Welcome to Declassified, a weekly column looking at the lighter side of politics.

(Important note: I’m not a doctor but I do have terrible handwriting.)

In the words of the great philosopher Billy Ocean, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

And so this week we were treated to the (non) sight of U.S. President Donald Trump hiding in a bunker underneath the White House to avoid protesters furious at the death of George Floyd. The lights were off and someone was home, which is the exact opposite of what people normally say about Trump.

It didn’t take long for the president to have a large fence erected around the White House perimeter, which means he finally got that wall he always promised (and all U.S. territory south of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has now been ceded to Mexico).

Meanwhile in the U.K., the government has scrapped its coronavirus press conference on weekends after claiming too few people tuned in to watch it on TV. Yes, it seems vital public health information has to compete with “The X Factor” and soap operas for it to have actual meaning.

But there has been some good news this week — as long as you are the Phantom of the Opera, Zorro, Hannibal Lecter, Catwoman or Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th.”

According to scientists from Harvard University, the coronavirus could be spread during sex so couples should put on masks before getting down to it. The researchers ranked different sexual scenarios, based on how likely you are to catch coronavirus during them. Sex with people within a household, and with people from other households, were ranked as “high risk” activities.

Of course what we really need in these tough times is some positive news for all of us, and we sure aren’t getting it from Dr. Michael Greger. His new book, “How to Survive a Pandemic,” warns that a virus emanating from overcrowded and unsanitary chicken farms has the potential to wipe out, er, half of humanity. He ranks COVID-19 as a weedy two or three on the scale of pandemics, and “The Big One, the typhoon to end all typhoons, will be 100 times worse when it comes, a Category Five.”

So congratulations to Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who boarded a Space X flight and headed to the International Space Station, where presumably life is less awful than it is down here on Earth.

CAPTION COMPETITION

“It’s fun to stay at the YMCA.”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter @pdallisonesque

Last week we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our post bag (there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze).

“If I drive like this to Durham do you think anyone would notice?” by David Spence

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.

LONDON — A time of crisis, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown once said, is “no time for a novice.” If that’s the case, then coronavirus came at a bad moment for Boris Johnson’s Cabinet.

Despite the Conservative Party having been in power for 10 years, the average member of the ministerial team leading the U.K. through its worst public health crisis in a century has just 19 months of Cabinet-level experience. Fourteen out of the 22 have been in Cabinet less than a year, and only one — the influential Whitehall fixer Michael Gove — is a veteran of David Cameron’s first Cabinet a decade ago.

Such inexperience is unusual in a government led by the same party for so long. One of the main causes? Brexit. The Tory Party’s civil war over EU membership and the Brexit deal ended or derailed the political careers of a string of senior politicians who in less fractious times would — in all likelihood — still be in top jobs.

But while Tory MPs and former ministers have expressed disquiet at the “sheer inexperience of the Cabinet” (as the conservative commentator Simon Heffer put it in the New Statesman) others question whether experience is everything. After all, the minister who, opinion polls say, is doing the best job in the eyes of the public is Chancellor Rishi Sunak, with just four months of Cabinet-level experience under his belt. And with huge economic and social changes predicted post-pandemic, fresh perspective might be just what’s needed.

But with the government’s actions during this crisis likely to be scrutinized intensely over the coming months, defining Johnson’s premiership and chances of eventual reelection, questions will continue to be asked about whether he was wise to put his faith in a new-look team at the top.

“We’ve interviewed a lot of former ministers and they always say that going into the job, in whatever conditions, is like moving onto a fast-moving treadmill,” said historian Catherine Haddon, senior fellow at the Institute for Government think tank. “It’s a huge learning curve whenever you take on the job. If you take on the job in crisis conditions, those pressures are going to be far greater.”

‘Groupthink’

For the government’s critics, the danger of an inexperienced Cabinet is that it invests too much power in too small a team: namely Johnson, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings and a few trusted allies from the former Vote Leave campaign. That concentration of power and strategizing can lead to good ideas not being heard, and bad ideas not being checked.

“The issue is that new Cabinet ministers rarely want to challenge groupthink or indeed the prime minister,” said one former secretary of state, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And you need that to stop mistakes being made.”

An editorial in the Financial Times last week — in the wake of the scandal surrounding Cummings’ alleged breaches of lockdown rules —  accused Johnson of presiding over “a bunker of close allies surrounded by a lightweight, supine and largely ineffectual Cabinet chosen mainly for their commitment to Brexit or their loyalty to Mr Johnson.”

It is not just the relationships within the top team but those with a department that can be tricky in the early days of a Cabinet minister’s tenure, said Haddon. “Knowing how everyone around you — private office, permanent secretary, your department — can help you, that’s really important,” she said. “A crisis is only going to increase the learning curve.”

But experience isn’t everything, she added: “More important than experience is the ability of a minister to actually learn, and learn rapidly, about their department, about their policy areas, and how to do the job. If you can do that no amount of experience is going to make up for that.”

Or, as one government aide put it, “experience and years served” didn’t help Theresa May and her Cabinet secure a Brexit deal or win a parliamentary majority — as Johnson et al. managed in less than a year.

Big beasts on the back benches  

It’s also not unusual, of course, for governments to have totally inexperienced Cabinets when a new party (or parties) takes power after a long time in the wilderness. Cameron’s 2010 coalition or Tony Blair’s 1997 government had next to no actual governing experience anywhere in their ranks (although neither faced a situation as serious as the coronavirus in their first year).

But the inexperience of Johnson’s Cabinet is unusual for a party that has been in power for so long. Brown’s 2010 Labour Cabinet had four ministers — including the prime minister himself — who were in Cabinet in 2000. Margaret Thatcher’s 1990 Cabinet had three veterans of 1980, including the prime minister and her deputy. Among Johnson’s team, Gove stands alone of the original 2010 team.

The other Tory big beasts of the 2010s — most of them former Remainers — have either left front-line politics, or been consigned to the back benches.

The influential Cabinet Office minister has more than seven years of full Cabinet service under his belt, twice as much as the next-most experienced figures, Liz Truss and Natalie Evans. Six members of the Cabinet, including Sunak and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, have just four months of Cabinet experience, accrued since their appointments in February. Another eight — including prominent figures like Business Secretary Alok Sharma, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick — secured their first full Cabinet jobs under Johnson, who became prime minister in July last year (with two years’ Cabinet experience as foreign secretary from 2016 to 2018).

Meanwhile, the other Tory big beasts of the 2010s — most of them former Remainers — have either left front-line politics, or been consigned to the back benches.

Cameron quit parliament after the referendum; George Osborne left to become editor of the Evening Standard; May went to the back benches after failing to secure support for her Brexit deal last year; and Jeremy Hunt suffered the same fate after coming second to Johnson in the Tory leadership race.

A number of ex-Cabinet and ex-junior minister Remainers ousted by Johnson — like Hunt, Greg Clark, Mel Stride, Tobias Ellwood and Caroline Nokes — are now plying their trade as chairs of parliament’s scrutinizing select committees. Tellingly, of the 22 Conservative MPs that chair these committees, 16 are ex-Remainers and 11 used to serve in government. Under Johnson, they had nowhere else to go.

Cabinet aides pointed out that some of Johnson’s team of ministers — such as Grant Shapps and Brandon Lewis — have previously held positions that allowed them to attend Cabinet, while not being full Cabinet ministers. Others have had alternative experience at the pinnacle of government; Dowden, for instance, served as Cameron’s deputy chief of staff before becoming an MP in 2015.

As for Gove, his exceptional level of experience (relatively speaking) has seen him rewarded with several key roles at the heart of the government machine as it responds to the pandemic. This week it was announced he will be chairing a new Cabinet committee — known as C-19 Operations — which will be responsible for putting into action the instructions of another new committee — C-19 Strategy — that will be chaired by Johnson.

The role mirrors the one Gove held during the government’s preparations for a possible no-deal Brexit last year. The fact he has made himself so valuable to Johnson despite betraying him during a previous Tory leadership contest in 2016 goes to show how useful it can be to have a minister with deep knowledge of how Whitehall operates.

Experience, it seems, counts for something after all.

The cheeseburgers of 2030 won’t be the same as they are today — or at least that’s Brussels’ plan. 

The European Commission’s recently unveiled Farm to Fork strategy aims to change eating habits across the Continent over the next decade to make the agri-food system more sustainable.

It includes a set of legislative proposals and the targets that, at least on paper, would make European food healthier, more nutritious and more plant-based — and consumer choices more conscious. 

As the name suggests, the Commission’s program will affect the whole food supply chain — from how food is grown and cultivated to the final meal on European plates. But what does it mean in practice? POLITICO looked into what the EU’s ideal burger of the future might look like, if the strategy gets implemented.

MILAN — Ask the hundreds of protesters who donned orange high-vis jackets and gathered in squares across Italy over the past week why they’re there and you’ll get as many different answers.

Some are angry with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. Others are worried about vaccines, which they say inject mercury into people’s veins, or the judiciary system, or 5G wireless technology. Some say the country’s lockdown measures have left them struggling to make ends meet.

What unites them is a sense of anger — and a charismatic figurehead, Antonio Pappalardo, a former carabinieri known to his followers as “the general.”

At a rally in Rome to mark Italy’s Republic Day on June 2, Pappalardo wore a bright orange tie and energetically led the crowd in chants of liberta, liberta, liberta! The former general drew on a mix of populist and nationalist catchphrases. He promised to give power back to the people. He insulted the government. And he railed against “fake news” and criticism from politicians and high-profile figures including Vasco Rossi, one of Italy’s most famous rock stars.

In the crowd, people shouted, “no to Bill Gates’ vaccine” and “5G is killing us all,” and hugged each other at the general’s insistence that COVID-19 is not a real threat. Few wore masks, and Pappalardo called out those who did, saying, “I cannot look a woman in the face without knowing if she’s beautiful or ugly.”

“I am ashamed of them and their lack of respect for all the victims, for those who have lost loved ones” — Cristina Longhini, pharmacist

Pappalardo, who is 73, served briefly in the Italian parliament in the early 1990s, then stood in a number of elections in the 2000s before he founded the Gilet Arancioni, or Orange Jackets, last year.

The inspiration for the movement struck Pappalardo in 2019 after a meeting with Didier Tauzin, a former French general with close ties to France’s Yellow Jackets movement. “When we met, we said that together we could revolutionize Europe,” Pappalardo told POLITICO.

It took a pandemic, but the combustible mix of frustration and fear across a broad cross-section of the Italian population has put Pappalardo on the political map.

The Orange Jackets have three main goals, he said. First, unseat the Conte government, which he accuses of having destroyed the country economy by confining Italians’ to their homes for months “without reason.”

Second, take Italy out of the European Union and ditch the euro. And third, spread the message that COVID-19 — which Pappalardo dismisses as no more than a “bad flu” — is being used as an excuse for abuses of power.

The fledgling movement has been met with harsh criticism from across the political spectrum.

“I am ashamed of them and their lack of respect for all the victims, for those who have lost loved ones,” said Cristina Longhini, a young pharmacist from Bergamo whose father died of COVID-19.

“According to the Orange Jackets, are we crying over something that didn’t happen?” she said. “Our lives have been destroyed.”

In Milan, which also saw Orange Jacket protests this week, the left-wing mayor Giuseppe Sala called the rally “an act of irresponsibility” while the city is still in a “difficult situation.”

Denying the pandemic should be a crime, Luca Zaia, the far-right governor of Veneto, said in a television broadcast this week, likening Papparlardo’s statements to Holocaust denial.

“I am for freedom of thought, but there is a limit beyond which you cannot go,” the League politician said.

Far-right leaders Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, the head of Fratelli d’Italia, have trod a little more carefully. Just hours before Pappalardo took the stage in Rome, they had appeared on the same square to protest the Conte government, drawing on much of the same anger that is mobilizing people to put on orange jackets.

Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy, has made clear that her party has nothing to do with the movement, but speaking to La Repubblica made sure to note “we understand the strong social unease of the people.” Salvini, meanwhile, has condemned rebukes of President Sergio Mattarella, saying people should be “ashamed,” but stopped short of linking those statements to the movement itself or speaking out against it.

For his part, Pappalardo says he’s not seeking acceptance from any party, and that the only thing that interests him is giving voice to the people.

“People are enthusiastic, and finally someone is saying the things that everyone is thinking,” he said. “They treat me worse than a mobster, worse than [Mafia boss] Toto Riina, especially the communists, but I’m stronger than ever.”