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Sympathy for Boris Johnson mustn’t blind us to people dying from the plague because of his Government’s mistakes.

The lionising of a Prime Minister thankfully released from hospital only adds insult to the terrible injury endured by families mourning lost loved ones.

Deputising Dominic Raab boasting his boss is “a fighter” was grotesquely insensitive: thousands of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters didn’t perish from lack of courage yet some almost certainly died who could’ve been saved.

Justice and maintaining life demands we scrutinise Johnson’s errors, Britain’s toll of 10,647 deaths in hospitals alone a loss far greater than Germany’s under 3,000 in a larger population despite the coronavirus infecting both countries around the same moment.

The warning from one of the Government’s most senior scientific advisers, Jeremy Farrar, that the UK’s likely to be among the European nations hit hardest, possibly even the worst, surpassing Italy, France and Spain, is a brutal condemnation of a PM slow to act.

Failing to prioritise tests, masks and ventilators cost lives, probably including NHS workers.

Johnson’s boast at the beginning on March 3 he was shaking hands with everyone in a hospital, lying it had coronavirus patients, was the blasé recklessness of a politician more worried a lockdown might damage his popularity than doing what was right.

Let the PM order published immediately all evidence and minutes of Downing Street discussions and decisions to let us decide if the three-week delay to March 23’s shuttering, or four weeks if we start the clock from late February when alarm bells blared, was genuinely based on scientific advice.

I have my doubts and suspect political back covering’s underway as No 10 operatives blame civil servants and experts to save Tory necks.

Videos lauding the NHS from a PM recuperating in Chequers don’t get him off the hook. The bounce in broad public endorsement for the Government’s handling of the cataclysm, 61% approving despite 70% thinking testing levels are insufficient, is clinging to nurse for fear of something worse in the heat of a pandemic.

I wish Johnson a full and swift recovery, as I do everyone else afflicted. I also wish to see him held accountable for fatal blunders.