This is a global original podcast.

Hello, I'm James O'Brien and welcome to the third special episode of full disclosure,

chronicling the COVID-19 crisis and all its myriad repercussions.

We're looking more at the politics perhaps than the health or the wealth this week,

not least because I sense that the optimism or at least the cessation of hostilities that

mark the beginning of this crisis, it would obviously be absolutely bonkers to want the

government to perform anything but brilliantly at a time of national crisis

and during a period that is literally of life and death importance.

But it would seem this week that even the most ardent optimist is, well, going to have

fairly serious cause for concern.

First of all, they still can't agree on why the United Kingdom didn't join the EU-wide procurement program. It was originally suggested that it was a result of an email going astray or the wrong account being checked, which is about as close, I think, as a government could ever come to claiming that the dog had eaten their homework.

That plan, to my eyes, seemed to fall apart when footage of Matt Hancock sitting on question time,

revealing full knowledge of the scheme when there was still time to join it emerged.

And then there was a press conference of the EU Commission that also seemed to make it

inarguable that the British government had not only been aware of it, but had indeed

elected for mysterious reasons to not join it.

And then those reasons became less mysterious when the most senior diplomat in the Foreign

Office, and indeed I think the head

of our diplomatic corps, described the decision not to join as political. How can you be sure

that he said that, James? Well, he called it a political decision. Fast forward a few hours,

and he was more or less frog marched into the stationery office to write a letter claiming that it hadn't been

a political decision at all, which presumably means we go back to the presumption or the claim

...