European leader

Before Easter, Government Minister Robert Jenrick broke lockdown rules by traveling over a hundred miles, twice, to visit his parents.

He was not forced to resign or face any kind of censure.

Before then, Government scientific adviser, Neil Ferguson, almost two weeks after recovering from COVID-19 infection, met with his mistress.

Then yesterday, on the day the UK officially overtook Italy to have the highest number of deaths, the Daily Torygraph broke the story about Ferguson, causing his to resign, and make that the big daily story, not over 50,000 deaths.

As was always going to happen, the scientists were going to be thrown under the bus.

That the story in the Torygraph was broke not by a jobbing reporter but the Deputy Political Editor and Chief Political Correspondent. I mean, just who could have leaked the story to them, what with them meeting politicians and Ministers all the time?

And the story broke just before the Government daily briefing, where Dominic Raab tried to mitigate the numbers by suggesting the UK was worse because we count better than the Italians.

Quite how Johnson is still in a job, I assume he's in the job, he has not been seen for three days now, in almost any other circumstances, any one of the numerous mistake and policy errors would have finished any PM.

But not Johnson.

I find it sickening that The Torygraph, The Sun, The Metro, The Mail, The Times, all lead with the Ferguson story, not the huge number of deaths. There is something rotten at the heart of the country, when the deaths of tens of thousands of people are ignored in order to protect ministers who made the policy decisions, not the scientists. But clearly, the error of judgement in meeting his mistress is strongly linked to the decision in imposing the lockdown.

The people who won the newspapers are willing to let 3,000 new infections a day be a sacrifice for breaking the lockdown, and with a mortality rate of 1% or more, well, you do the maths. And it was suggested that UK workers preferred to be paid for doing nothing rather than working and that the furlough is unsustainable beyond the end of the month. Each death has a monetary cost that our billionaire tax-avoiding newspaper magnates and Ministers are will to let us suffer.

Nice of them.

Earlier in the day, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer admitted in evidence to a Select Committee that the reason for the change in policy regarding testing and tracing in the middle of March wasn't beacause "the science changed", but because testing capacity had been reached. Sadly this is rather different to what she said that the daily briefing at the time.

She and the Health Minister are still in post, Neil Ferguson is not.