 So today's Sunday Times included an explosive story laying out the negligence of Boris Johnson's government when it came to preparing for COVID-19. We've known since late January the seriousness of this disease, how deadly it is, how easy it is to spread. Yet Boris Johnson missed five COBRA meetings at the start of this year and didn't attend his first until the 2nd of March. These meetings are the most important meetings in government. They should be chaired by the Prime Minister. The fact Boris Johnson was not there is not normal. In the essential weeks when the UK government could have been making life-saving preparations for coronavirus, Boris Johnson spent 12 days, yes 12 days, at a grace and favour country retreat. The peace also lays out the longer-term failure of our government to prepare for a virus like COVID-19. A top emergency planner told the paper that Britain was the envy of the world, but pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years. They also said that preparations for a no-deal Brexit sucked all of the blood out of pandemic planning in Britain, but the failures don't just end there. The government weren't just criminally underprepared in the long-term and slow to react in January, February and March, but their incompetence has carried on right up until this month. The peace reveals that the chief executive of the trade body that represents testing labs in Britain did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1st, the night before Hancock vowed to pressure and announced a belated and ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month. Failing was repeated with respect to personal protective equipment. The British Health Care Trades Association, the BHTA, was ready to help supply PPE in February and throughout March, but it was only on April 1st that its offer of help was accepted. These failures alongside the government's delay in imposing a lockdown will have cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of lives. This is incredibly important public information journalism. But you might be asking why me, a host of our media, am spending my Sunday talking you through an article written in the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. Well, for one, just because some journalists in a mainstream paper have broken ranks, that doesn't mean this article will necessarily have a political impact. We've already seen journalists at the BBC try to downplay its findings. What we have to remember is insight very good, hindsight very easy. Hugh, you've been looking at the same piece, and there's lots and lots of questions to be answered one day, I suppose. Yes, indeed, as the point was just made about ventilators and PPE and testing, the lack of preparedness for mass community testing, all of this will be looked at at some stage in the future. Yes, I do remember the end of January, the first Cobra meeting, the message that came out that risk to the UK was low, that there was a pandemic plan, whichever one seemed to be relying on. But it turns out a lot of the pandemic planning was for influenza. And again, with hindsight, it's easy to say. Why not? Exactly, who would have known it would have been coronavirus. Second, we should ask why we are only being told this now when it's been obvious to anyone paying attention for months now that the government have been way behind the curve when it comes to their response to COVID-19. For example, why when Britain was pursuing a strategy in conflict with the dire warnings of leading epidemiologists, was ITV's political editor Robert Peston writing that herd immunity will be vital to stopping coronavirus. Why when the government was pursuing a policy in direct contradiction to the advice of the World Health Organization, did Beth Rigby present the inaction of Boris Johnson as him taking a scientific only approach, contrasting it positively with other leaders more dramatic actions. And finally, when the government had been told in early February that COVID-19 could lead to half a million deaths, did the BBC cover the government's mid-March U-turn as them responding to changed science as opposed to this being a government which was belatedly responding to public outrage and public pressure to change, of course. Why does this matter? Yes, it's important to recognize when mainstream journalists come up with stories that really do hold the government to account, and this one does. But we can't ignore the fact that this has come quite late. There are already tens of thousands of people who've been killed from COVID-19, and that's because the government back in February and early March were not put under the scrutiny they should have been. If the Beth Rigby's, the Robert Pestens and the Laura Koonsbergs of this world had been asking Boris Johnson difficult questions back then, it could have saved thousands of lives. So it's not just the government whose negligence has led to Britain's catastrophic response to coronavirus. It's also our overly servile press. Good policy requires serious scrutiny, and too often in this country that has been sadly lacking.