There are times when Michael Gove can sound like a convincingly reassuring GP. The sort of doctor who would always be willing to go that extra mile with home visits. “Don’t you worry. You’ll soon be better. Just take the medicine and you won’t feel a thing.” Gove was in the Commons to give what came billed as an “urgent statement on public services during the coronavirus”. Only he managed to deliver it without betraying the slightest sense of urgency, even when calling it the biggest crisis since the war. Apart from the 25,000 or so – he couldn’t give a precise number as the Office for National Statistics is always playing catch-up – who had died, the UK was basically in tip-top health. Yes, things were a bit challenging, but he’d basically just like to thank everyone from NHS staff to pharmacists, social workers and lorry drivers for doing their bit. “We haven’t got everything right,” he conceded as an afterthought – a bit of humility never goes amiss – but by and large he couldn’t think of a thing he would have done differently. Lockdown and social distancing had been implemented at exactly the right time, food supply chains were all fully operational, thousands of tests had been carried out and children were learning far more from the government’s online education resources than they ever had in school. He stopped short of saying greenhouse gas emissions and shoplifting were down, but then – for all his faults – he’s not as stupid as Priti Patel. But then no cabinet minister is. In her first appearance back on the Labour frontbench for the best part of five years, Rachel Reeves was both constructive and measured in her reply. She was less interested in Gove’s palliative care homilies and more concerned about what could be done to improve the situation. What was the plan – if indeed there was one – for ending lockdown? What was the government doing about domestic abuse and the protection of vulnerable children? Why were so many doctors being forced to re-use single-use personal protective equipment? And why had the government double-counted so many items in its list of PPE already distributed? The ending of lockdown is still apparently covered by the Official Secrets Act, meaning we may find out about in 30 years’ time, but Gove was at his most Uriah Heep in his other answers. Nobody cared more about vulnerable children than he did and it was desperately unfair for Reeves to have accused the government of double-counting PPE by listing each rubber glove individually. After all, strictly speaking, each finger and thumb could have been counted separately, in which case more than five billion pieces of PPE had so far been distributed. So if anything he had underestimated his government’s achievements. Pete Wishart, the SNP’s frontbench spokesperson, was unconvinced. It was clear from the previous night’s BBC Panorama documentary that the government had failed to stockpile the right levels of PPE so why couldn’t Gove just come out and admit it? Mikey’s ears pricked up at the suggestion of any admission of wrongdoing. He’s been in politics long enough not to implicate himself in anything that might have legal liability when a public inquiry is an inevitability. The government had always stockpiled exactly the amount of PPE the scientists had recommended, Gove said, citing a hitherto unknown advisory group. It didn’t exactly tally with anything we had heard about Exercise Cygnus, the 2016 pandemic plan, but maybe this new scientific panel is the only one on which Dominic Cummings isn’t thought to have sat in the past few years. It’s not hard to see that it’s the scientists that are being lined up for the show trial when the dust finally settles. The rest of the questions were batted away with Gove’s customarily urbane bedside manner. A veneer of civility masking condescension and contempt. Even towards his fellow Tory backbenchers, who are now beginning to have their doubts over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Sitting in front of the country’s largest Union Jack, Desmond Swayne wondered why the scheme to attract more British fruit and veg pickers – last year’s every Brexiter’s wet dream – had barely managed to attract more than 100 takers. Gove wittered on about having once dug up a potato as a teenager. Far better than the real reason that no Brits are prepared to work 12-hour days for minimum wage while being put up in caravans on site. Where are the Romanians when you need them? The one question he answered directly was Tory Mark Harper’s on the discrepancy between the capacity for testing and the number of tests administered. Anything to throw Matt Hancock under a bus. Poor Tigger is everyone’s favourite fall guy now. Of course the important figure was the number of tests taken. He had no idea if the government would meet its 100,000 target a day by the end of the month Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But as this wasn’t a commitment he personally had made he wouldn’t be taking the rap for it. A few hours later, Hancock appeared in person at the 5pm Downing Street press conference where he basically said the same thing he has said for the last week. The media needed to stop concentrating on the number of deaths and start being a bit more positive about what had been done. The fact that the UK now topped the European mortality charts was just a statistical outlier. Something of which we could even be proud. We were a nation of winners. The government was doing a great job – with no thanks to the Govester – and he was determined not just to meet his testing target but to expand it. Hell, if necessary he could always ramp the figures up by testing the same people five times in as many minutes. And no, he wasn’t going to apologise for anything. Why should he? If he was going down, he would be making sure to take as many of his colleagues with him.