Never in the field of viral conflict has so little been owed to so few miserable apologies for political leadership

Prepare for a shock, says Matthew Norman. How you do so is your affair, just prepare to be stupefied as seldom before...

How Boris Johnson chose to fill those blissful days and nights with Carrie Symonds, the paper doesn’t relate (AP)

The only omission from the Sunday Times analysis of the government’s early response to the virus – “Revealed: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster” – is a health warning.

The belated warning, for those yet to read it, is this. Prepare for a shock. How you do so – diazepam, absinthe, visualising the most tragicomically clueless government in the charted cosmos – is your affair; just prepare to be stupefied as seldom before.

Shock is not, of course, quite the same as surprise. Years of exposure to Boris Johnson’s capacious indolence robs the report of the power to surprise. Nothing he couldn’t be arsed to do could do that. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s elongated stay in a Tehrani jail because he couldn’t be bothered to read his Foreign Office brief pays testament to that.

But unutterably shocking nevertheless it is that, in late January and through February, the prime minister absented himself from not one, not two, not three, missus, not four… Johnson truanted from five consecutive coronavirus Cobra meetings about how to prepare for and limit the pathogen’s destructive impact. In the style of the old Grandstand vidiprinter confirming the accuracy of an outlandish football score, let me spell that again.

That’s five. FIVE. F.I.V.E.

How could this possibly be? How could Johnson – even Johnson – play hooky from chairing five emergency meetings about preparing for the gravest threat faced his country had faced in decades. How at the optimal moment to minimise the approaching lethality could he be elsewhere?

That said, and in his partial defence, there is a precedent. It’s such a little known fact that it is missing from his own biography of the old boy, but Winston Churchill went AWOL on the eve of the Battle of Britain.

According to top secret cabinet papers I’ve just unearthed, if not invented, Churchill had a matter of rival urgency on his mind in the early summer of 1940. “PM sent his apologies to war cabinet,” reads one triplicate memo in fading type. “Left a private note for Attlee, gist of which as follows.

“‘Sorry to lumber you, Clem, but part of a wall has collapsed at Chartwell so I’m off to Kent rebuild it. Also want to paint a couple of landscapes, so I’ll be gone a couple of weeks. Good luck with this forthcoming air battle for the survival of the nation thingummywhatsit. Not worried as can’t believe it’s an especially big deal. XXX W”.

Johnson also repaired to his country seat, in this case a grace-and-favour residence, in Kent. While his gnomic cabal of fellow inadequates were gathering under the Cobra mantle to ignore medical advice and do sod all about locking us down in time to prevent community transmission, ordering adequate supplies of protective equipment and procuring effective tests, he took a fortnight’s “working holiday” with his fiancée at Chevening.

Well, she is pregnant. And we all know what an attentive, uxorious fellow he prides himself on being.

How he chose to fill those blissful days and nights, the paper doesn’t relate. I like to picture him squiring Carrie on languid walks, brushing up on burping techniques, and knitting matinee jackets over a perky Montrachet in front of the fire. Crucial national work of some kind, anyway.

You can’t begrudge him the relaxation. He must have been shagged out from shaking all those hands in the hospital and pondering the masterstroke of herd immunity. Not to mention giving that speech in which he foresaw economic advantage over scaredy-cat nations if Britain, rather than busy itself saving its citizens, kept buggering on.

While he was recharging those sorely drained batteries, the pygmies he left behind responded to the menace with the predictable brilliance that has led to nurses, doctors, hospital porters, transport workers, care home residents and others needlessly dying.

None of this is strictly those ministers’ fault. For one thing, as the power vacuum paralysis during Johnson’s convalescence establishes, they aren’t capable of deciding when to void their bowels or which shoelace to tie first without his express approval. For a second – and again, through no fault of their own – every member of his virus war squad (with the arguable exception of Rishi Sunak, on whom the jury remains out) is transparently in the wrong career.

How they came to be misrouted from their true vocations – minor public school housemaster for Dominic Raab; medieval Vatican schemer for Michael Gove; suburban estate agent for Robert Jenrick; rural conveyancing solicitor for Matt Hancock – is anyone’s guess. But pity them for being thrown into a battle up to which, as Winston would style it, they are not.

As for Johnson himself, in ordinary times (if you remember that far back) the instinct would be to treat these claims with scepticism. Is it conceivable that, weeks after the devastation wrought by this virus was apparent to anyone who follows the news, a prime minister would swan off for a break? The Sunday Times, which has a penchant for sensationalising, must be flamming this up.

Not a bit of it: Gove confirmed everything with the weediest non-denial denial you ever heard. “There are one or two aspects of the Sunday Times report,” he said without specifying, “that are slightly off-beam.”

I’ve said this before, and I say it again. When this is over, the least natural justice demands is a class action brought against the government by the families of those whose lives Johnson has spaffed up the wall. An investigation into a potential case of state manslaughter by gross negligence, however unlikely, is also indicated.

The lexicon of outrage is almost as inadequate for this task as Johnson is for his. Shameful, scandalous, disgraceful don’t cut it. We need new adjectives, as we need new antivirals and vaccines.

But as someone almost put after the Battle of Britain (an aerial battle to which he may have taken a more hands-on approach than hinted above)… never in the field of viral conflict has so tragically little been owed by so many of the sick and deceased to so few miserable apologies for the concept of political leadership.