Joey Barton hits out at ‘horrendous leadership’ for government’s handling of coronavirus

Fleetwood Town manager vented his anger with the government’s failure to control the spread of Covid-19 and labelled them ‘space cadets from Eton’

Fleetwood Town manager Joey Barton has hit out at the government for their “horrendous leadership” during the coronavirus pandemic after deaths in the United Kingdom exceeded 10,000 at the weekend.

Sunday’s death toll as of 5pm Saturday evening saw the number of recorded hospital deaths reach 10,612, with the UK currently among the worst-hit countries in the world by the outbreak of Covid-19.

Prime minister Boris Johnson left hospital on Sunday after being treated in intensive care upon testing positive for coronavirus, but his government has been strongly criticised for not doing enough to contain the spread of the virus that originated in China at the end of 2019. The main areas of concern have been how long it took to implement a nationwide lockdown – and the relatively relaxed guidelines it involves – and how experts got it wrong over “herd immunisation”, which was quickly scrapped when the true scale of expected deaths from coronavirus was realised.

Johnson and other leading government figures including health secretary Matt Hancock and Cabinet minister Michael Gove have been targeted with criticism for their words and actions, and former footballer Barton joined the growing anger at how the pandemic has been handled.

“We can’t just ignore those numbers and believe it was handled correctly in this country,” Barton wrote on Twitter on Monday.

“That is over 10,000 human beings no longer breathing because of horrendous leadership. Not acceptable. Shouldn’t be papered over.”

The former Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers midfielder’s outburst followed a direct question to Hancock over the weekend in which he asked how his younger cousin was able to travel from the United States to the UK – two countries who are in lockdown – without a single checkpoint for coronavirus.

“My cousin flew back from (the) USA last week,” Barton said. “The UK was on lockdown. He flew Tulsa to Chicago, Chicago to Washington DC, Washington DC to Heathrow and he was never checked once at any point for CV.

“How is that good governance? Surely, you knew it was serious then @MattHancock?

“Insane. How are we meant to get on top of this crisis. We needed strong governance and got a bunch of space cadets from Eton.”