Everywhere, as one obscure minister after another stutters and stumbles on the airwaves, people complain that this is a cabinet of mediocrities. But this does violence to the word. Mediocrity suggests middling ability. You and I are mediocrities. These people are incompetents. Ministers like Robert Jenrick, Dominic Raab and Helen Whately, the hapless minister of state for social care, who comes across like a quiz contestant who’s forgotten the name of the fourth Beatle – and who is, by the way, in charge of care homes – such people do not begin to merit the word ‘mediocrity’.

The nadir of the government’s performance comes from the home secretary, Priti Patel. Patel has been recklessly reinstated by Johnson after being driven out of government for trying, in 2017, to pioneer a one-woman guerrilla British foreign policy in the Middle East. She had taken twelve secret meetings with Israeli politicians, including the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while being careful not to inform the Foreign Office – an omission about which she later lies to a newspaper.

Plucked from disgrace, she’s today asked by a journalist at the regular press briefing if she will apologise for the failings of resources and equipment which NHS staff and their families blame on the government.

Patel replies that she’s sorry – if people feel there have been failings.

The journalist, a little taken aback – everyone except Patel knows the facts – gives Patel a second chance, and asks, ‘But are you apologising for the lack of personal protective equipment which has led to mass infections and the deaths of several nurses and doctors?’

Patel replies: ‘I’m sorry that people feel that way.’

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All right, maybe watching television in my condition is a mistake. My mind is racing back to Suez and to Iraq to recall instances of any public figure trying to get away with a formula of words as despicable as this. But at least, as I sweat, shiver and vomit, it gives me an insight into what the medical profession have to put up with, answering to their masters.

Come virus time, the Conservative Party have discovered a hitherto undisclosed admiration for nurses. But in June 2017, Johnson, Patel and the health minister Matt Hancock had been among the 313 Conservative MPs who were seen cheering when a motion suggesting the lifting of a pay cap which kept nurses’ rises down to 1 per cent was, with the help of their votes, defeated in the House of Commons.

If I weren’t gagging anyway, I’d gag.

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