The arrival of a son for Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds occupies an inordinate amount of newsprint. Less commented on is Iain Duncan Smith’s splendid sense of timing in delivering an old-style Tory rant about unmarried dads.

First up, child number five (or is it six; do I hear any advance on six?) for Boris Johnson. As a human story this has legs: man has brush with death but recovers in time for birth of his new baby son. Viewed personally for Carrie Symonds, the birth of her first child is obviously a big moment.

After that, it’s all a bit downhill for Boris sceptics.

“Good news at last for Britain” cries the Sun, yoking together Captain Tom’s 100^th birthday and the birth of Johnson’s newest child. “Britain celebrates two morale-boosting birthdays”.

Well – Happy B’Day indeed to the marvellous Captain Tom, but does the arrival of another child for Boris Johnson really boost morale?

Over in the Telegraph, a front-page column has the headline: “Baby balm for the soul in these anxious times.” And, well, I gave up after that as man can only swallow so much barmy balm.

Boris Johnson has always lived a chaotic, seat-of-pants life with plenty of high drama. He is unlike previous prime ministers in being elected as much for his personality as anything else; elected for Being Boris, even though that role is a cynical calculation, all put-up bombast, over-done optimism and calculated Bunteresque bluster.

Lately, the previously loyal Sunday Times seemingly has grown weary of this act and been critical of the Johnson government – and for its efforts has reportedly been banned from asking questions at the daily press briefings (along with the also proscribed Channel 4).

As a master of narrative, Johnson knows how a story should roll, and pushes politics into that groove. Imagine how the arrival of this baby will be given a narrative role, with Boris the Daddy (again) rolling out his son at opportune or awkward moments. With a leap of imagination, here is a half-invented scenario…

Sunday Times reporter: “Prime minister, why was your government so slow to act over Covid-19 and why is Britain’s death toll so high?”

Johnson: “Oh, never mind that – have a look at this photograph of my new son.”

Blustering paternal pride pushes unwelcome stories away from the headlines (just wait…).

Anyway, Iain Duncan Smith – three words to put you off breakfast, lunch or whatever meal you’re about to have.

As reported yesterday by Huffpost, Duncan Smith claimed at a fringe event at a Conservative party conference in Manchester that cohabiting couples have “inherently unstable” relationships in comparison to those who married.

He adds that unmarried men are more likely to get into debt and commit crime. And – oh there is loads more, including an impenetrable metaphor about joining golf clubs.

But here is a key passage from the Huffpost story… “He went on to claim men out of wedlock were ‘released to do all the things they wouldn’t normally do’ such as committing crimes, drinking too much, taking drugs and fathering multiple children”.

Quite why that didn’t ring any bells about his feckless unmarried colleague in Downing Street remains a mystery. Iain, what were you thinking? Well maybe thought didn’t come into it – just the usual kneejerkery.

Should you wish to do further research, ask Google about allegations concerning Duncan Smith and a certain high-profile Tory woman MP. None of it may be true and I wouldn’t wish to comment at all, but IDS does have form for high-mindedness while forgetting to check his own shoelaces are tied.

Perhaps I should have asked my friend the scientist about this before letting my fingers do the laptop dance.

But I am genuinely puzzled by the way science has been dragged into every government statement about Covid-19.

Obviously, even a total non-scientist can see that the science is important. But is science being used as a shield, a political distraction or an eventual get-out clause (well, we followed what the scientists said so it’s not our fault)?

When it was revealed that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser and chief propagandist, attended meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, reactions were varied.

Sensible people shouted that such an arch manipulator shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a scientific group working out how to deal with Covid-19; slavish followers of comedy turn prime minister Boris Johnson said it was all a fuss about nothing stirred up by the Guardian – good old Boris will sort it out and cheer us up.

What the Guardian did was reveal who sits on those meetings. According to wider reports, it is not normal for advisers/spin merchants to attend. After all, can such an important gathering be open if Boris Johnson’s chief hitman is glowering from the sidelines?

My other takeaway was, oh, that explains the sciency slogans. Cummings is the master of the simple slogan: “Get Brexit Done” and “Take Back Control” being two of his greatest hits. Others pertinent to the gloomy moment are “Stay at Home”, “Protect the NHS” and “Save Lives”.

Now he’s at it with science. Every minister bundled into a Zoom interview comes armed with variations on “we have followed the science”. Yesterday it was the turn of Victoria Atkins, who is the safeguarding minister, apparently. Safeguarding what exactly: herself; her own arse; her party? It’s a continuing mystery.

Aktins did the morning rounds and was roughed up by Piers Morgan on ITV and Louise Minchin on the BBC. Every time she stumbled, and that was often, she blabbered about following the science and kept saying “We have been absolutely transparent…”

Bizarrely, she also said she had never heard of Exercise Cygnus, the pandemic stimulation exercise carried out by the government in 2016. Pretty sure she has heard of it, but prefers not to talk about it.

I have come to see science in italics: the science, as if it were one definite discipline with a golden test tube containing all the answers. Saying the science all the time overlooks the wider truth that science is ever-evolving, a constant search for answers, and creates the idea that there is one science, like a sort of true religion, rather than lots of different scientists with different disciplines and competing interpretations of the available evidence.

Also, choosing which strand of science to follow, cherry picking the evidence you most like, becomes a political decision, not a purely scientific one; doesn’t it?

One reason Boris Johnson’s government is so keen on spouting forth about following the science is that for a while it blithely ignored the scientific evidence, preferring to follow Johnson’s gut instinct that life should carry on as normal; until he changed his mind.

Also, all those breezy proclamations – “We can send coronavirus packing” – have much more to do with makeshift oratory than the science.

Hadley Freeman is always a good read but a line in her latest column had me raising a floury fist. Her theme last Saturday in the Guardian, and it is a good one, is that “everyone needs a distraction right now”.

She defends “thinking, talking and writing about extremely stupid stuff that has nothing to do with the current hellishness”. For her that might be an obsession with Cameron’s Diaz’s baby, whether to buy a Jane Fonda-branded tracksuit and gazing at Instagram pictures of Elizabeth Hurley’s “fascinating mini-me son, Damian”.

True, it is good to wrench yourself from the gloomed grip of the headlines. But here’s where I fall out with Hadley. She says that sharing “twee photos of just-baked bread” isn’t a displacement activity as people are only doing that because of the virus: “they are coronactivities and therefore do not count”.

Well, I think you should climb down from that particular fence, Hadley – some of us have been boring the arse off the world for years with twee photos of bread hot from the oven. A weird minority sport suddenly hijacked by everyone else in a lockdown world. When I put those photos up, it’s not because of the coronavirus – it’s because I am a bread bore with strands of gluten wound through the dough of my brain.

My distraction discoveries include baking tutorial clips on Instagram or YouTube. It’s strangely comforting to watch a skilled baker at work, leaving the amateur kneader to think, oh that’s how it should be done.

After a disappointing sourdough run, I am trying again today, helped by a nice American woman from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco. She also has a lovely kitchen, which is uplifting until I go down to start baking in ours.

Here is another sort of displacement: reading nature books. Well, I’ve only read the one recently, but as a fan of Robert McFarlane I was pleased to discover John Lewis-Stempel.

Lewis-Stempel is a farmer and writer who contributes to Country Life sometimes. A friend has lent me two of his books. The one eagerly consumed so far is The Wood – The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood.

Lewis-Stempel traces the seasons from December to November during his last year in the wood, where he spent four years farming and managing the wood.

At a time when you can no longer visit such open spaces, Lewis-Stempel is there to remind you what a wood looks and feels like, and to point out all the sights and animals your townie eyes would likely as not have missed.

It’s a beautifully written book, sparse and poetic, occasionally surging with emotion, sometimes matter-of-fact brutal in, say, the shooting of pesky squirrels or bagging a pheasant for dinner, and resonant with gnarled knowledge.

By his own reckoning, Lewis-Stempel is not a nature writer but a countryside writer, and The Wood is very much a book about the countryside – which, unless you live there, now has a big sign at the entrance reading, “Closed… please piss off”.

Do give this book a read. It’s “a heartfelt and evocative diary of a year among the trees”, according to Hadley Freeman’s own newspaper.

As for those bread photos, if this batch of sourdough works, the pictures will be up there. But they won’t be posted just because of this virus.

Photo: Steve Smith on Unsplash

The pound in my pocket is no longer there, it is gathering dust. Sometimes there was more than one, with five needed to secure a parking space at one of my jobs.

There is now no need to park anything but my bum on this isolated chair.

Four one-pound coins settled the weekly cappuccino tax at another of my jobs, while the fool’s gold tax known as the office lottery syndicate took care of a further two.

And two more paid for my own long-running waste-of-money go at the lottery (now frittered away online).

I miss that pound in my pocket, but nobody wants coins anymore. This is one small consequence of Covid-19 as people fear, understandably, that coins can carry the protein molecule that cannot be killed but has to be left to die on its own (thanks to my mother for that email from the John Hopkins University in the US).

“The disintegration time depends on the temperature, humidity and type of material where it lies,” says the maternally propelled email.

Those lurking protein molecules have made cash disappear for now. The idiot lottery tax is paid for online or transferred monthly to the syndicate ‘boss’.

Our small local Sainsbury’s stopped taking cash two or three weeks ago. Will this be the end of cash? The disappearance of coins and notes has long been prophesised. Maybe Covid-19 will finally see off cash for good.

Plenty of street food places and small independent bars no longer take cash. This makes sense, but still I miss tapping my right pocket to sense the weight of coinage.

Oh, Richard that’s a bit rich…

As we are talking money, I see that Virgin tycoon Richard Branson has put himself up for a new TV game show called Who Wants To Stay A Billionaire.

The bearded awkward grin on legs is reportedly asking the government for a £500m bailout of his Virgin Atlantic airline. As Branson is said to be worth $4bn, that strikes some as a stretch, especially as the government money is intended to support people who otherwise would have no coins in their pocket.

Still, Sir Richard has at least offered to put up Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands as collateral – generous of him, as it appears to be sinking.

Sir Richard – you and your beard are reported not to have paid any income tax in Britain for 14 years. Asking the taxpayer to stump up for your airline is, well, a bit rich. Especially times two as a year or so ago, you were offering trips to the “edge of space” for a reported $200,000 a ticket.

Oh, and five years ago, Richard, your company was reported by the Observer to be one of 10 private health providers that use tax havens as part of their corporate structure. And you sued the NHS in a contract squabble.

If you use a tax haven, you haven’t the right to ask for money from the government. That isn’t me speaking, or not just me, it’s Denmark, which has told companies that they will not be eligible for bailout funds if they are registered in tax havens (as reported by the Independent yesterday).

Smart move, Denmark.

All this staying at home is making us ill-tempered, judging by some responses to the Sunday Times’ analysis of how the government initially failed to act against Covid-19.

The main takeaways from this report were that the government didn’t do enough (maybe anything much at all) in January and February, leading to disgraceful decisions about ‘herd immunity’ and a general lack of preparedness.

It seems that gung-ho Boris didn’t at first wish to heed the scientific advice he later swore was his guiding hand in all decisions.

The other major cause of gravity in jaws was Michael Gove’s admission that Boris Johnson did not attend five Cobra meetings on the crisis. You may recall that the first such meeting was put off until the next available Monday, as Johnson is said to enjoy his weekends off.

Search among the Twitter embers and you will also discover theories that the prime minister wanted to spend time away from work with his pregnant partner, while trying to finalise his divorce.

Boris being absent from those Cobra meetings didn’t much surprise those of us who always suspected him of being lazy and duplicitous.

Professor Sir David King was chief scientific officer from 2000 to 2007, touching the Blair/Brown years. Asked on Sky News about the Sunday Times report, he said: “And when Michael Gove says ‘but prime ministers don’t attend all Cobra meetings’, I cannot recall a Cobra meeting when it was called with Blair or Brown as prime minister when the prime minister wasn’t in the chair.”

In the pro-Boris Twitter comments, there was much Trump-like fake news nonsense, and plenty of grief for journalists. What those defenders of Johnson forget – quite apart from all the sterling work being done by journalists right now – is that Johnson and Gove were/are journalists.

Not only that, but Johnson was famed for doing everything at the last minute – a technique also employed for writing speeches for which he was generously recompensed.

As passed on here on November 12, the Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson reported that Johnson always left writing his Monday column for the Daily Telegraph until the last possible moment, leaving the briefest possible time for editors to make any changes.

While such behaviour can, at a mighty push, be portrayed as breezy charm, really it suggests laziness and arrogance: “everyone else can fit around me”.

Merely an anecdote, of course – but if the same breeziness applied to attending important Cobra meetings about Covid-19, and if actions that could have saved lives were delayed, then we are looking at serious failings.

In an unusual move, the government published a lengthy rebuttal of the Sunday Times’ report. Well, I say lengthy rebuttal but ‘incoherent ranting ramble’ might better describe this circuitous complaint. Michael Gove put this out on Twitter, and you do wonder if he’d bothered to read a word before hitting send.

It was the longest, scrawliest bit of official government graffiti ever seen.

Yes, fighting this virus is tough. Yes, the government has got things right (such as facilitating those ‘instant’ hospitals). But endless glorification of Boris and his ‘brilliant handling’ of this crisis doesn’t count as journalism and should instead be filed under screwball propaganda.

And, yes, I do hope the prime minister soon feels well again, although I wouldn’t go as far as today’s headline in the Daily Express: “We need Boris! Race to put PM back in charge.”

He has to be better first; and perhaps the editor of the Express should put in an order for the Sunday Times.

Hypocritical footnote: As a long-time Observer reader and subscriber, I saw excerpts of the Sunday Times report on Twitter. This was, hands up, bad behaviour as such journalism shouldn’t be got for free. But I’d already paid for my copy of the Observer, so had at least done my bit for newspapers.

Telling footnote: The Sun today lays into critics of the government, calling on them to “cut the backseat driving”, and let ministers get on with making decisions away from public scrutiny… my italics put there in astonishment: isn’t that exactly the opposite of what a newspaper should do? And presumably the editor of the Sunday Times, which has the same owners, is one of those backseat drivers.

Empty shelves (Picture: Getty)

Suddenly everyone is talking about sourdough bread. Well, the chattering classes at least, and I’m a fully paid-up member of the chattering-about-bread classes.

People are sharing photographs of their bread on social media, passing on tips and worrying more about their starter than their relationships.

One woman half-jokingly complained on Twitter that her boyfriend had asked her if she would sleep on the sofa so that he could cuddle up to his sourdough starter at night.

A starter, if you’re not similarly obsessed, is a fermented mixture of flour and water that replaces the yeast in sourdough bread.

That woman’s boyfriend might have been pushing his luck, but his theory wasn’t as far out as it sounds. It is said that when German settlers emigrated to the US, they moved through the Wild West carrying their starters near their stomachs. This kept the starter warm and earned the carriers the nickname of “sour bellies”.

American pioneers also used to carry pieces of old dough buried in flour to reactivate when they next needed to bake.

A sour belly is also a cantankerous person, fitting in a way as trying to make sourdough bread can ruin your mood.

Anyone who always makes their own bread now suddenly finds that everyone is at it. Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, bread flour has been almost impossible to find.

A BBC website report on April 9 explained that nearly all bread flour is sold in bulk, straight to bakers and other food producers, leaving around 4% to be bagged up for shops and supermarkets.

When the lockdown started, everyone went baking mad and flour (and yeast) disappeared off the shelves. Both but are still hard to find but I did ‘score’ three bags from our local branch of Thomas the Baker, after a tip-off from my son. A friend followed my passed-on tip-off but returned flourless.

That BBC report featured Wessex mill, which is now working 24-hours a day to keep up with demand.

Making bread is a way of life for me. And struggling to make good sourdough is a source of frustration. You see, my sourdough is unbeatable in the sense of occasionally being very good; and unbeatable in the sense that often if you beat it with a hammer, the hammer might lose the argument.

Dear me, some of those loaves could be used to build at extension on the kitchen.

That’s why I came up with the sourdough cheat’s recipe: the same as any number of pure recipes, but with a pinch of easy-blend yeast. This works every time, makes loaves of burnished brown, and yet isn’t quite right, often a little too light.

That turns me back to the righteous path and the apron of repentance. I go back to the true sourdough, yesterday baking two tasty but poorly risen loaves. Looked at again this morning, the starter appeared thin, too much water, not enough flour, and that may be the problem; it often is.

Baking bread is calming and pure. Or it is to me now. Years ago, when we had three young kids at home, I was a pain in the arse about bread. Days were built around the baking, arrangements altered to accommodate the next stage of preparation, and so on.

Now I am chilled out, as sometimes is the dough. You can start first thing, leave the dough to rise in the fridge for hours, even overnight, and stop being a bread-headed nuisance.

As for baking the perfect sourdough, always the best sort of bread, I shall keep trying. It’s the holy grail of dough.

The flour shortage is a nuisance, even a worry, but a comfortable sort of worry compared to all the others around. And I do love hearing everyone talking about bread. Chances are I will still be doing that long after everyone else has wandered away in search of alternative conversation.

With many of us living remotely, it is understandable that BBC1’s Have I Got News For You should give it a go, too.

Our interactions now commonly take place at a technological remove.

Over the past week or so, I have joined a Skye group call about a smallish Covid-19 pay cut at one of my jobs. Had a couple of family conference chats on Skye and met up twice with York friends on Zoom: lovely but not like a real meeting in a real pub or walking across real countryside together breathing real air.

‘Meetings’ with students look set to go that way too next week, and my usual guitar lesson has been replaced with a Skype lesson.

The first post-real lesson was sabotaged by my laptop or my incompetence or something. Andy the teacher could see me; but I couldn’t see him. He’d been replaced by a black-and-white pixelated blur, his forehead blown to fill the screen. But he could hear me, I could hear him, so the lesson carried on.

Have I Got News For You is now filmed with Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and co at home and connecting, Zoom-style, in a series of boxes.

Two episodes in, and this format fits the moment: it’s generally terrible and nothing like the real thing; much as this disconnected, home-based existence is nothing like real life. The show is oddly of the moment, even if not much cop.

The lack of a studio audience leaves the jokes to bump around, naked and alone on the screen. Usually, Paul Merton is pollinated by audience laughter, going off on an improvised comic riff, sometimes brilliantly so, but here he seems isolated.

It’s a game attempt at reproducing the normal show, but not that successful.

The actor Stephen Mangan hosted last week, looking his cheerful self again after all that moping around in the perversely enjoyable divorce drama The Split. Normally, he’s a good host, witty and inventive, pushing things just a little too far. Without the audience, it all seemed a strain and a stretch.

It’s easy, or it has been so for me, to retain an affection for this panel show, even when it seems past its best.

Merton is good at the jokes, while Hislop seems avuncular until he lets the twinkle fade as he turns on a politician guest, giving them a good filleting.

Hislop did this brilliantly back in April 1998, when Boris Johnson first appeared on the programme. He needled Johnson about that notorious phone call with his friend Darius Guppy.

As the novelist Jonathan Coe reminds us in an article for the London Review of Books in July 2013, this was when the pair “are alleged to have discussed the possibility of beating up an unfriendly journalist. Hislop was doing what he does best, remaining genial but suddenly toning down the humour and confronting the guest with chapter and verse for a past misdemeanour”.

In a long article, Coe also argues that Hislop nails Johnson, but then allows him to make a funny joke so laughter lets him off the hook. He also argues that permitting Johnson to then host the programme established his ‘lovable’ reputation as a self-mocking buffoon.

Hislop has since deflected criticism that HIGNFY helped inflict Boris Johnson on the country, a charge that turns him a touch prickly.

Another point raised by Coe is that, by generally insisting that all politicians are useless and duplicitous, Hislop has helped create the anti-politics mood in this country.

Is that criticism a bit of a stretch? Possibly, but the show has also become a cuddlier version of its once more vicious self.

Will I still watch? Oh, almost certainly as some habits are too deeply ingrained.

Journalists get a lot of stick and sometimes not without reason. They also generally work hard, even the ones on newspapers you don’t like.

Yesterday two front pages received attention side by side and both involved thought and effort, although one did so more profitably.

How you regard the two pages perhaps to an extent indicates your ‘tribe’.

The Sun continued its lickspittle adoration of all things Boris with a headline written as if being spoken by Carrie Symonds, his partner – GET WELL SOON BABE.

As was widely pointed out, that was published on a day after 1,000 people died from Covid-19. That grim statistic made for a shabby contrast between the bigger story and the Sun’s Boris-centric perspective. Yes, it’s still a story that the prime minister is beginning his long recovery from the virus, but it is not the only story in town.

The other page belonged to the Guardian, my paper of choice. The headline above a short story read: The lives cut short. The report below began: “The numbers keep coming, every day. In ones and twos are first. Now it’s close to a thousand…”

To the right of the headline a grid of 40 postage stamp-sized photographs showed people who have died from the virus. The story continues across four pages inside, with the headline: ‘So much living to do’ – Aged from 13 to 108, victims of Covid-19 and their stories.

Maybe some people would prefer the Sun story, as it’s a free world and all that, but the Guardian report is brilliant in its simplicity and its humanity. Those honoured here are people and not statistics, people with lives and loved ones, people who played their part in efforts to constrain the very virus that killed them (doctors, nurses and other NHS workers appear).

It’s an old newspaper trick to gather small photographs of people as the Guardian did on its front page yesterday, but it’s a trick that works. Faces say so much, tell the story so well.

It’s far from an uplifting read, as you might expect. After reading through every short story, I had to brush away a tear or two. But that’s a good human reaction: we should feel sad, even if there is only so much sadness and worry a person can take.

Better, though, to honour lost lives rather than reprint love notes from Boris Johnson’s partner.

Still, it’s not the only view. Over in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, Allison Pearson devoted her column to arguing that “The health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself…”

I didn’t read the full column as it was behind the Telegraph paywall but suspect it wouldn’t have been to my taste.

The Guardian’s four pages of short reports appeared to have been harvested from many sources. Those included various local newspapers, papers that are struggling to get editions out against impossible odds. Sadly, this crisis could well finish off those local newspapers that constitute the local walking wounded.

Carole Cadwalladr, the campaigning Observer journalist, tweeted a photo of the Guardian’s front page alongside a story from the BBC’s website about Health Secretary Matt Hancock with the headline: “‘Herculean effort’ to provide NHS protective gear”.

“And *this* is why you should subscribe to @guardian,” she tweeted, despairing that the BBC was following a government-approved line.

Of course, these things are never straightforward. Many of those stirring the mud in the Twitter comment pool were aggrieved Corbyn supporters who have foresworn to complain until Doomsday that the Guardian was rotten to their man and anyway employs “right-wing” journalists – in other words, columnists whose opinions didn’t sufficiently burnish the departed dear leader.

Anyway, buy a newspaper, any newspaper, they all need your support. We’d be worse off without them – even the newspapers you don’t like and the journalists you don’t like.

As for those journalists, their job is to ask difficult questions of the government, not to see who can score most brownie points with Boris Johnson.

Here is a helpful reminder pulled from the drawer where statements of the bleeding obvious are kept. Boris Johnson was no saint before he suffered from Covid-19 and he won’t be one when he recovers.

Worth bearing in mind as we all wish the prime minister well during his spell at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

Apparently, people were clapping for Boris the other night, but I didn’t hear anything round here.

Two weeks of clapping for the NHS and other workers was fine and inspirational; putting your hands together for a politician doesn’t appeal to me at all, although if you search “brilliant Boris” on Twitter you will uncover plenty of fans (some with accounts that ring fake when you tap them).

There is a social media push from the government to emphasise what a brilliant job is being done over coronavirus, with lots of similarly worded tweets and messages. At best such efforts are horribly premature. It’s not yet possible to say whether Boris Johnson’s Tories deserve ‘brilliant job’ or ‘total botch-up’.

A report this week for Reuters suggests multiple shortcomings from politicians, officials and advisers, with the politicians accused of being slow and reluctant to act after the first warnings.

One potential problem is that the government leading us through this crisis is one shaped by unblinking fealty to Brexit and Boris. What you need are contrary Cabinet voices willing to stick in an awkward oar, not compulsory backslapping all around.

Anyway, I have got this far away from the headline without mentioning Emily Maitlis. She is all over social media today and even inserted herself into our friends’ WhatsApp group.

The Newsnight presenter is much praised for comments she made before last night’s programme, although there was Tory grumbling too.

She said that the language around Covid-19 sometimes felt “trite and misleading”.  “You do not survive the illness through fortitude and strength of character, whatever the prime minister’s colleagues will tell us,” Maitlis said, adding that it was a myth to say the disease was a ‘leveller’ between rich and poor.

She pointed out that those “serving on the frontline right now – bus drivers and shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers – are disproportionately the lower paid members of our workforce. They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed.”

The lockdown would be experienced differently by rich and poor. It’s tougher in a tower block than on a country estate, you might say.

The Tory commentator Tim Montgomerie accused Maitlis of Fox News-style punditry, quite something from a hardworking pundit of the right. Thanks to all those helpful people on Twitter for pointing out that only the other month, Montgomerie was lavishly praising Viktor Orban, the right-wing leader of Hungary who is using the virus as a means to amass long-term power for himself.

Oh, give me powerful humanity and sense from Emily Maitlis rather than all that “battling Boris” nonsense in the Daily Express and other ruptured places.

Boris Johnson deserves all our best wishes even if normally they would be delivered through gritted teeth.

To have our prime minister in intensive care with coronavirus is shocking and worrying. Johnson is in St Thomas’s Hospital, over the Thames from Westminster, and hopefully he will be well again soon and back to his annoying old self.

The prime minister’s present vulnerability reminds us of the politics of health, how a leader’s wellbeing can be built up or exaggerated to bolster their image.

This morning cabinet minister Michael Gove was on the BBC Today programme saying that Johnson, 55, had been given oxygen but not put on a ventilator.

Gove and presenter Nick Robinson animatedly praised the prime minister’s “zest for life”, at which point, while still wishing him well, I turned off the radio.

Beforehand, others discussed Johnson’s great good health, how he went running, could beat anyone at tennis and so on. The Times report today describes Johnson as being reasonably fit, adding that he plays tennis regularly and while at No 10 follows online video workouts mixing yoga, Pilates and aerobics.

The Times adds that he has given up jogging because of problems with his knees and is troubled by his weight, said to have reached 16-and-half stone a little over two years ago, in the obese category as he is not particularly tall.

It was always possible to wonder at the running as he didn’t look like a natural, and he did seem to like running whenever photographers were around.

Still, trying to keep fit isn’t easy, as various muscles and tendons in my old jogging legs can testify.

The political side comes from having to create myths about the fitness of our leaders. The orange flab mountain Donald Trump has made great play of his personal fitness, as proclaimed by his doctor.

Before he became president his personal physical, Dr Harold Bornstein, wrote: “If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” A statement so bold it might almost have been dictated by Trump himself – which, according to reports three years later, is exactly what happened.

Trump proudly boasts about his health while looking, it must be said, decidedly tubby. Photographs of him playing/cheating at golf always show him looking very rotund for someone purportedly so healthy.

In the past Johnson’s illness may well have been kept from us, but such state secrecy over delicate matters of health is no longer possible. Those sort of secrets are just harder to keep.

Winston Churchill had various health problems and assorted mishaps, including burning his hand when accidentally placing a lit cigar in a box of matches.

Churchill also suffered a tooth abscess in 1941, a heart attack while staying at the White House and pneumonia in 1943, and a severe stroke when a peacetime prime minister in 1953 that saw him off work for four months.

There has always been much debate about Churchill’s health and about habits that now seem remarkably hazardous, yet he lived until he was 90, so perhaps he wins that argument.

When he arrived at the White House in 1941, Churchill, then 67, made eccentric demands according to the Smithsonian magazine: “I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne, and 90-year-old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

Boris Johnson, according Michael Gove, is receiving “the very best medical care” – as, of course, is everyone blighted by this virus. He is receiving the same sort of high care provided to all virus patients by the NHS. Perhaps he will have time, when he recovers, to take to task Charles Moore, who yesterday wrote in Johnson’s old newspaper the Daily Telegraph: “The inflexibility of our lumbering NHS is why the country has had to be shut down.”

Blaming the NHS for the lockdown is the sort of weird logic proudly flourished by a Daily Telegraph columnist. But, of course, as a former inhabitant of that role, Johnson knows that all too well.