Whenever anyone decides to release a much-delayed report late on a Friday afternoon, you know there’s probably something in there they’d rather you didn’t see. Journos are busy on Fridays trying to get things done ahead of the weekend – and this blog is much the same. I do like to spend some time with my kids, you know…

The fact that the report has also appeared on the same day we found out Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, has been cheating on his wife with a political aide and old university friend just raises my suspicions further. What could be in that report that bothers them so much?

That’s my initial conclusion on the first report from the Events Research Programme finally seeing the light of day. They reveal a total of 28 cases were found amongst a sample size of roughly 58,000 people. Which sounds good – until you discover the number of people doing the PCR tests as requested was as low as 15% for some events.

This raises questions about that 85% who didn’t do them. Why didn’t they do it? Why wasn’t it a compulsory part of the test events? And whilst I acknowledge this wouldn’t have led to a tsunami of Covid, but how many cases were missed because participants were apparently too lazy to do it?

I’m about to have my dinner, and not even a government report released to bury bad news is going to stop me eating my fish. But rest assured I’ll return to this….