05:39

Yesterday the Sunday Times (paywall) said that Boris Johnson missed five meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee and that this was unusual because Cobra meets “at moments of great peril” and it “normally chaired by the prime minister”. In its rebuttal the government said that this was wrong and that it was normal for Cobra to be chaired by a relevant secretary of state.

The matters because the “five missed Cobra meetings” anecdote encapsulates a much wider argument - that Johnson was negligent in his early handling of coronavirus because he did not take it seriously enough. No 10 is working on the basis that, if it can discredit this anecdote, it might stop the wider narrative gaining credence.

On the very narrow point about whether it is normal for Cobra to be chaired by the PM, Tony Blair seemed to back up the Sunday Times’ claim. (See 10.03am.) Gordon Brown has not commented, but Damian McBride, his communications chief, has in tweets that argue that, if Cobra was convened, the PM should have been in the chair.

Damian McBride (@DPMcBride) During the Foot & Mouth crisis in 2007, GB didn’t just attend every COBRA meeting, he chaired them all. There were no 'experts' telling him when to tune in. If that's what we got from a PM for a disease that didn't even threaten human life, was it too much to ask for Coronavirus? pic.twitter.com/pFirda9BX0

Damian McBride (@DPMcBride) I’m enjoying the folks simultaneously missing and proving my point, by saying the 2007 Foot & Mouth crisis was no big deal compared to the disastrous outbreak in 2001. As I’ve written previously, the very first thing GB did in 2007 was immerse himself in those lessons from 2001. pic.twitter.com/OWkZgOaFga

However, what these interventions from the Blair/Brown years miss is the extent to which there seems to have been Cobra-inflation over recent years. Partly because of what happened in the New Labour years, governments discovered that if they wanted to persuade the media they were taking a crisis serious, they had to convene Cobra, journalists started expected Cobra meetings to take place as a matter of course and over time less-urgent Cobra meetings, chaired by officials or ministers, because more common. Richard Benyon, a former junior environment minister under David Cameron, made this point on Twitter yesterday.

Richard Benyon (@RichardHRBenyon) I’m astonished by @thesundaytimes reporting that PM didn’t attend every Cobra meeting. I attended several none of which were chaired by PM. As the lowest form of ministerial life I even chaired one. A ridiculous piece of journalism

So the government is correct in saying it is not unusual for the PM not to chair Cobra.

But one of the paradoxes of journalism is that it is not unusual for a story to be wrong on a narrow point of detail or interpretation but nevertheless accurate in that it conveys a broader truth. And the Sunday Times Insight report is probably a good example. On 5 March, in an interview about coronavirus, Johnson was still arguing it should be “business as usual for the overwhelming majority of people in this country”. The evidence that Johnson (like many others, including some government scientists) was slow to grasp the seriousness of the coronavirus threat is strong.