A very good morning to you. It's three minutes after 10 and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC.

I've worked something out yesterday. I don't know if you were listening. I hope you were.

If you weren't, I'll need a letter off your mum, obviously by the end of morning break.

But I think what we've got to do as we try to wade through the revelations or indeed the confirmations,

depending on whether you were paying attention during the COVID-19 catastrophe,

we can't wade through them willy-nilly, can we?

We can't just sort of sit there and let it all wash over us.

We've got to focus in on things that make it

easier to see the bigger picture, oddly. You focus in on specifics and the bigger picture comes

into better focus. So the line that struck me most in many ways in Helen McNamara's testimony

yesterday was, and she of course was the deputy head of the civil service at the time.

It's impossible to exaggerate the importance of her role.

But I think the line that struck me most actually was not the ones that perhaps jumped out fastest,

but the ones that settled hardest.

And it was about him, Boris Johnson, spending a significant

amount of time in the very early days, in her words, laughing at the Italians. Laughing at the

Italians. I don't know if you remember, but that's when we all started panicking, wasn't it?

That's when we all started thinking, this is, this is

serious. And the idea that what was happening in Italy wouldn't happen here, well, it was surreal.

It feels even more surreal in retrospect than it did at the time. But there was some sort of,

we used the word exceptionalism a lot. I think it's when we really started digging into the word exceptionalism.

And even as we said it, even as we used the word a lot,

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