"There are still shockwaves from seismic events," says a former cabinet minister - "that's what we're living through now." Boris Johnson might not have stitched prawns into the hems of his expensive curtains in No 10, but as we've seen over the past couple of days, the leftovers from his time in office can still cause a nasty stink.

We've been reminded of the early scramble over Covid, illustrated by former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's trove of WhatsApp chats - distressing for those who lost relatives, no doubt, and deeply embarrassing for those who pressed send.

There has also been more evidence of how No 10 struggled to get its story straight as the public reeled from revelations that there was booze and get-togethers in Downing Street during lockdown.

And there have been fresh conversations in the Conservative Party about the manner of Mr. Johnson's exit. Labour's decision to hire the Whitehall sleaze-buster, Sue Gray, is catnip for his old allies who want to claim that he was stitched up.

Reminders of the pandemic, partygate, and more howls of protest about how the former PM was treated. None of that was in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's carefully designed script.

First off, the spectacle - for that truly is what it is - of the former health secretary's WhatsApp messages being carefully dropped day by day in the Telegraph newspaper. His colleagues are less than impressed.

"It's an eyeroll," says one Tory MP. "How much of a moron was he?" asks another. "Spectacularly bad judgement," remarks one of his former cabinet colleagues.

Much of the media has done what it does best - talk feverishly to itself about the rights and wrongs of the way the story emerged after Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who co-wrote Mr Hancock's book, passed thousands of his messages to a newspaper without his permission.

The chats have illustrated, in sometimes toe-curling levels of detail, the way in which government figures communicate - described as "teenage with LOLS" by one Tory MP. They include sweary messages about Dominic Cummings, who was Mr Johnson's chief adviser, and reveal a love-hate relationship between Mr Hancock and his then-Cabinet colleague Michael Gove.

And it's given colour and context to the arguments that were raging at the top of government in 2020, during the first few scrambled months of the pandemic.

There is intriguing and seemingly perplexing detail in Saturday's information dump, where Mr Hancock seems to suggest the government was covering up rises in Covid cases as a result of then-Chancellor Mr Sunak's "Eat Out To Help Out" scheme. It was reported in October 2020 - after the scheme was up and running - that it could have contributed to the second wave.

But the effects of the pandemic are still being felt in so many profound ways - these stories, the lasting effect on the economy, and the Covid inquiry that is likely to run for many, many months and is only just getting off the ground.