FINE journalist that he is, Andrew Marr kept his scoop under wraps until he was ready to deliver it.

Regular viewers of The Andrew Marr Show were surprised last Sunday at his sudden replacement by Today presenter Nick Robinson. Yesterday the Scots broadcaster revealed the reason for his absence.

“I had a bit of Covid last week, despite being double jabbed, and very nasty it was too,” he said.

Marr’s revelation turned out to be the biggest talking point from the Sunday political programmes. For that, production teams can blame Matt Hancock. While it was doubtless not the former Health Secretary’s first consideration, his Saturday evening resignation on Twitter left the Sunday politics shows with a headache.

With the story covered extensively in the newspapers, the TV teams had to get creative if they wanted to freshen things up. The effort started with a couple of try-hard presenter intros.

“Hands, face, space, they lectured us day after day” began Trevor Phillips on Sky News. “Well, the hands and face of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock were pretty active in the video we saw last week, but there wasn’t much space at all between him and his paid adviser.”

Marr took a sporting angle. “What happened yesterday afternoon was decisive, brutal, and in retrospect perhaps inevitable. Many people up and down the country will be sad about the outcome. Enough, however, about the Welsh in Amsterdam…”

READ MORE: Focus turns to CCTV leak

Brandon Lewis was the Minister sent forth with the line that Mr Hancock had done the right thing, there was a new man in charge at health in Sajid Javid, and he should be left to get on with the job. The blokeish Mr Lewis, a former Minister for Security and current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was as safe a pair of hands as could be expected, giving nothing away.

Marr’s team had made a nifty addition to the paper review line-up, with Salma Shah, a former aide to Mr Javid, joining the Sun’s Jane Moore and Nick Watt, political editor of Newsnight.

Ms Shah, describing her old boss as a “problem solver”, thought his addition to the Cabinet would tilt it in a more liberal direction when it came to lifting Covid restrictions.

“I think we’ll see a nuanced shift, but a shift in the opposite direction from where Matt Hancock was.”

Not everyone was as welcoming. Marr showed a tweet from Dominic Cummings, with the ex-aide to the Prime Minister, stating : “Saj = bog standard = chasing headlines + failing = awful for NHS. Need #RegimeChange”.

Ms Shah was unimpressed. “The fact of the matter is Cummings no longer does anything in government.”

With Mr Hancock gone, attention turned to the Prime Minister’s handling of the crisis. In the Sunday shows and elsewhere the question was asked: why had Boris Johnson not sacked him?

The three times married Mr Johnson has been famously reluctant to criticise the behaviour of others lest the stones are lobbed straight back at him. In 2004 he was sacked by then party leader Michael Howard for lying about an affair. Whenever he is asked questions that he regards as relating to his private life he insists it is his rule not to speak about such matters.

That red line appears increasingly flexible, however, with Mr Johnson’s wife and baby son featuring prominently in photographs of the recent G7 summit in Cornwall.

No party leader or Prime Minister wants to look like they have been bounced into sacking someone by the media. Even at the height of the row over Dominic Cumming’s road trip north during lockdown, Mr Johnson stood by his man.

He also backed Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, after his own head of standards, Sir Alex Allen, found she had “unintentionally” broken the ministerial code. Sir Alex, his ruling snubbed, promptly resigned.

READ MORE: 2639 cases, 1 death, in 24 hours

One high profile departure from Mr Johnson’s Cabinet was Sajid Javid. In a February 2020 reshuffle, he quit rather than carry out an instruction – from the PM but originating with Dominic Cummings – to sack his own advisers.

Yet here is Mr Javid, just 16 months later, returning to a front line role. Given the circumstances of Mr Hancock’s departure, the former Chancellor is in a strong position. He will need to be given the crunch looming over social care in England.

One of his predecessors in the health job, Jeremy Hunt, was a guest on Marr. Asked how long Mr Javid had to tackle the social care crisis, he said: “Six months, because the Government have said they will do it by the end of this year, and I know Sajid will want to honour that promise.”

Earlier, Marr returned to his recent brush with Covid. Speaking to Sir Peter Horby, who chairs the Government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), Marr said he had been double jabbed in the spring. “I felt, if not king of the world, at least almost entirely immune. And yet I got it. Was I just unlucky?”

You were, replied Sir Peter. “What we know with the vaccines is that they are actually remarkably effective at preventing hospitalisations and deaths. They are less effective at preventing infection. So, although you were sick, you weren’t hospitalised and there wasn’t any fatality, and that is probably because of the vaccination.”

Same time, same place next week then, Mr Marr.