Dan Hodges - Pants On Fire

With the UK now having the worst death toll from Coronavirus infections of any country in Europe, and indeed second only to the rolling shambles that is the USA under the less than benign leadership of Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, someone in the Northcliffe House bunker has clearly decided that the time was right for one of their obscenely overpaid pundits to make a futile gesture. And so it has come to pass.

He's desperate, Dan

This duty has fallen to the Mail on Sunday’s not even slightly celebrated blues artiste Whinging Dan Hodges, floor-crosser supreme and worthy successor to the now retired Peter McKay as the World’s Worst Columnist. “We DON’T have the worst Covid-19 death rate in Europe and it’s wicked of the Left to pretend we do” he proclaims, later also asserting “Britain does not have the worst Covid-19 death toll in Europe”.

It is not long before Desperate Dan goes from talking well, but lying badly (we do have a higher death toll than Italy), to losing it completely, so fully invested is he in The Adoration Of The Boris. “The assertion that Britain has the worst Covid-19 death rate is the coronavirus equivalent [of the £350 million for the NHS Vote Leave pledge]. Those peddling this fake news have stopped short of painting the Grim Reaper on the side of a bus and touring it round the nation. But the effect is the same. They are working the political angles on the most deadly global pandemic for a century”. And there is more.

“Obviously part of it is base hostility to Boris and his administration. As I’ve written before, there are those on the liberal Left who will never forgive him for winning that Brexit referendum, then cementing his victory in last year’s General Election … the problem is not British exceptionalism, but British nihilism. A need among sections of marginalised liberalism to debunk the simplistic notion British is Best by replacing it with the even more simplistic notion British is Worst”. To which I call bullshit.

Let’s consider Hodges twin assertions, shall we? Even if you limit yourself to the declared death tolls from both countries, the UK numbers are not only higher, but the rate of increase is greater. Hodges suggests the Italian total may be much higher, but this is disingenuous nonsense: he knows the UK death toll is also far higher (pace the FT).

So he then falls back on the death rate, asserting “The most obvious is the differing size of the respective national populations. Britain’s population is ten per cent larger than Italy’s, and 40 per cent larger than Spain’s”. Ri-i-i-ight. Let’s look at a helpful graph of information from the World Health Organization, showing the number of deaths per million of population, on a seven day moving average to the 8th of May.

Which country comes out top, above Sweden, the USA, Italy and Spain? The UK. A higher Coronavirus death rate than all those other nations. There’s a good reason that Dan Hodges devotes so much of his column to whining “look over there at Italy”. Because he doesn’t want his readers to see that his pants are well and truly alight.

But his bosses, and his pal Bozo, will throw him a few biscuits. So that’s all right, then.

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