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Downing Street has confirmed that Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary and arguably the second most important person in government, had coronaviruses at the same time as the prime minister.
Sir Mark had symptoms around April 2-3, the government revealed Thursday.
A source said the symptoms were only “very mild.” This overlapped with the Prime Minister in a critical condition.
Boris Johnson was announced He had a coronavirus on March 27 and was rushed to the hospital on April 5, where he remained until April 12, a period that also saw Matt Hancock, health secretary, and Chris Whitty, medical director, off duty.
Issue 10 can expect this to be overlooked as a historical fact, a month is an eternity in this pandemic, rather than urgent news. And it’s something Number 10 clearly doesn’t want us to dwell on beyond confirming the information first revealed by ITV’s Robert Peston three days ago.
However, this is very important, along with repeated claims that Boris Johnson was “in a good mood” while in intensive care and facing death, he later admitted.
This is because it goes to the heart of whether we can trust officials in the deadliest crisis facing this country.
Sir Mark, who entered the top job at Whitehall after the premature and tragic death of his predecessor, Sir Jeremy Heywood, guides the state ship to the prime minister, wielding enormous formal power and informal influence.
And it seems that because he maintains this position, Whitehall decided to keep the news that he had contracted the disease a secret, and someone somewhere considered it too sensitive news for the public to handle.
In late March and April, journalists asked questions almost every day after Sir Mark’s condition, after rumors circulated that he was not well. Number 10 replied that it was “fine” and that it was working normally.
It is difficult to see that as an accurate answer.
In fact, Johnson’s spokesman said that he, too, only found out from a journalist, himself a dazzling admission, despite happily answering questions that he was fine at the time.
Number 10 insists that this is not a big problem since he was “working normally”, only from home despite the symptoms.
There will be different views on this.
But Sir Mark’s work is especially important, now more than ever, and the idea that he might even be incapacitated at the same time as the Prime Minister is a serious and revolutionary proposal that must be planned.
The justification that Sir Mark had only “mild symptoms” is strange, given that the illness takes a few days before he knows how severely it hits him.
During this period, the fact that he contracted the condition meant that Sir Mark might always have to be replaced if his symptoms worsened; however, it appears that even many Cabinet Office officials where his office is located are unaware of his condition.
The Cabinet Office maintains that he did not lie to journalists, saying that when journalists asked if Sir Mark was infected on March 27, he had no symptoms at the time.
But this doesn’t excuse Downing Street, which was actively answering questions about Sir Mark’s health and fitness during his period in question at daily briefings, but now they claim they were unaware of his illness until a few days ago.
We know very little beyond this.
Sir Mark was last photographed in the cabinet room on March 31, when he may have had the condition asymptomatically, and returned to the Prime Minister’s side on April 28, according to images released by the government on social media.
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Perhaps Sir Mark managed to catch it from the same source as the Prime Minister: is this evidence of the reckless personal approach in Issue 10 towards the disease?
The fear is that keeping Sir Mark’s disease private is another example of an endemic and resounding secret in our political culture.
It is this secret, in a different context, that Jeremy Hunt argued in the Commons this week that it may have cost lives, with the potentially disastrous scientific advice offered by the secret body SAGE whose minutes are kept out of the public domain and whose names have only been made. public
It feels entirely possible that Sir Mark, an insurer accustomed to working in the shadows as a national security adviser, Number 10, or a combination of both, decided that this was too sensitive a fact to make public.
Which begs the question: what other pieces of information “too hot to handle” fall into the category of things the public cannot be trusted?
