It’s not a great time to be a friend of Matt Hancock, knowing that any moment the Telegraph might splash the contents of your private WhatsApp conversations. Still, good old Jim Bethell – a veteran of the Ministry of Sound and the Department of Health – was wheeled out to defend him tonight. And in his eagerness to defend his onetime boss, the Old Harrovian made an extraordinary revelation: that the British government debated whether it might have to ask people to exterminate all pet cats during the early days of the Covid pandemic. He told Channel 4:

What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease. In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?

Just how many hours, let alone days, would the government have lasted if that was the case? Talk about letting the cat out of the bag…