The possibility that Covid-19 was leaked from a Chinese lab was dismissed as a “deranged conspiracy theory” early in the pandemic, says Glenn Greenwald in his Substack newsletter. Anyone dissenting from the official narrative – that the virus arose naturally in a wet market in the city of Wuhan – was accused of spreading “disinformation” and banned from social media platforms such as Facebook. Debate about Covid’s origins was verboten: “It had all been settled by The Science.”

Boris Johnson has finally been “rumbled”, says Matthew Parris in The Times. The “dismal trickle of dirty little stories” from No 10 is awakening voters to what many in his party have long suspected: the man is a “cad”, a “moral toad” whose first instinct is to lie and whose second is to “tip somebody else into the slurry”. The question now is, who will replace him? I had assumed the next leadership contest – whenever Tory MPs grow the balls to oust their leader – would be between Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt.