They had to go and ruin it, didn’t they? Here is a great moment for humanity: lovely people getting a vaccination against a deadly virus that has been developed with breathtaking rapidity. And what is the image that has been injected into our brains where it will lodge like a parasite? Matt Hancock pretend-crying on Good Morning Britain like a no-hoper auditioning for clown school.

The health secretary staged his bizarre pantomime presumably because the simple emotions that any sane person might be feeling – relief, hope, a tinge of wonder at the extraordinary ingenuity of which our species is capable – are not enough. Another layer of sentiment must be slathered on.

As throughout the pandemic, that extra coating is a thick overlay of phoney patriotism. The grim reality of being the first country in Europe to pass 50,000 deaths from Covid-19 must be somehow cancelled by the boast of being the first in the world to begin vaccinating against it.
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For everybody else, the race has been against the virus. For the Johnson regime, it seems, the race is against everybody else. That way of thinking is especially risible when you didn’t even build the rocket.

But it’s also rather sad. Confident countries don’t need to prove their greatness to themselves by building their very own Olympic podiums and presenting themselves with gold medals. They don’t need to suck the joy out of a great achievement for humanity by wrapping it in red, white and blue. We’ve all shed enough real tears this year – spare us the fake patriotic ones.