Lockdown Bulletin - Westminster Press Pack

I have a cousin who lives on a farm in northern Victoria. He has an Instagram account and occasionally posts to it - if there is an unusually hard frost, he'll put up a picture of the solid block the water in his birdbath has become overnight; in the bush fires, we were treated to photographs of smoke rising from distant hills; sometimes he'll provide a shot of some unusual bush plant flowering or a brief clip of cockatoos yahooing across the sky.

The other day, my cousin posted a little video, showing wasps buzzing about near what looked like the bottom of a door. "It's that time of year when the bloody European wasps appear", he wrote in the caption, "they are pointless and annoying."

After I'd watched my cousin's short video, I turned on the television to look at the nightly press conference in Downing Street. The Westminster press pack hurled furious questions at the hapless souls who are trying to manage the current coronavirus crisis. The pack seemed more than anything else to want to catch someone out somewhere, they were clamouring for a victim. In the midst of attempts to control the spread of an illness that no one has ever seen before, they seemed to be interested only in gotchas.

Journalist after journalist came forward to jab at the minister sent out to face them that evening - and they do the same on each occasion. They appear to be hoping to show up the government's failings when it is clear that no government is going to get things entirely right, because actually no one knows for certain what is the right approach, plus everyone is working on the run.

Having the press shrieking about how the government didn't move soon enough and then, once they did move, how the economy will be destroyed, how there isn't enough protective equipment, how there should be more testing, is entirely unhelpful, when no one is claiming that all is perfect, but everyone is scrambling to try to do the best they can. It is as if the press believe that the government is deliberately making mistakes, rather than working under extreme duress.

I think there are many things that have been done wrong, but I believe that all decisions have been taken with the best of intentions. That might sound feeble, and it certainly isn't a ringing endorsement of all UK policy; what it is though is a query about what exactly the Westminster press think they are achieving with their distracting hostility, their attitude that the government is the enemy, to be needled and attacked at this hugely difficult time.

In short, apart from the excellent Hugh Pym, the BBC's health editor, who is exemplary, the rest of the journalists reporting on the coronavirus crisis in Britain remind me of my cousin's pointless and annoying wasps. While trying to make things better for the nation, our politicians are forced to swat at these little stinging nobodies who make nothing better or clearer or easier for anyone at all.