Matt Hancock has offered the NHS a salute. I think they'd prefer masks

There are items slightly further up the NHS's wish list than a salute from the health secretary – protective equipment, say

Today was Matt Hancock’s turn to look gravely down the barrel of a TV news camera and hope that his very best John 1:1 voice might reassure an incarcerated nation.

With eyes sunk so deep into his exhausted head, we are, he reminded us, at war with the coronavirus, and the front line is the NHS. “We salute you,” he said. If NHS nurses were to be writing a corona-based Christmas list, certain items, like protective masks, for example, are likely to feature higher than a salute, but you can’t have everything. Seriously – you can’t, so stop asking.

Which, of course, we do. It is a touch on the inconvenient side, however, that for as long as anyone in the NHS can remember, they’ve been at war not with any virus, but with the government, and have not been winning.

Here was Matt Hancock, announcing the success of the scheme to ask retired NHS staff to come back to work. 11,000 have signed up, he said. 6,000 nurses, 2,660 doctors. Then there are 5,500 final year medical students, and 18,000 final year nurses all being fast-tracked to the front line.

The deja vu that hung about it was especially unfortunate. Most of the general election campaign took place over the persistent mood music of the promised “50,000 new nurses” not actually being new at all, but double-counting those whose jobs were scheduled to be axed, but now wouldn’t be (and, it turns out, be asked to come back anyway).

Then there were “40 new hospitals” actually being six, the “20,000 new police officers” not quite replacing the number that have been scrapped in the last decade of Conservative government, and so on, and so on.

At this hour of need, Hancock and co are doing their level best to convince us they are deadly serious when they say they have every intention to temporarily return the NHS to somewhere near the state it was in before they got their hands on it.

There was a touch of de ja vu about Matt Hancock’s other big announcements, too. Londoners still take a special interest in news about the Olympic games, for obvious reasons, and the day on which the Tokyo games became certain to be delayed, also turns out to be the day this country would be launching a fresh appeal for volunteers, bringing in the army and turning an old London 2012 venue into a giant 4,000-bed hospital.

Matt Hancock has formally launched an appeal for fully 250,000 “NHS volunteer responders.”

“People in good health,” he said, “to assist with shopping, and delivery of medicines.”

One imagines he’ll have no problem hitting that target. Many people will leap at the chance to just get out of the house.

It may even be that some of London 2012’s 100,000 “games makers” answer the call again. Some of them, in theory, could even end up back at the Excel Centre, or NHS Nightingale, as it is to become known, though answering the call of duty this time won’t come with getting to see Anthony Joshua or Nicola Adams win Olympic gold. The army will certainly be called in to assist, a somewhat tougher job than guiding giddy ticket holders through metal detectors. They will see things one can scarcely imagine.

Though the ultimate de ja vu is with the Big Society. Remember that? That was David Cameron’s big idea that never quite happened, for how to strip back essential public services and replace them with community spirited volunteers, an idea he imagined would work because he personally could always be relied upon to help put away the chairs after community cricket matches.

It never quite worked because it never quite made sense, and it also just drew attention to the terrible cuts he himself was delivering. His grand dream has kind of come true now, even though we have had to live through several nightmares to get there.

What cannot be in any doubt, however, is that when this terrible storm has passed, the public will know that “saluting” the NHS is not enough. They, or rather we, will know, that a round of applause in the House of Commons, to which they were treated on Monday afternoon, is not the answer.

Already, terrible graphs exist, which plot the severity of the coronavirus outbreak versus the available number of Intensive Care Unit beds, in which huddled in the bottom right-hand corner of doom are the US, the UK and Iran.

A salute won’t sort that out; nor will a round of applause. Only proper action, that once it inevitably comes will already have been too late.