The Covid inquiry shows why we’re a dysfunctional country - David Behrens

We took the government seriously three years ago because we wanted to believe they knew what they were doing; because other, more stable countries were taking similar precautions; and because we were frightened.

We’re not frightened now; we’re betrayed, angry and irreparably distrustful.

Whatever we thought we knew, the week’s evidence to the official Covid inquiry was dumbfounding. Boris Johnson and the treacherous, myopic Dominic Cummings were cast as the two most stupid stooges, performing the political equivalent of hitting each other over the head with shovels while their straight man, the chief civil servant Simon Case, knocked their heads together.

He did not give evidence with Cummings because he is on sick leave. So are a great many of his Whitehall colleagues, who between them took 770,000 days off last year. ‘Mental health sick days’ were up by a third on the year before. No sign of a new era there, then.

Mr Case blames his political masters for all the mismanagement but it was his own civil service that had failed for years to prepare the ground for a national emergency. Everyone was probably away sick.

The collateral damage from their ineptitude is a dysfunctional country that was going to have a high speed railway but now isn’t; and which has a universal free health service but no doctors or dentists.

All this fallout should have punctured the pomposity of politicians as surely as a nail in a hot air balloon. So it was surprising when a minor issue emerged this week and revealed the extent to which they still have their heads in the clouds.

This was the news from West Yorkshire that laying on high-class hotels for visiting Hollywood stars is suddenly a political imperative. That at least was the way it came across to me.

“We need a fabulous hotel where Tom Cruise can stay,” effused the mayor, Tracy Brabin. Mr Cruise had been spotted here not long ago and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority had commissioned a tourism study which concluded there was “limited hotel capacity” for the likes of him, compared to other parts of the North.

It got worse. Ms Brabin went on to report that “when Samuel L Jackson came to [Halifax] Piece Hall everyone was panicking, thinking ‘where’s he going to stay?’”

Everyone? Mr Jackson’s sleeping arrangements might have preoccupied a few toadies at the Town Hall but for all anyone else cared he could have kipped on the floor at Woodall services.

And he probably wouldn’t have minded. Actors are used to roughing it on the road and Ms Brabin must know that: she used to be one. An actress friend of ours whom we saw in York last week told us that last time she played Derby her digs were alive with bedbugs. If you want to build a new Regency Hyatt, build it there.

Besides, our county has an abundance of first-class hotels; you have only to head for the touristy parts of York and the North Riding and you’re spoiled for choice. The fact that they are outside Ms Brabin’s bailiwick is neither here nor there.

But the real problem with the story was the heartlessness it betrayed, because there is indeed a shortage of accommodation in the region but it’s at the other end of the scale. At a time when child asylum seekers are being made to share rooms with adults in sardine-like conditions in converted hotels, it is frankly insulting for politicians to be even thinking about the comfort of movie stars.

Messrs Cruise and Jackson would be the first to acknowledge this, should they ever return. Both came here for work, not by choice, to film scenes for movies. Their requirements were fundamentally no different to those of any other contractor who gets parachuted in for a job and then leaves. Only the most hopelessly starstruck would think otherwise.

And hotels are commercial entities that will spring up wherever there’s a demand. The time of politicians is better spent improving the places where there isn’t.

Yet you will find no contrition for this minor insensitivity, let alone for the week’s more serious revelations.

That’s because politics isn’t about being sorry and meaning it; it’s about looking briefly at the floor and then bashing the other guy again with a shovel. Isn’t that right, Dominic?