You can punctuate the title any way you like.
Tim Harford’s More or Less is back on BBC Radio 4. Everyone should listen to it. Whether you’re a statistics nerd, enjoy hearing statesmen get caught out fibbing, just like learning facts of the world, or (like me) all of the above it’s worth every minute.
This week we had the pleasure of Hero Hancock. The man who joined his boss in screwing up every last thing he touched, but in the smaller remit of the UK health service. And for who (also like his boss) we’ve forgotten about all of that thanks to his tangential contact with employing someone to arrange vaccines.
There’s a serious Covid outbreak in Bolton, North West England. That was caused by Honest Boris, our illustrious ankle-trousered Prime Minister, vetoing a travel-ban from India, where there’s much family contact with, when India’s current Covid boom was in its prime. He was happy to ban travel from Pakistan and Bangladesh at the time, though they had a quarter and a half of the case rate*. Co-incidentally there was a trade deal to be announced.
Hero Hancock proclaimed to parliament that we vaccinated “tens of thousands… every single day” in Bolton. Incredulous journalists asked his department about this incredible figure (Bolton has a population of 194,000), they were told “He meant ‘per week'”. The actual figure was 17,000. In the week.
*Hancock mis-spoke about that one too