Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. And here we are again

with a virus special. There are so many issues that arise from this virus. It's difficult to

know where to turn to. I think on Friday when we had that sequence of Boris Johnson getting it,

Matt Hancock getting it, the chief medical officer

getting it, Chris Witty, was in a competitive field the most extraordinary day so far. And in a way,

I think, more significant than was made out and obviously led bulletins and so on. But there's a

great book by David Owen, which was written about,

I don't know, five or six years ago. He, of course, being a doctor. And he wrote a book about

prime ministers when they became ill. Now, they were all very different contexts. And on the whole,

the ones he wrote about about it was not known publicly

at the time that they were ill but Owen explored in a really interesting way the huge significance

of the illness and the way it determined to some extent the fate of these prime ministers

policy making and all the

rest of it. Unsurprisingly, they're human beings and when they fall ill, they can't function as they

would do normally. Now, this is different in that Boris Johnson has revealed right away that he

has got this virus and he says that the symptoms are mild. But even so, we know what

can happen with this virus and those symptoms. It can be really serious. So, you know, he will

function, but in an impaired way, even if it's mild. There's, you know know that great kind of formulaic answer uttered many

times at Prime Minister's questions where a Prime Minister stands up and says, I've had meetings

with Cabinet colleagues and others. That's not Boris Johnson, by the way, this is a kind of generic

Prime Minister. I've had meetings with Cabinet colleagues and others, and I will have further such meetings

for the rest of the day or something like that.

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