What a difference a year makes. Sir Richard Dearlove, the MI6 chief (‘C’) from 1999 to 2004, was first interviewed on the UK’s excellent Planet Normal podcast almost exactly a year ago. His key message was that he saw plausibility in the theory developed by virologists Professor Birger Sørensen and Dr Angus Dalgleish that Covid-19 was an ‘engineered escapee’ – i.e. an enhanced natural virus deliberately created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which accidentally escaped.