When I heard this about Boris Johnson and Covid, I thought it must be a wind-up – Angus Robertson

The revelation that the Prime Minister missed five top-level crisis meetings is so shocking it will haunt him and his Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

When the news emerged at the weekend that Boris Johnson failed to attend five Cobra meetings, I at first thought it was a wind-up.

On the Sunday current affairs TV programmes, his de facto deputy, Michael Gove, first tried to spin his way out of the media storm by suggesting the reports were “a little bit off beam”. Within hours he had changed tack, acknowledging that Boris Johnson was not at the important meetings, which was the key fact contained in a Sunday Times report headlined ‘38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’.

Complacency by BoJo was highlighted in a devastating analysis by one of the Government’s own senior advisors: “There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,” the adviser said. “And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent ­crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

All of this happened before the Prime Minister fell ill with coronavirus and now we are at a key point in the battle against the Covid-19 curve and saving the economy. We need to be able to depend on our decision-makers in ­London and Edinburgh to be on point.

The furlough scheme, which is based on the earlier Scandinavian initiative to retain jobs, has now gone live and will be absolutely essential for hundreds of thousands of people. It is to be extended for a further month until the end of June.

There are improvements reported for the take-up of business support schemes, but still far too few payments have been approved. Just as the crunch is really hitting businesses these schemes need to work properly. People’s attentions have recently been turning to the 100 per cent Swiss ­business support model, which is also used in Germany and the United States. This needs to be looked at in the UK as a priority.

Meanwhile, the UK Government should extend the transition period for Brexit as a priority. How on earth can leaving the EU and coordinated European action against coronavirus be a sensible priority when Whitehall is massively overstretched by the pandemic?

One sign of this is that the joint ministerial committee on EU negotiations, which includes the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, has not met since January. If the Westminster Government believes its own UK ‘family of nations’ rhetoric, that is not a sustainable. Not only has Boris Johnson been missing coronavirus crisis meetings, but his Government has not been holding the key EU meetings which involve the devolved governments.

Is it too much to hope for that when BoJo returns to work he will take a new approach to the coronavirus crisis? No doubt his illness and hospital ­experience will have convinced him of the scale of the challenge.

In this Covid-19 crisis, everything that our governments do in Westminster and Holyrood should be guided by sound judgement, hard work and science.

Hopefully Boris Johnson will take that to heart.