Pippa Crerar is the political editor of the Guardian, but in June 2021 she was at the Mirror. And there she wrote a story saying that Boris Johnson had tried to have his weekly audience with the late Queen in the usual face-to-face way at the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, even though he was himself going down with the virus.
Only when he was persuaded that he could be responsible for the death of the Queen did he abandon the idea.
No 10 told her the story was "completely untrue," but she stood by it and the Mirror published it.
Today Crerar tweeted extracts from Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell's Johnson at 10: The Inside Story that show her story was true:
The previous day he had been due to meet the Queen for their weekly audience, with Palace and No 10 official going back and forth about whether the meeting could take place in person.
Johnson was eager not to be restricted by the new laws or his apparent symptoms, to the dismay of Palace officials deeply concerned at the risk of exposing the elderly Queen to the virus.
After some convincing, both from the Palace and Cummings, the prime minister agreed to hold the conversation by phone. The content of a prime minster's audience with the sovereign is sacred, with no advisers in attendance and no official record of the discussion.
The sanctity of this one would be easier to keep than most: afterwards the Queen turned to an aide and commented that she couldn't hear a word of what Johnson said, he was coughing so much.
We know Johnson was willing to sacrifice the truth to burnish his self-image as a man of courage: he claimed to have shaken hands with Covid patients at Kettering General Hospital, even though it had no such patients when he visited it.
But it seems that, for the sake of that image, he was even prepared to put the life of his sovereign at risk.
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