For much of the week, it’s been as if the government has gone out of its way to appear wilfully clueless. First, the psychotically unstable Dominic Raab, then the pathologically untrustworthy Michael Gove, culminating with the shambolically underprepared Alok Sharma. History repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce. It was as if the only real contingency plans the government had made were for the postponement of this year’s climate change conference. Sometimes, doing absolutely nothing proves to be entirely the right option.

But cometh the hour … There are some words I thought I’d never write. Like “Thank God for Matt Hancock”. But thank God for Matt Hancock. It seemed a high-risk strategy to send out the health secretary for the daily Downing Street press conference as it was only six days since he announced that he had contracted coronavirus. And the official NHS guidance is for anyone with symptoms to self-isolate for a week.

Maybe he had first become symptomatic shortly after 5pm last Thursday. That at least would explain why the press conference began 25 minutes late. Matt was merely doing his civic duty. He had been waiting the full seven days and had sneaked into Downing Street under the wire.

This was Hancock at his least needy. Though, Matt being Matt, he couldn’t not let slip a slight air of Tiggerishness at the start of his statement. A Tigger’s gotta do what a Tigger’s gotta do. The government had been doing a brilliant job. Everything that was being done was being guided by the science: even if the science the UK government had occasionally seemed out of step with that of countries with rather better track records on treating the disease.

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He was also positively gushing about the speed at which the 4,000-bed Nightingale hospital had been knocked together in London. In fairness, it’s one hell of an achievement. But by no stretch of the imagination can it be called a proper hospital. It’s a field hospital at best. Let’s hope Boris Johnson doesn’t think he can get away with counting it as one of his promised 40 new hospitals. When push comes to shove, it’s just a much-needed large facility providing basic care for people with respiratory problems. It would be no one’s destination of choice for urgent treatment.

But then Tigger dropped the Tigger act. Rishi Sunak apart, for the first time since the pandemic started, a minister stood up to take responsibility for the situation. It’s a weird coincidence that the two ministers who look as if they still need to show ID at off-licences are the ones to show true leadership. Sure, he looked a bit defensive at times, but given the circumstances, that seemed fair enough. He was boldly going where no minister had gone before.

Even though he didn’t go into details – such as why the South Koreans and the Germans are able to identify tests that work while we appear to have bought 7.5m kits that we still don’t know are effective or not – he did admit the government had made mistakes. And now that he was recovering from the illness, he was going to take personal responsibility for putting things right.

First, he was going to write off £13bn of NHS debt. On any other day this would have been the biggest news story – one that would have horrified most of his fellow Tory MPs – but now it was nothing more than a throwaway. An academic footnote. He quickly moved on. “I have a five-pillar plan,” he declared. Politicians love to have plans in fives. Four sounds too few and six sounds as if you aren’t thinking clearly. Matt, though, had just one pillar. To fend off ongoing criticism of the government’s testing programme by committing to 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month.

Given that the government has consistently missed even its own piss-poor targets – we’re struggling to manage 10,000 tests a day at the moment – it was understandable that most of the questions were on whether 100,000 was hopelessly optimistic. But Matt was adamant. He couldn’t exactly promise how many of the tests would be antibody and and how many antigen, but 100,000 was the hill he was prepared to die on. No more bullshit. No more obfuscation. A real target with his job on the line if he failed to deliver.

To add to the distinct air of the surreal – it’s so rare to find a politician behaving like a grownup – he even allowed journalists follow-up questions. Normally, the minister fails to answer the question and swiftly moves on to the next one. But now Matt was positively inviting interrogation. Had he been clear enough? Do you want more details? Most of the hacks were so startled by this new openness, they didn’t actually have any prepared follow-ups and ad-libbed. For once it was the media doing the waffling.

For reasons best known to itself, the BBC got bored with such an informative press conference and cut to the weather forecast halfway through. Apparently it’s going to be a nice weekend to stay indoors. But Sky persevered to the end and Matt extended the press conference to a record-beating 80 minutes. In more ways than one, he had raised the bar considerably for other ministers in the coming weeks.