Jeremy Hunt’s mortgage nightmare could be worse – he could be Matt Hancock

The now chancellor was health secretary for six years until 2018 and knew all about the shortcomings of our pandemic preparedness – but still the government did nothing, writes Tom Peck

He made a very public show of the fact that he’s been inviting Martin Lewis, Britain’s most trusted public figure by some margin, to Downing Street (Kirsty O’Connor/HM Treasury)

Jeremy Hunt probably isn’t quite sure when he’s awake and when he’s merely having nightmares.

At some point today, he will have got out of bed, opened up his computer and looked at the same old numbers. The ones about the hundreds and hundreds of billions of pounds of government debt, and then the ones about how fast the interest on that debt is rising, and at that point it’s distinctly possible he will have tried to jump in the air in the hope that his legs don’t move and that none of it is real.

After that, he took a very short journey over to the Covid inquiry, where he nodded his head, smiled, let out a bit of laugh and told them a very funny story about the time he had to kick every single intensive care patient out of their beds and leave them to die in the street. That bit, he’s pretty sure, was just a simulation; a now notorious training exercise called Cygnus in 2016, that showed how hopelessly ill-prepared the country was for a pandemic, to which it responded by spending the next three years preparing for Brexit instead.