Try to buck your ideas up, Boris

With office comes responsibility. That was why the former US President Harry S Truman had a sign on his desk which read: “The buck stops here.” A principled and brave leader would be proud to follow this example. Boris Johnson has effectively put a sign on his Downing Street desk that reads: “The buck is passed here.”

You can understand why the Prime Minister is so keen to avoid being held to account for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. From the beginning, he has made misstep after misstep.

Despite the UK having the advantage of learning from Italy and Spain, where the virus struck weeks earlier, we were too slow to enter the lockdown, too slow to provide protective kit and too slow to begin testing.

When other countries were warning of the need for social distancing, the PM was boasting of how he had shaken the hands of NHS staff.

When the World Health Organisation was calling for mass testing, the Government temporarily halted the testing programme.

And when medical experts were advising against mass gatherings, we allowed the Cheltenham Festival to go ahead and Liverpool to play its Champions League game against Atlético Madrid.

These errors have cost lives. So far, more than 44,000 people have died, including almost 20,000 in care homes.

Boris Johnson’s response has been to blame anyone other than himself.

We saw this shameless behaviour this week when he claimed it was the fault of the care homes that so many vulnerable people had died.

This was not just deeply insulting to those care workers who have worked tirelessly for months, but a cynical twisting of the truth.

Instead of throwing a protective ring around care homes, this Government allowed hundreds of patients to be discharged from hospital without being tested for Covid-19.

The case for an inquiry is now overwhelming. There is a genuine possibility that we could see a second wave of the virus this autumn.

The best away to avoid another calamitous response is to learn from the previous mistakes.