When Dr Richard Horton turns up for our Zoom lunch, I feel a pang of disappointment. I am at home but attired for a real-life work meeting: black frock, inoffensive earrings and a dab of make-up. The editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal founded in 1823, “arrives” in a black hoodie. He has apparently forgotten his light-hearted promise to wear a jacket, though happily remembered that we are dining together. “Look, I’ve got my lunch,” he says proudly, thrusting a brown paper bag towards the camera. He offers to wait until mine is delivered.

I am not surprised that our loose sartorial agreement has crumbled in the face of his to-do list. It was The Lancet that, in January, first published clinical reports of a mystery pneumonia from Wuhan. Since then, a trickle of papers on Covid-19 has become a torrent of crucial, freely accessible information helping to shape the public health response in real time.

That has landed the 58-year-old with an arguably more important secondary role: critic-in-chief of the UK government’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. Since February, he has accused ministers and their advisers of failing to see the coming storm, keeping up a barrage of criticism in The Lancet, in newspapers and on television. The UK response to the pandemic, he told the BBC on March 26, is a “national scandal”. I go to the heart of the matter: does the government have blood on its hands?