Turns out PPE was in the sky all along – it was just headed in the wrong direction

UK firms have bombarded the government with offers of masks, gowns and gloves. When our shambolic government didn't take them up on it, many were forced to export their stocks, writes Matthew Norman

Matt Hancock claims he doesn't have a magic wand to get all the equipment the NHS needs (PA)

If you trust in the equation that comedy equals tragedy and time, one day someone will make a funny film about the PPE fiasco of 2020.

Obviously, it won’t be any time soon. For the next 80 years, the living will be around to remember those who died. Add another two decades for good taste, and Carry On Falling Like Flies For The Want Of A Gown will debut on whatever has replaced Netflix.

But even while this country is being drenched by this cascade of needless casualties, the details have the flavour of farce. You know, the kind that might belong to one of those black-and-white flicks about Whitehall that rolled off the studio production lines in the 1950s, invariably starring Richard Wattis, and sometimes Terry-Thomas (both appear in Carlton-Browne of the FO, a pleasantly pallid twist on Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop). Yet even these twin paradigms of governmental mismanagement look masterful compared with the sorry bunch running the show today.

More than two months ago, it was clear from the carnage in northern Italy that the safety of NHS staff and carers would rely on a stockpile of protective equipment.

At that stage, an adequate government – one whose leader neither shook hands “with everybody” in an infected building nor regarded allowing crowds of 75,000 at the Cheltenham Festival as a spiffing wheeze – would have prioritised a taskforce dedicated to building the stockpile. This government allowed existing supplies to be exported.

As Johnson missed Cobra meetings and his government flirted with the social Darwinism euphemised as “herd immunity”, infection rates of NHS and care staff mounted. UK firms publicly and spiritedly bombarded the government with offers of gowns, masks and gloves. One based in Birmingham emailed the cabinet office asking to help. Like the others, it received no reply, and had to sell its stocks to foreign nations who actually wanted them.

When Matt Hancock was asked about the shortfall last Friday, he implied that the very idea of a solution was blue-sky thinking. “I would love to be able to wave a magic wand,” he said, “and have PPE fall from the sky in large quantities.” It turns out the PPE was in the sky all along. It was simply in the cargo holds of aircraft travelling in the wrong direction.

On Saturday, local government secretary Robert Jenrick portended the reversal of this policy with the news that 84 tonnes of PPE ordered from Turkey would soon land on British soil.

This turned out to be less a statement of fact than a cunningly disguised audition for Doctor Who, just in case Jodie Whitaker’s new career as an online teacher stops her returning to the show. Jenrick’s pledge, it transpired, was predicated on one of those temporal anomalies the Time Lord comes across now and again. Whether you call it the Bootstrap Paradox, or prefer David Tennant’s “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey”, it’s the theory that a future action can retroactively bring a non-existent previous event into being. Only in this case, it didn’t.

The Turkish order hadn’t been placed when Jenrick hinted that the PPE was awaiting clearance from air traffic control. His claim that the 80,000 gowns were on the way inexplicably failed to rewrite history. The order was placed the next day, and at the time of writing, the RAF plane sent to collect them hasn’t left Turkey. On the form book, it’s even money that it will be ordered to reroute the moment it does, and deliver the gear to the Federated States of Micronesia.

Now there are those who pride themselves on resisting the rush to judgment. They rightly point out that nothing about this is easy, and that those handling the crisis are doing their absolute best. No doubt they are. But what can you say about the absolute best of those who permit the export of life-preserving supplies, ignore offers of replacements in storage here, and then pledge the imminent arrival of items that haven’t been ordered?

Once again, as with Johnson’s absenteeism from the five Cobra meetings, words seem a miserable substitute for a photo of the face in Munch’s The Scream. But if we must dredge some up, they might be these: if you a) commandeered Jenrick’s Tardis and flew it back to the middle of January b) used an arcane intergalactic law to dissolve the government and c) replaced it with a ruling council of members of the public selected at random by the Premium Bonds computer – if you did that and left them to it, do you really imagine that the death toll would be worse than it is today.