Hi Umair, I think you're a little unfair about the UK - I can't comment on the USA though I think you're being unfair there too.

You have to distinguish between the people themselves and the ones running the country. Yes, to a certain extent they reflect each other - but also, to a larger extent they don't.

Let me explain. At the moment, with Boris and his chums we have a spectacularly incompetent bunch of wuzzocks running the country. They are also ideologically hobbled by their embrace of extreme neoliberalism, libertarianism and the Chums' Charter rule.

In case you don't know, the Chums Charter refers to the idea that when you can hand out lovely contracts worth millions and billions of pounds, you hand them out to your old chums from Eton who are now running companies.

Would test-and-trace have been as disastrously bad if the chums had kept their chubby fingers out of it?

NHS doctors beg people not to call it NHS Test & Trace because it's not only centralised, it's also largely outsourced to 22 outside companies. This gives you the worst of all worlds, right away. It's centralised so it has no contact with local authorities who are much better at running test-and-trace anyway, because they've done it before. It outsources all over the place so it's also fragmented.

Serco is the biggest company and of course it's run by Rupert Soames, a major chum of Boris's from Eton, grandson of Winston Churchill.

Now for all I know Soames may be a wonderful CEO. However Serco is not covering itself with glory and is currently managing to contact just 56% of the people who may have caught Covid 19.

Serco has failed to cover itself in glory before.

Dido Harding, head of the "NHS" Test and Trace programme, is another chum of Boris's and there's a murky incestuous network of other chums and rightwing Tory MPs giving each other jobs, finding each other grants and going to horseraces together.

A strong economy can withstand these parasitic growths - but not in a pandemic. When plum jobs that need basic skills in management are handed to incompetent chums, the people who could have done the job don't get it and the people who might have been contacted and told to self-isolate, aren't and don't and merrily go on unknowingly spreading Covid19.

Unfortunately when people voted for Boris, they thought they were voting for Getting Brexit Done, not Stopping Covid Now.

Boris and his chums had plotted to take over the UK, which is basically an elective dictatorship, so they could pillage it and turn it into an even better tax haven in the course of Brexit. Their plans did not include actually having to cope with a nasty infectious pandemic.

Hence their utter uselessness and cluelessness, their stupid picking of fights with entire sections of England (hello Great Manchester) over their disastrous mini-lockdowns and their covert milking of the country for cash.

Should the great British public have elected someone better - yes, but unfortunately someone better was not available. (Sorry, I think Corbyn is a painfully honest man, but almost as bad a prime ministerial option as Boris himself.)

We got Boris and although he isn't a malignant narcissist like Trump, he is a narcissist and oddly childlike in his hunger for love .

I actually feel sorry for the man who's been landed with problems so much bigger than he is when all he wanted was a jolly good time and the gratitude of his chums.

Would Keir Starmer have managed better? I suspect he would if only because he would at least have paid attention to the science and possibly locked down earlier. We'll never know.

British society was pulling together quite well in March and April - until in May it came out that another Boris chum - his advisor Dominic Cummings - had ignored the lockdown rules. Boris proved his devotion to his chum by not firing him and defending him - at the price of firmly signalling to the bolshy British public that there was one rule for them, hoi polloi, and another rule for Boris's chums.

After that the unity was shot and everybody started arguing again.

Would we have been able to pull together under better leadership - I think so.

Don't mistake the accidents of politics for a deep tendency of the society at large. The US and UK have had a bad pandemic because of their incompetent leadership, not because they're unable to unite.

It's quite poetic, really.