RAF plane, believed to be carrying PPE, arrives from Turkey

Flight tracker RadarBox showed the Airbus A400-M registered ZM416 depart Istanbul and land just after 3.30am on Wednesday at RAF Brize Norton.

The plane had been dispatched from the Oxfordshire base, where two other planes are on stand-by to pick up further kit from Turkey, late on Monday.

It is not known if the consignment, which was ordered on Thursday and originally due to arrive on Sunday, includes 400,000 badly-needed surgical gowns.

Health minister Helen Whately said there has not been a political decision made that Britain should not to become involved in EU procurement programmes to acquire equipment for dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

The senior civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Simon McDonald told a Commons committee on Tuesday that ministers had taken a "political decision" not to join a programme to procure ventilators, only to later issue a retraction.

Ms Whately said the UK had since joined other EU procurement programmes.

"There do seem some misunderstandings about the EU scheme. I am assured there was no political decision about the involvement in it," she told Sky News.

"The reason we weren't involved in the initial scheme was to do with a communications error. We are now participating in one EU scheme and ready to participate in future schemes.

"The important thing is making sure that we are getting the PPE that we need."

Ms Whately has said that 61 NHS staff were known to have died after becoming infected with the coronavirus.

"We know that 61 NHS workers have died and for care workers I have a figure of 15, but we are working to get more comprehensive data on that because it is important for us to know the number of people in health and care who are dying of this," she told BBC Breakfast.

"We have got to do everything we can to protect their lives."

Tony Blair has said "you can't have a void of decision making" as Prime Minister Boris Johnson recovers from symptoms of the coronavirus.

The former prime minister said Mr Johnson, who was treated in intensive care and is thought not be fully back to work, has "got to get better" and he would be consulted on major decisions regarding the government's response to the pandemic.

Mr Blair also told Good Morning Britain: "I think in a situation where every day matters and where every day decisions have to be taken, I think the person who is the acting prime minister along with what is essentially the war cabinet - the top four ministers that are meeting together - that person has got to be taking those decisions.

"You can't have a void of decision making."

Mr Blair, who said he "completely" sympathises with Mr Johnson given his present condition, added that some important decisions have to be "taken now".

These include matters such as how the Government is organising itself, what needs to be done now to prepare to exit from the lockdown and various issues around things including schools and business sectors.

Tony Blair suggested that the whole of the Government needs to be reordered in order to tackle the crisis, and said mass testing is of vital importance.

He told Good Morning Britain that a senior minister should be in charge of different key elements and they should be backed up by good people outside the Government who have the necessary skill sets.

"You have got to get the point where you have the capability of dealing with all the different dimensions and not getting overwhelmed."

Mr Blair said tough decisions are currently having to be made and he is sure everyone in government is "working flat out" but "it is really a question of whether we are positioned rightly to measure up to the scale of this problem and the need for action and decision-making at speed".

Health Minister Helen Whately defended the Government's efforts to acquire personal protective equipment (PPE) for health and care workers.

She said the Government had been contacted by more than 8,000 potential suppliers and that ministers are concentrating on those with established supply chains.

"What the team is doing ... is moving quickest on those who have the largest scale that they can supply because we need billions of items of PPE," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Some companies we have heard from have only set up in the last couple of days and have had a conversation with somebody they think they can get some stock to the UK.

"There is a difference between that and those who have established, experienced supply chains."

The leader of a team of British scientists seeking to develop a coronavirus vaccine has said he is "very confident" one will be found.

Professor Robin Shattock, from Imperial College's Department of Infectious Disease, said Covid-19 is a less difficult target than diseases such as HIV or influenza.

"I think we are very confident that some vaccines will come through and work," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"There are so many groups working on different approaches and the virus is not as difficult a target as some of the things we have seen before.

"The main issue is that it doesn't seem to be changing very much. So it is a target we have in our sights and it is very different from influenza, which changes every year.

"As long as this virus stays relatively stable it will be very easy to lock our sights on it in terms of targeting a vaccine."

Tony Blair dealt with the foot-and-mouth crisis during his time as prime minister.

Recalling the handling of that crisis, he told Good Morning Britain: "To be frank about it, for the first few weeks we were behind the curve, but what I learnt is that you just have to set aside all the normal rules and bureaucracy and just reposition the government differently."

On the handling of the current situation, he said: "All of us know people who are serious people with capabilities to offer who are have been trying to fight their way into the system to offer them - and that is what makes me think we are not yet organised in the right way for the scale of this thing so that every possible avenue is being explored."

Noting that a vaccine could be "a long way away", he added: "You cannot be sure when those vaccines are going to be available and the testing for those has got to be done with a lot of care."

Tony Blair recalled that it was only when he repositioned the government as he was dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis that "we accelerated our ability to deal with it and got on top of it".

Of the current crisis, he told Good Morning Britain: "When you come to the exit from the lockdown, this phase of the suppression of the disease, which is absolutely right and necessary, that, in my view, is actually probably a simpler task than how you exit from the lockdown.

"How you exit is really, really complicated and, unless you have the right skill set there at the centre of government right from the very beginning, then it's going to be very hard to do things like mass testing, which I can't see any other way out of this."

In an interview with care minister Helen Whately on Good Morning Britain, presenter Piers Morgan described the government's current level of testing as a "spectacular failure".

Ms Whately told Mr Morgan she would answer his questions "if you let me finish speaking" and she was trying to "give him the context" of efforts to ramp up the number of tests.

She said that current figures on the deaths of people in care homes could be "misleading" as they "include some who have died in hospitals, so it is an inaccurate figure".

She said the way the data is being collected has been changed so that new figures could be published next week.

Mr Morgan took issue with her answers regarding the number of people who have died in care homes and said those who died in hospital of the same illness are being given more respect.

She described his comment as "an incredibly unreasonable accusation".