The Sunday Times detailed last weekend how government inaction had compromised attempts to tackle the virus

The government’s defence of Boris Johnson over his failure to attend five successive meetings of the Cobra national crisis committee on the coronavirus has been dismissed by former Whitehall officials and senior politicians.

A former head of the civil service, three Conservative ex-ministers and a former Downing Street chief of staff said it was usual for the prime minister to attend Cobra if he was in easy reach of London.

They spoke out after the government issued a 14-point response in a 2,100-word blog to The Sunday Times’s account of the five weeks from late January, detailing how government inaction compromised attempts to tackle the virus.

The government’s most senior ministers — including Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Matt Hancock — leapt to the prime