The writer is a science commentator Who needs Succession when the UK Covid inquiry is on YouTube? The real-life rollercoaster drama, which began public hearings in June, has been lifting the veil on how decisions were made in the UK during the pandemic.

The storyline, shaped in recent weeks by the testimony of civil servants and scientific advisers, veers between the farcical and the macabre. At the centre of the decision-making web lay an indecisive and “bamboozled” prime minister who struggled with numbers, according to diaries kept by his chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. 

Surrounding him, one female civil servant testified, were ego-driven misogynists with a collective “absence of humanity”. These accomplices included a health secretary keen to decide which citizens would live or die; and a chancellor nicknamed Dr Death for his resistance to infection-curbing measures. In a twist that Succession creator Jesse Armstrong might applaud, Dr Death, aka Rishi Sunak, is now prime minister, and Dame Angela McLean, the scientist who coined the nickname, is his chief scientific adviser.