Never in the field of viral conflict has so little been owed to so few miserable apologies for political leadership

Prepare for a shock, says Matthew Norman. How you do so is your affair, just prepare to be stupefied as seldom before...

How Boris Johnson chose to fill those blissful days and nights with Carrie Symonds, the paper doesn’t relate (AP)

The only omission from the Sunday Times analysis of the government’s early response to the virus – “Revealed: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster” – is a health warning.

The belated warning, for those yet to read it, is this. Prepare for a shock. How you do so – diazepam, absinthe, visualising the most tragicomically clueless government in the charted cosmos – is your affair; just prepare to be stupefied as seldom before.

Shock is not, of course, quite the same as surprise. Years of exposure to Boris Johnson’s capacious indolence robs the report of the power to surprise. Nothing he couldn’t be arsed to do could do that. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s elongated stay in a Tehrani jail because he couldn’t be bothered to read his Foreign Office brief pays testament to that.