Another daily briefing, another attempt by the Lobby’s titans last night to keep the flame of the Cummings saga alive. At the Downing Street briefing they tried to drag boffins Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty into the row by asking them questions about Dominic Cummings. Boris demurred from allowing such questions. Outraged tweets garnered tens of thousands of shares…

Following the third attempt by Sam Coates – after Kuenssberg and Peston had a go – the boffins gave the Lobby’s finest a basic schooling in Civil Service conventions. Truth twisting tweets that there was a gagging order from Boris were soon shown to be hollow claims, it was just the conventional reluctance by Civil Servants to get drawn into politics. The boffins themselves made clear they had no desire to get dragged into the Lobby’s games. Be in no doubt that if they had commented in a less than hostile manner to Cummings, these same Lobby titans would be outraged at “Boris politicising Civil Servants”. The perils of realtime punditry were apparent when Whitty made their tweets look idiotic, seconds after they were sent, when he spoke for himself.

They were made to look like muppets with their tweets because of their collective desire to be ‘first’ telling us what we can see and hear with our own eyes – most interested people are actually watching the briefing. You can see why the Lobby don’t want to televise normal briefings…