Some years ago I was invited to a dinner party by a friend of mine – a partner in a firm of chartered accountants.  During the meal the subject of the armed forces, or more particularly the cost of them, came up.  One of my fellow guests, a major in the Signals – or was it the Pay Corps? I forget – remarked that one easy saving would be to stop recruiting the Gurhkas.  They were, he said, an anachronism: they had no understanding of modern technology, and no place in a modern army.

And yet it is a fact that in the Falklands war the troops most feared by the Argentines were not the paras, not the commandos, not even the special forces, but the Gurkhas.  They fought with the utmost tenacity and the utmost loyalty.  They embodied the word “courage” to a man.

But it is not just their courage that makes the Gurkhas so formidable.  They are ruthless and they are efficient.

There were, in the 20th century, two men who, in terms of their administrative ability stood head and shoulders above their peers.  Both were, like the Gurkhas, superficially unassuming,  underestimated by their peers, and yet responsible for the transformation of their respective countries; judged not by promises, but achievement.  The two were Viscount – better known as Clement – Attlee and Ioseb Djugashvili, otherwise known as Stalin*

When the history of Covid-19 comes to be written I doubt that the name of Hancock will be seen in quite the same light.   The unfortunate Minister of “Health”  – himself a victim of the very disease against which he “defends” us – has failed dismally.  He has over promised and underachieved, and in that – and as far as I can see in that alone – his results have been spectacular – the figures speak for themselves, 2,000 out of an NHS  staff of half a million tested.  A daily total of around 8,000 tested against a target of 70,000 – and Hancock asks us to believe this will increase to 100,000 by the end of this month.  Administrative success requires determination and graft: not fine words and promises.  We’ll see.

Hancock’s namesake – Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock of 23 Railway cuttings East Cheam – when asked in The Blood Donor by an admiring Hugh Lloyd, “are you are doctor?” replied, with splendid insouciance, in words that may yet turn out to be a fitting epitaph for our own latter day Hancock, “No, I never really bothered.”

* for example, a quirk of Stalin was never to sit at the head of the table. C.P. Snow has written “they underestimated Stalin at that time. They went on underestimating him.  almost up to the end, they found it inexplicable that he got anywhere at all.*