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Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabelle Hardman and this is the Sunday Roundup. On Friday, the High Court ruled that the

government had acted unlawfully by failing to publish details about the awarding of high-value contracts made during the first wave of the pandemic.

Under its own transparency policy, the government was duty-bound to publish the relevant information within 30 days of issuing the contracts.

Andrew Marr confronted the health secretary Matt Hancock over the delays in publishing the information.

The High Court has ruled that you acted unlawfully by not publishing contracts quickly enough

that your department struck during the coronavirus pandemic. And these are contracts that were

worth millions and millions of pounds, sometimes hundreds of millions of pounds. Would you

like to take this opportunity to apologise to people for that?

It's really clear what this court case is and isn't about. The court case did not find that there

was a problem with any of the contracts. What it found is that whilst, of course, contracts

like this need to be published, and we've published all of the details that are required.

You're supposed to do that within 30 days, and on average, in the height of the pandemic, we did that within 47 days.

So we were just over a fortnight late, on average, with this publication.

And the reason for that is because my team

were working seven days a week, often 18 hours a day, to get hold of the equipment that was

saving lives. So you have nothing to apologise for at all, despite losing a case and being

legally in breach of the law?

...