Sajid Javid provoked roars of laughter when he won The Spectator magazine's 'comeback of the year' award last week – and paid tribute to 'the CCTV guy at the Department of Health' who caught his predecessor Matt Hancock in the fateful clinch that enabled the return of the Saj to frontline politics.
After the ceremony was over, and while Mr Hancock – who was also at the event – headed to a Prohibition-style basement bar in Soho to dance to 1980s music, Mr Javid went home to deal with the latest plot twists in the Covid pandemic.
Yesterday's announcement that two people in the UK have been found to be infected with the new Omicron Covid variant is being greeted with relative calm by Mr Javid and his officials: they are cautiously optimistic that the vaccine roll-out, combined with travel restrictions, PCR testing, the return of mask-wearing and advanced genome sequencing will remove the need for any more lockdowns.
'We were the first country to identify the significance of this variant, we are talking every day about it and I am being constantly updated on it,' Mr Javid says.
Yesterday's announcement that two people in the UK have been found to be infected with the new Omicron Covid variant is being greeted with relative calm by Sajid Javid (pictured)
'I think for something like that we should act very quickly. I spoke to the Prime Minister and he agreed absolutely.'
Mr Javid is speaking to The Mail on Sunday in his expansive Whitehall office to herald a planned week of health announcements, including a new national force of 'NHS reservists'– modelled on the Army Reserve – made up of retired medics and logistic specialists who can swing into action if the NHS comes under strain in the winter, or if the booster vaccine programme needs supercharging.
He is also expected to set out measures to tackle the backlog of hospital appointments, which is now forecast to peak at an astonishing 13 million, and to deal with the endemic waste that saps the Health Service's £162 billion annual budget.
His carefully prepared plans risk being scrambled by concern – which many experts think could be overheated – about the mutant Omicron.
But critically, Britain's world-beating vaccine programme means that confidence is higher than it was with previous variants, such as Delta.
'The good news is that we know a lot more about vaccines than we did at the start of the pandemic. The MRNA technology, which you find, for example, in the Pfizer vaccine, is very quick.
'In theory the MRNA platform should be able to develop something for trial within days. Of course it has to be vigorously tested, but what we can say today is that vaccines can be developed in months now where pre-pandemic, if you'd asked me or anyone else, it would have been years.'
The contact tracing of people who have potentially been exposed to the new variant will be carried out by what Mr Javid hails as the UK's 'world-leading test and trace architecture'.
Sajid Javid provoked roars of laughter when he paid tribute to 'CCTV guy at the Department of Health' who caught Matt Hancock (pictured) in the clinch that enabled the return of the Saj
'A really good example of our surveillance capability is the fact that we are the first country to identify the threat of this particular new variant. And in terms of testing, there are hundreds and thousands of tests taking place every day.'
Does he think that Omicron has increased the chances of another dreaded lockdown?
'No, not yet, not yet,' he says, before pointing to Boris Johnson's decision to relax restrictions earlier than other EU countries as key.
'I think we have got enough data now to say, especially when we look at what's happening in other countries in Europe, that we absolutely made the right decision in the summer.
'But I was firmly of the view that of course we need to open up at some point and if you are going to do it, do it into the summer, it's much less risk. It was about opening up at the safest possible time but accepting the transmission.
'I think one of the reasons why in the UK things are very stable at this point in time is because of that decision and the success of our booster programme.'
He adds: 'When I first took up this job, I said we need to learn to live with this virus like we live with flu. We accept that flu comes round every year, sadly people die because of flu and we have given the best help and protection that we can to society, but we don't stop society to deal with flu.
'Today we already have flu vaccines that deal with multiple strains and there is no reason to
