglect your public services, you won’t be ready when a crisis hits. Nobody blames the government for the existence of the virus.
But the under-funding of the NHS, the abandonment of social care and the lack of investment in prevention, that’s all on their watch. That’s all down to them.
And it always ends this way with Tory governments:
Public services are neglected, cut-back, and left to decline. For a party called the Conservative Party, they don’t seem to conserve very much.
The second thing I’ve learnt is that a crisis reveals character like nothing else.
And I think we’ve learnt a lot about this Prime Minister. Tory backbenchers know it. His Cabinet knows it. We all know it.
He’s just not serious. He’s just not up to the job.
Whenever he encounters a problem, Johnson responds either by wishing it away or by lashing out.
He kept wishing away the problems with testing, pretending they didn’t exist. He wished away the problems with the Irish border. Then, when he finally realised what he’d signed up to, he lashed out and decided to break international law.
We’re all doing our bit to combat the virus by obeying the rule of six. Meanwhile the government won’t even obey the rule of law.
And this is the big difference between the Prime Minister and me:
While Boris Johnson was writing flippant columns about bendy bananas, I was defending victims and prosecuting terrorists.
While he was being sacked by a newspaper for making up quotes, I was fighting for justice and the rule of law.'
That is excellent stuff.