Imagine you’re a cabinet minister and you get a late-night call from the communications team at No 10 telling you that you’ve drawn the short straw for the following morning’s media round. Most would mutter “oh shit” and reconcile themselves to a night without sleep as they try to come up with some vaguely convincing answers to possible questions about the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Some might even have switched on the news and realised that deaths in care homes had become a hot topic.

Not Thérèse Coffey. She just mumbles a simple “sure thing” and settles down to a good night’s sleep, certain she can wing her way through any interview. Seldom has confidence been so badly misplaced. Last week in her only previous outing, the secretary of state for work and pensions managed to underestimate the number of people claiming universal credit by 200,000. Now she was planning on going full Priti Patel in her desire never to be asked to make another public appearance.

First up, she got completely rinsed by Dan Walker on BBC Breakfast. This was the equivalent of being taken apart by La-La of the Teletubbies. No disrespect to Dan, who comes across as a thoroughly likeable man, but he is most at home asking unthreatening lifestyle questions. Yet within minutes of the interview beginning, Coffey was behaving as if she had been waterboarded. “I think we have been well prepared,” she repeated desperately. Though admittedly her definition of being well prepared might be a little different to everyone else’s.

Things went rapidly downhill when she squared up to Piers Morgan, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, and Nick Ferrari, on LBC radio. “How can you not know the answer to how many NHS staff or care home workers have died?” Morgan asked. “I don’t have the answer to that,” Coffey admitted. Which was odd, because many of that morning’s newspaper front pages had precisely those figures.

Then it was hard to find any questions to which she did have an answer. She didn’t know how many care home residents had died and she didn’t have a clue why it had been a bad idea to apply for an EU procurement scheme on 24 February but a good one just a few weeks later.

In normal times, this could have been a career-ending series of interviews for Coffey. But in the year of the coronavirus such stupidity and incompetence gets forgotten within hours. No doubt all will soon be forgiven and Coffey will be back on the airwaves within a week. And just as hopeless.

Still, the government had been clearly rattled enough to send out its star performer for the daily 5pm Downing Street press briefing. Just weeks ago almost no one outside the Tory party – and precious few within it – had heard of Rishi Sunak, but he has now become one of the cabinet’s few beacons of sanity and competence. You just have to suspend disbelief rather. It’s disconcerting to have a chancellor who looks younger than most teenagers and is so small that he has to peer round the sides of the Downing Street lectern as he can’t see over the top.

“We must be honest with the British people,” Sunak said with his best honest man-of-the-people face, as he addressed the latest Office for Budget Responsibility forecast. Though not quite so honest that he could actually bring himself to spell out that the OBR was predicting a possible 35% fall in GDP with two million unemployed for the next three months. Only that it was just one forecast that could easily be wrong and even if it wasn’t then he wouldn’t sit around and let it happen.

Sunak has already delivered five separate budgets inside two months and you could almost see him writing his sixth and seventh as he was speaking. Many chancellors don’t get to deliver that many in their entire political career. Sunak is on course to easily break double figures by the end of the year.

Now was not the time for ideology or orthodoxy, he added, rather pointing out the obvious. Those horses have long since bolted. “It’s not a choice between the economy and public health,” he concluded. Here he was sticking his neck out. There are quite a few of his cabinet colleagues who might beg to differ if they start to see the end of the Brexit transition receding further into the distance.

Not all the media shared Rishi’s faith in his own abilities. He might be the best of a bad bunch but the gene pool of ministerial talent wasn’t exactly overloaded. Sunak tried to insist the UK would bounce back and that the government was committed to levelling up opportunities for everyone, but it was hard to see many winners in the coronavirus pandemic other than the hedge fund managers who had bet on a stock market collapse.

“We’re all in this together,” Rishi insisted, before bitterly regretting his choice of words. David Cameron had said exactly that back in 2012 and in the intervening years the NHS and public services had been cut and the gap in inequality widened. The chronicle of more deaths foretold.

Nor was there much faith in the way the UK reported its statistics, as it was now clear our mortality rate would be higher than France’s if we included deaths in care homes and the community.

Luckily, Sunak could palm this off to the two medical officers who insisted this was a blip and that they personally longed for the day when the charts had the UK outperforming Italy and Spain. The most telling question, though, was what they might have done differently in hindsight. On that they were all agreed. They would never have signed up to a daily press briefing. This one will run and run. As they all did for the exit.