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There's no madness. Pretty much every infection is a variant of some description so they've been tracking thousands all this time. Just see how countries like Japan and Iceland are tracking pretty much every single infection by doing DNA analysis on each of them and seeing how it spread.
Whether a variant survives depends on lots of things.
A variant that is far more potent might not survive (in population terms) because people infected by it get sick quicker and isolate faster, therefore it spreads less. This is like Ebola, it's pretty lethal but it's hard to catch it if you avoid people who are actively sick.
The worst case is a mutation that means people are infectious for a long time and/or there is along delay between infection and getting sick.
Other countries have mentioned variants, Denmark in particular. It's not unique to the UK.
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Greenbank
I imagine they are tracking a a large number of variants and have been from the Jan 2020.
It would be madness if they haven't accounted for the inevitable mutations.
This strain will be one of thousands of strains that have been detected, but the one that is now very rapidly becoming the dominant one.