23. Rotating briefers in the time of coronavirus
Watching
the UK coronavirus crisis briefings, a strange phenomenon has caught my eye. An
inordinate number of different people are leading or participating in these
briefings. It’s hard to build an emotional attachment to any of them, as they
continuously rotate. At home we are now playing ‘guess who will brief us today’.
This rotation is akin to that sports clubs do with their stars when it comes to
press conferences. Sports people don’t tend to like press conferences and the
only way to coerce them to do them is to spread the pain amongst the whole
squad. But politicians like the limelight. Then it dawned on me! The questions
by journalists are the same every day! The rotation must be, thus, protection
to avoid terminal, life sapping boredom afflicting the unfortunate speaker who
would have to field them day after day. This may be the best planning yet shown
by UK government during the crisis, they are still working out how to protect
medics, but they are at least protecting briefers
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