What questions did Starmer ask the new cabinet secretary about his role in Covid losses?

Here are two jarring facts.

The Chancellor has just appointed a special Covid corruption commissioner to examine an eye-watering £7.6 billion of dodgy and fraudulent contracts awarded for Covid equipment.

And the PM has just appointed as cabinet secretary Chris Wormald, who was the top official in the Department of Health and Social Care, which oversaw the awarding of the dodgy contracts.

The juxtaposition of the appointments is astonishing, quite literally.

I am intrigued by what Keir Starmer asked Wormald about his financial stewardship of DHSC during the job interview.

What is Wormald’s explanation for how such spectacularly loss-making medical procurement - that has explicitly and repeatedly been described by Rachel Reeves as a scandal - happened on his watch, when he was the accounting officer?

Who does Wormald think was to blame for awarding the disastrous loss-making contracts? Where does the buck stop for the debacle?

It can’t be his fault, surely, or presumably Starmer would not have promoted him to run the entire civil service? So who was at fault?

Tricky to blame the tooth fairy for this one.

Is it plausible that the corruption commissioner and the separate Covid Inquiry will give the DHSC a clean bill of health as they go through purchasing procedures and the books?

That seems a stretch after the National Audit Office has said the department has written off a staggering £9.9bn on unusable and over-priced personal protective equipment?

If they savage the DHSC, does Downing Street already have a media plan to protect Wormald and blame others?

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Everyone tells me that Wormald is sensible and impressive. “He is interested in substance and not just a courtier” says someone who knows him and rates him highly.

And lest we forget, the country and the government were in panic mode during the early Covid months, so accidents were bound to happen, milk was inevitably going to be spilled.

It was a crisis after all and the NHS was chronically short of PPE protective equipment - though whose faults was that?

But the difficulty with saying forgive and forget, don’t get worked up, is that the Chancellor says precisely the opposite.

She insists the lost billions are a scandal and we should all be very angry. Though presumably Starmer has misplaced her memo.

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