Two gentlemen of corona: the scientists helping to fight Covid-19

We will have to get used to this. Every afternoon the prime minister strides into a butterscotch room in Downing Street and stands at a lectern between two drooping flags to give the latest dolorous news to an uncertain nation. How ironic that Boris, who instinctively loathes ‘doomsters and gloomsters’, is obliged to play the mortician’s bean–counter and recite the daily tallies of the infected and the dead.

He’s flanked by the best brains in the land. On the right, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s top scientific adviser. To the left, Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer. They wear the usual suit-and-tie uniform of reassuring officialdom. And both men stand a few inches taller than the Prime Minister. Theatre directors call this the ‘stage picture’, meaning the visual contours that show the relative status of the characters in a scene.

Sir Patrick looks like a classic corridors-of-power man, a technocrat with a banker’s dark-rimmed spectacles worn slightly forward on the nose so that the rims cast shadows across his eyes. He’s watching every-thing but what is he thinking? Only he knows. His voice is classless, his delivery measured and with carefully spaced pauses. He has the faintly unsettling air of the all-knowing puppet-master, the seasoned and elusive Whitehall insider, a man who can appear in a room without the door handle having been turned.

His specialism is blood. Earlier in his career he made ‘important discoveries’ in the field of cell disease. His work revealed that ‘human arterial vasculature is actively dilated by continuous release of nitrous oxide’. Some of us knew that already, of course. His background is in Big Pharma, specifically Glaxo, where he served as president of research and development for five years.