The National:

BORIS Johnson missed five Cobra meetings at the beginning of the pandemic.

As the novel coronavirus spread rapidly around the world and heads of state everywhere desperately looked to plan how best to respond, Johnson didn’t even bother going to the meetings.

Five times he missed those top-level discussions about how the UK should react to the oncoming storm, but it definitely wasn’t because he was working on a book about William Shakespeare to fund his second divorce.

However, some Unionists have got the perfect response to those statements of fact.

In an almost too stereotypical example of whataboutery, they say: “Nicola Sturgeon missed six.”

Tom Harwood, the soon-to-be GB News journalist who thought the man leading an independent review into whether Nicola Sturgeon broke the ministerial code was in the SNP because he read it on Wikipedia, has set them all off.

The right-wing writer tweeted: “Isn't it funny how Nicola Sturgeon, who missed more Cobra meetings (6) than Boris Johnson (5) in early 2020, somehow escapes similar criticism.”

While Nicola Sturgeon did miss six Cobra meetings in early 2020, the comparison doesn’t exactly seem fair.

For the First Minister to travel from Bute House to 70 Whitehall, the address in London where the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms are, she would need to be driven around 400 miles. This would take about eight hours.

If she were to walk, it would take her more than five days of continuous movement.

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Boris Johnson, in comparison, lives about 160 yards from where the Cobra meetings are held - and that’s with Google Maps taking us the long way round.

The Scottish Government said it receives “only limited advance notice of such meetings”, which may go some way to explain the First Minister’s absences.

But what about Johnson’s? Does he need a lot of warning before he walks almost 150 metres?

Furthermore, Cobra meetings are held in the UK Government Cabinet Office for a reason: they’re UK Government meetings.

Unless something dramatic has changed that the Jouker is not aware of, Nicola Sturgeon isn’t in the UK Government. In fact, we remember hearing something about her wanting to end the UK altogether.

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As her Scottish Government stressed in April 2020: “The First Minister has been chairing meetings of the Scottish Government Resilience Committee (our equivalent of Cobra) since 29 January."

How many of those meetings has Boris Johnson attended?

We're not the only ones who noticed Harwood's "misleading" tweet. Here's a few others: