This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

It's three minutes after ten, a very good morning indeed to you.

Quite a lot to get through today, but I've had a bit of a change of plan at the

top of the show. I thought that we'd talk about American issues, not because they're more

important than what is happening here, but because I am very conscious of the increasingly unleavened

nature of the diet that we share together every day. Today is a horrible day in the

context of trying to get your head around why things have gone the way they've gone. The Financial

Times has a chilling statistical analysis of what the real death toll is likely to be already,

and it is, you won't be surprised to hear considerably higher than the daily

toll of hospital deaths at the government deigns to share with us.

You also suffer slightly, or at least I do, from a kind of blurring of information.

You can't remember what you heard or when.

So I've double-checked and we already knew that the emails, we didn't

see the emails or the dog ain't my homework defense of the British government's failure to

join that joint procurement program was not true. That's already been discredited twice, hasn't it?

Again, I stress I'm suffering from a slight blurring of remembered information. But didn't Matt Hancock let slip on

question time that they knew all about the scheme? And I've just looked at something that was

dug up on March the 27th, an actual press conference, a recorded press conference in which

members of the Commission directly addressed the question of whether or not the UK knew about

it.

And we did.

So yesterday, the intervention by Simon MacDonald, the senior foreign office Mandarin,

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