Pandemic Diaries: The inside story of Britain’s battle against Covid

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Personally, I’d rather read more about the exact capacity in which Gina went with him to debrief the PM in the Downing Street garden one fine May evening and less about the end of his marriage. In Aug 2021, those who were under the age of 18 years and six months and those who were fully vaccinated no longer had to isolate if they were a close contact. It was amazing work by our intelligence agencies and the private-sector company who first spotted it, and just goes to show that we were not being paranoid.

Amid the undeniably entertaining flourishes there is a much darker side, however - including flagrant antisemitism and support for appeasement in the run up to the second world war.Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph show that Mr Hancock asked his team about alternatives to the 14-day self-isolation period in August 2020, less than three months after Test and Trace was launched.A diarist’s job is to capture how it felt in the heat of the moment, however mortifying it might be to read in retrospect. There are kernels of truth in here, some uncomfortable, about why politicians make the decisions they do.

In his Pandemic Diaries memoir, Mr Hancock wrote that on Nov 17 he was “pushing hard to reduce isolation periods for people who test negative using lateral flow kits.I also knew I had to tell the children – it was going to be incredibly painful, but I couldn’t hide away from them forever.

Since then, accelerated by the “professionalisation” of politics during the early 20th century, the pressure to hold politicians to account has grown significantly. The Government ended up having to exempt some key workers from self-isolating to prevent the NHS and critical food supply chains from collapsing. So, in the spirit of goodwill, here are a few alternative UK political diaries that are more worthy of your time. I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything (for love),” confides Hancock, in precisely the sort of sentence that should never make it into “the novels”.Then the camera was back on me, my microphone was live, and my watery red eyes were there for all to see.