UK coronavirus live: Gove says lockdown could be extended; Starmer rejects union calls to close schools
Gove #Gove
Our cabinet structure has not changed. It’s still the same peacetime tried-and-tested system, but it’s very risk averse. We should have moved onto a war footing with slicker decision-making and splitting policy creation versus operational delivery.
I’m afraid this was treated as if it was a terrorist attack or a flooding, where there was a Cobra, a national security council meeting, and then we made some plans and then we’ve tried to keep it going.
This is very different. It should be comparable to where we were in the Second World War, where you have an ongoing crisis, where the messaging is going to change quite regularly …
We haven’t really ever moved to that structure, which is far more efficient in its decision making, separating the daily business of government. The consequence of that is that the bandwidth in Number 10 is just overwhelmed.