Brandon usually a safe pair of hands and rolled out to do media in difficult circumstances, his auto-cliche really misfiring inappropriately this time.

“His position was untenable and distracting from the wider work that we’ve all got to do to move forward in the pandemic and out of the pandemic; there’s no getting away from that, and I think that’s why Matt’s ultimately made the decision that he did.

As I say, in doing that, he’s put his family and indeed all of us across the UK first because he wants the focus – as the PM does, as we all do – to be on getting out of the pandemic.”

Oops…