After cock-ups and cover-ups there MUST be a judgement day for this disaster

AS we approach the peak of this modern plague, there is a theory that we will emerge from these dark days as better people – more caring and with a greater understanding of the things that truly matter.

We will come out of this with a heightened awareness of what is precious to us, and how easily it can be taken away.

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We will be less impressed with the blathering of celebrities — Madonna explaining the crisis while squatting in her bathtub, Prince Harry phoning in advice for the Government from Hollywood.

Who cares? For now we know what courage, kindness and true heroes look like.

Fifty years from now, the children of today will remember Thursday nights at 8pm, when a nation in lockdown came out of their homes to give the carers of the NHS a standing ovation.

And today’s children will tell their own children and grandchildren about Captain Tom Moore, the 99-year-old World War Two veteran who thought it would be a good idea to raise £1,000 for the NHS with a sponsored walk in his back garden — and ended up raising almost £24million.

Captain Tom, the front line workers of the NHS — they are our heroes now.

The cynicism of the modern world melts away in the face of Captain Tom’s optimism and the courage of doctors, nurses and carers who put their lives on the line caring for strangers on gruelling 12-hour shifts.

These are days of raw emotion. It is deeply moving to see the unsung heroes who keep our lives in touch with some sort of normality — the bin men, the supermarket shelf stackers, the delivery drivers, the pharmacists.

And the bus drivers — 20 now dead in London alone.

I know of grown men who were reduced to tears by the Queen’s perfectly pitched speech, balm for a nation’s bruised and battered soul, when our 93-year-old monarch promised us: “We will meet again.”

But as we look around from the peak of the pandemic, we can see that the toll has been enormous.

Beyond the chilling statistics — more than 100,000 infections, more than 15,000 dead — there are families just like yours and mine that have been torn apart for ever.

A war must feel a lot like this because every single day there are stories of individual tragedy that rip your heart out.

Mary Agyapong, just 28, an NHS nurse who died from coronavirus in Luton on Easter Sunday, five days after giving birth to a baby girl delivered by emergency C-section. Mary leaves behind a two-year-old son too.

If this is a war, then it is a war where every battle is fought on the home front, and the pitiless enemy claims the bravest and the best as its victims.

But there has been no failure in the spirit of our people.

The British have reacted to our changed circumstances with stoicism, quiet courage and a heightened sense of community.

But it can’t be denied that there has been a monumental failure of bureaucracy.

Twelve years ago the British people bailed out the failing banks to the tune of £500billion, but now the greedy fat cats of British banking are refusing to help struggling British businesses, despite the Government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme, explicitly designed to prevent one million businesses from collapsing.

Harvey Jenkinson, who runs a gym in West Yorkshire called Gravity Fitness, was forced to lock its doors like every other gym.

Harvey is exactly the kind of businessman that Chancellor Rishi Sunak has tried to protect, yet Lloyds Bank ­— awarded £20billion of taxpayer’s money in 2008 — refused his loan.

Harvey’s gym is one of the 30,000 firms that have asked for a helping hand.

Only a pitiful 6,000 have been granted.

After the worst economic crash in three centuries, these firms need money NOW.

And it is a national disgrace that there are still front line health workers who do not have the right personal protective equipment. Exhausted nurses wear bin bags and desperate doctors try to source their own equipment while the NHS waits for a delivery from Shanghai — who often send PPE so poorly made that it can’t be used.

Our country should never again rely on China — of all places! — to provide our NHS with the right kit.

Public Health England, the body tasked with protecting the health of the nation, and which gets an annual budget of £4.5billion to warn us of the evil of Coco Pops, has not been fit for purpose.

We should be mass-testing the general public by now so we can start getting back to work and school. But even front line carers can’t easily access testing.

Long lines of NHS workers were turned away from testing centres because they didn’t have the right paperwork.

There has been totally conflicting advice about the benefits of wearing face masks.

Yes, there are cock-ups in every war but we have had far too many.

London’s Nightingale Hospital — quickly built by our servicemen with a capacity to treat 4,000 patients — stands almost empty while nurses in our care homes are pushed to breaking point as the virus sweeps through the elderly.

There are the million businesses that are fighting for their lives while the bankers spit in their faces.

There are the many millions of grafters who will have no job to go back to.

There are the working-class students who will never get the education they need if forced to complete their schooling from home.

This country desperately misses the Prime Minister who worked himself to death’s door.

Boris must get well then get back to work as soon as possible.

As a battered nation approaches the peak of this mountain of misery, we miss Boris’s optimism, humour and hope. We have never needed it more, for when lockdown is eased — only Boris can make that agonising decision.

We know there are hard times ahead — millions unemployed, children who will feel their future has already been stolen, thousands of families who will mourn a loved one for ever.

There must be a reckoning when this is done.

On both a national and international level there must be an investigation into who has failed this country — and humanity.

Let them be held to account. Hard questions need to be asked of bankers who allowed healthy small businesses to perish.

The well-paid senior man- agement of Public Health England needs to explain why nurses were sent to do a 12-hour shift wearing bin bags. We need to know what we got wrong — and what we got right.

For the filthy wet markets of China are open today, and this will happen again. But above all, let an international court judge the old men in Beijing whose negligence inflicted this plague on the world and left our economies in ruins.

The Chinese government covered up the scale of the crisis when it emerged in Wuhan and their spin doctors in The World Health Organisation helped them do it — asserting that human-to-human transmission was impossible, then saying it was limited, then praising China for doing a grand job.

A pack of lies. There has been an epic cover-up and the world deserves the unspun truth. This global catastrophe should never have happened.

For the sake of the dead and for the future of children yet to be born, the world must say — NEVER AGAIN.