But they could organise awarding the funds to one of their friends who pinky promises they know how to organise a piss up

Government is a continuum, and I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t riven with cronyism. A book came out in 2005 called The Essential Guide to Quangos and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Blair’s government that invented them (and it certainly didn’t put a stop to them).

No government has ever or will be completely uncorrupt or efficient. Thatcher bent various rules for her shady son. Labour arranged all those dodgy PPI deals. Humans will be human. But in my 54 years on this planet and living in the UK I don't remember a government being anything like this corrupt or inefficient. Everyone politician with a brain, spine or conscience was fired and replaced by Brexit 'loyalists'. And here we are. One of the worst responses to the pandemic in the world and I don't know if I will even be able to get fresh veg in January. So much for British exceptionalism.

I live in Japan and the response by the government here was and is in sharp contrast to that in the UK (a super soft lockdown that ended before the summer is one example), yet it has been akin to comedy show from the beginning, before it hit the UK.

Still, there has not been the same hit from the disease, which only underlines that the differences in effect that are seen worldwide are about differences in population and geography - being overweight, having a very low friction of movement (e.g. excellent transport links, many borders), and not being low in vitamin D etc - far more than they are about government response.

I'm not saying the UK government has done well but it's striking to me that, from a distance, the criticisms of the UK and US I see coming from my friends are very similar, very parochial, and seem driven by media headlines rather than anything objectively sound.

In short, I'd give it another few years before you judge them more harshly than the government that brought us the Iraq war, for one.

The quango is the worst of all worlds, so it's not surprising that the concept was invented by governments.

I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service.

The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better.

In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent".

The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them.

tl;dr quango = power without accountability.

Opinion, not necessarily fact, but my understanding of the "piss up in a brewery" outlook comes from Parliament, not the government. The structure of Parliament is that the opposition has to challenge everything the government in power says and does in order to keep them in check, even when the opposition has exactly the same views on the policy being discussed; this leads to arguing for the sake of arguing even when common sense would say "this is entirely agreeable to practically everyone".

I'm not saying that the government shouldn't be kept in check, but the fact that the UK government appears to move with all the speed of a striking slug appears to be the fault of the system they are required to follow, not the government itself.

For what it's worth, I completely agree. Still, I don't think those things are mutually exclusive though.

There's the government and there's the people who run things, i.e. the Civil Service in this case.

While governments change and might or might not be incompetent, those structures largely remain the same.

While I appreciate your point I think the current UK government have done more than average to "shake up" the civil service. Others might describe these changes in less charitable terms.