This month there were two big stories on the Covid pandemic. Firstly, the House of Commons standards and privileges committee investigation found ex-prime minister Boris Johnson “deliberately misled” Parliament over his Covid rule-breaking parties.

Secondly, the news website Open Democracy got hold of a secret document proving the government knew it worked to the “detriment” of care homes during Covid, where thousands of residents died, and did so in part because most social care has been privatised.

The opposition and news media concentrated almost entirely on the former, largely ignoring the latter. It suggested they care more about bad behaviour at parties than life-and-death social policies.

Johnson’s rule-breaking parties were selfish hypocrisy. It’s a real issue. But the solution is to get rid of Johnson. It makes no immediate difference to social policy. And as Johnson has already gone, it’s not much of a change there either.

The Open Democracy scoop was based on getting hold of a secret document via a long Freedom of Information battle. This is the kind of hard digging journalists claim to value, but was widely ignored in favour of “palace gossip” about Johnson.

Open Democracy got the Department for Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) own internal “lessons learned” review of their Covid response from September 2020. The review admitted: “This prioritisation of the protection of hospital capacity, without adequate acknowledgement of key interdependencies, was to the detriment of ASC [Adult Social Care] and led to difficulties in securing PPE, receiving testing, understanding the number of deaths, and producing guidance.”

The DHSC looked after hospitals but did not support care homes — indeed Covid patients were discharged from the former to the latter. Consequently, many vulnerable care home residents died — this is the “detriment.”

The DHSC admit they didn’t look after care homes because, thanks to the “largely private nature of adult social care in Britain” they assumed “care providers would be responsible for their own response,” and social care was “not well understood” by many DSHC staff.

In short, this internal review found DHSC did not understand social care or think they were responsible for stopping Covid in care homes or among care visitors because these services were privatised.

The lesson is that privatisation helped the virus, so privatisation should be reversed. This is one of the many lessons of Covid which media and opposition are downplaying.

This month former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance told the Covid inquiry that “all pandemics feed off inequality and drive inequality.”

Former deputy chief medical officer Professor Jenny Harries said local-authority based “health protection” was “denuded” by austerity.

Expert witness Professor Sir Michael Marmot told the Covid Inquiry that “Britain entered the pandemic with its public services depleted, health improvement stalled, health inequalities increased and health among the poorest people in a state of decline.”

The lesson of Johnson is that we shouldn’t have a selfish man partying in number 10. The wider lessons of Covid are that privatisation, cuts to local services and the NHS and growing inequality helped the virus kill people.

Much of the media like emphasising the Johnson parties because they prefer palace gossip to talking about social change.

The worrying thing is that the opposition also seems to prefer concentrating on parties because changing the personal behaviour of prime ministers is easier than trying to reverse privatisation, cuts and inequality.

In praise of Jeffrey Lewis

If you like indie-rock and folk-punk music which is funny, angry and political, I suggest you buy Jeffrey Lewis’s latest album, Slices of Water.

Lewis is a singer-songwriter who writes and performs wry, deadpan songs in a punky folk or garage-rock style. For comparison, he has a bit of Lou Reed about him — especially if you include Reed’s most “political” album, 1989’s New York.

Lewis also has a sunnier disposition than Reed did, so maybe has more of a Jonathan Richman feel. For those of you who like Billy Bragg’s earnest, honest political folk, you could see Lewis as a more anarchic, more sarcastic, more DIY alternative from the US.

Lewis tells everyday stories of bohemian and down-to-earth life with some wordplay and self-deprecating humour. As well as tales of heartbreak or crazy neighbours or how you let your house get badly untidy when your girlfriend goes away for a few days, Lewis also sings about wars, presidents and the like.

Lewis does fully produced albums, but also just throws out lo-fi, home-recorded albums annually of all the songs he wrote that year: these were once produced as hand-to-hand distributed cassette tapes, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can now buy them as MP3s.

His 2022 “tape” Slices of Water has been available since March and I 100 per cent recommend this product. There are some real gems in there. His all-purpose rant song What in the Hell is the Motherfucking Point of Anything Ever is a protest against everything — wars, Trump, anti-vaxxers and the ways we all blunder from romantic break-up to the next break up.

A more directly anti-war song Get Them Before They Get You contains, like many of Lewis’s tunes, lots of potted history in absurd rhymes covering everything from WWI to Putin invading Ukraine, to Vietnam. The underlying truth Lewis sings about is that they all work on the twisted logic of: “Get them before they get you / Whenever tensions rise / It seems to be the plan / To become the shit that hits the fan.”

These songs deserve to be recorded in a more polished way, but Lewis is such a productive cottage industry of funny, angry songs that he might just chuck them out in this homemade way and move on to new songs, so grab them while they are hot on the subject.

Lewis is a New Yorker, but regularly tours Britain and is well worth catching live. Lewis is also a pretty prolific comic-book artist and sometimes you get cartoon-illustrated comics and serious lectures as well as a bunch of folky, punky rock.

Lewis will be doing some festival appearances in Britain in the summer: you can find out about his tours, latest music and buy his tunes from Thejeffreylewissite.com.