Hello. Three minutes after at 10 is the time. The former top civil servant, you to give evidence in the

COVID inquiry today. And I am still struggling to find a way into it for us. I feel we should be

talking about it more. The revelations that are coming out, although for many people, they are a

mere confirmation of our worst fears rather than revelations deserve more

attention. They need more attention. And I find myself this morning in one of those places,

one of those moments when I really recognize how bent our media is. Because I try to swim,

if I can, some mornings against the tide, but you can't change the tide.

You can't turn the tide, as Cancunuch famously demonstrated.

And when I'm rooting around for things to talk about, some days obviously it's a lot easier

and a lot more obvious than it is on others.

I'm still a seagull rather than a trawler, almost every day. We're still following. I'm not sure

we'll ever be able to change it, however hard we try. We're still following the sort of amorphous

industry that sets the news agenda that decides what a big story is,

whether it is through front pages of newspapers or whether it's through the story leading a

bulletin. Those of us who spend our time together, and this is you and me, this isn't just me,

those of us who like to talk about issues in the news

don't often determine what the news actually is. There are exceptions. I mean, during COVID,

there were a couple of extraordinary moments where we were ahead of the news. We were ahead of the

news on people working from home for the testing regime. Do you remember? People ringing us to tell us, they'd been on the payroll for two weeks

without having done a single thing?

So we've got very early indications of something going horribly wrong there.

We were a bit ahead of the news on procurement when we took calls from people who were telling

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