Now Boris Johnson is in intensive care, this is what Dominic Raab needs to do

The foreign secretary – now officially standing in for the prime minister – has to reassure the nation he has a firm grip on the government’s response to coronavirus

The most alarming part of Monday’s government news conference came when Anna Mikhailova of The Daily Telegraph asked a follow-up question of Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, who is standing in for the prime minister. Raab had said in answer to a previous question that he had spoken to Boris Johnson “over the weekend”. Now she asked him directly when they had last spoken, and Raab said it was on Saturday.

If the journalists had been gathered in the room, as we would have been BC – “Before Coronavirus” – you would have heard the gasps and murmurs of surprise. As it was, we were surprised privately in our remote locations. It meant that the prime minister’s trusted deputy had been out of touch with his boss for two days.

Downing Street spokespeople had assured the nation for some time, since even before Johnson was struck down with the virus, that Raab was ready to take over the essential business of government should the prime minister become too ill to work. But this afternoon it turned out that the foreign secretary was so unready that he hadn’t even spoken to Johnson since the day before yesterday.

Instead of being briefed by the PM on his latest thinking about the coronavirus crisis, he had been sent into the news conference to rehearse the collective wisdom of the government machine, which had been gathered this morning in the Covid-19 video conference, chaired by Raab in Johnson’s absence. When Raab promised, as he did tonight, to implement the plans “the prime minister instructed us to deliver”, it turns out that he has about as good an idea of those instructions as the rest of us.

That means that the government is running on autopilot. Raab may be a senior minister, and an able one, but he has not been immersed in the detail of the pandemic in the way that either Johnson or Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has been – or, in fact, even Michael Gove, the cabinet office minister acting as a central troubleshooter.

None of this is reassuring at a time when the government has often seemed to be struggling to stay on top of the crisis.

Hancock’s return from his isolation three days ago helped restore a sense of energy and direction, and a constant stream of instructions seemed to be issuing from the flat above 11 Downing Street where Johnson was holed up. But since he was admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital on Sunday the element of uncertainty has returned.

Raab’s priority now is to gain a firm grip of the government response to the emergency. That probably means delegating as much as possible to Hancock and Gove, and deferring as much as possible to the scientific and medical advisers. But it also means that Raab himself will need to speak more personally and directly to the country than he has hitherto, to explain on behalf of the prime minister exactly what the plan is.