I’m really looking forward to seeing family and friends, I’ve not seen family and friends for a very long time, like most people,” he told a virtual event last month hosted by the Royal College of Physicians. “I’m really looking forward to getting out of London. I’m in London to work, not because I wish to live in London, and getting out to the hills in England and the mountains in Scotland, that’s a very distant, but very attractive dream.” The top lawyer added: "In light of the new evidence it now makes no sense for this gathering not to be investigated by the police given that an almost identical gathering in the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case's office two day's later is being investigated." In my opinion, it really breaks the flow of a presentation for the presenter to keep prompting someone with “next slide please”. It became a running joke with the UK Government updates that they were constantly prompting for “next slide please”

Many people online also complained that the slides didn’t fit the screen. This was an error seen on the BBC only, which had set them up wrong, and wasn’t the government’s fault. However, it does suggest the government isn’t considering what devices people will use to view the press conferences. They appear to be designing for the 50-inch television they are viewing and not for the many people streaming or catching up on their phones. Auditory/Linguistic learners take in information through listening and speaking. They prefer to hear the content and verbally repeat it. This group might well prefer audio books to reading by themselves. You can also use the new “standout” mode (not sure about that name, I prefer “weatherman mode”) to appear over the slides which can help promote engagement. Note, standout mode person overlaid on the slides won’t come through on a recording, The recording will show normal bottom right video. University College hospital in London, where Chris Whitty worked over the Christmas period. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

The last slide projector ever made rolled off the assembly line in 2004. The inside of its casing was signed by factory workers and Kodak brass before the unit was handed over to the Smithsonian. Toasts and speeches were made, but by then they were eulogies, because PowerPoint had already eaten the world. Inventing PowerPoint

Downing Street is hoping his "defensive" mini-reshuffle to promote loyalists - and the promise of a bigger reshuffle in early summer - will be enough to keep mutinous Tory MPs at bay. When Whitty finally does take a holiday, he will most probably find himself on the Isle of Skye, where he part owns an old schoolhouse. Perhaps anywhere but London will do. When our producers advance slides for presenters, we ask them to consider other signaling phrases that fit more smoothly into the conversational flow and we practice them during our rehearsal so we know our cues. Below we share our favorite alternatives to “next slide”.One goal of a map maker is to reveal patterns that may exist in the data, and colouring is key to this – they have to decide when to move from one colour to another. In some cases it’s preferable to split up a narrow part of the distribution into lots of colours and then assign the rest to a few. Or you might assign each part of the distribution equally. Either is fine, but it needs to be explained, or else it’s a nuance that will get missed or misinterpreted. My natural style is not to use slides at all. I prefer to engage an audience with what I’m saying. But over the years I’ve learned that some people in an audience like to be engaged visually as well. The Mirror revealed last year that dozens of staff had spent the evening huddling in groups around their office computers rather than dialling in from home. Although you might be familiar with the slides, your audience has never seen them before. So if you have several areas on a busy slide – like a graph, an image and some wording – the audience won’t know where to look first. You’ll be speaking and they’ll be looking around the slide, not listening to you, trying to find out where you are.

But the PM’s Press Secretary could not say whether the newly-revealed photo had been sent to the Met, saying: “I’m not aware of that and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment”. It’s worth remembering that audiences are made up of three groups of people – auditory, visual and kinesthetic – and they all learn in different ways.

“Take Control” – the “next slide please” killer

And yet Whitty is at his most devastating when he calls out wrongdoing. In a Gresham lecture on lung cancer last month, he was clear where blame lay for the most common cancer death in Britain. “This is cancer entirely for profit,” he said. “Almost all of the people who get this cancer … have got the cancer, because an extremely wealthy, incredibly sophisticated marketing industry – the cigarette industry – has got them addicted to cigarettes at a young age and kept them addicted the rest of their lives, and then they die. This should never be a cancer blamed on individuals. This is a cancer created by industry for profit.” Visual/Imaginative learners prefer information laid out in a visual, often structured format. They love pictures, charts and graphs, will probably take notes, and often doodle when listening. The choice made for this map overemphasises small leaps in small numbers at the expense of big leaps in large numbers. Unless the values up to 25 and those between 25 and 50 had significance in policy, they could have been lumped into 0-50. Likewise, the map suggests anything greater than 200 doesn’t really matter – that a rate of 201 deserves the same colour as a rate of 601. This doesn’t seem right to me. But the point is, this system needs to be explained, because choosing different intervals can create a very different impression.

PowerPoint had become shorthand for the stupefying indignities of office life—a 2001 New Yorker profile summed it up as “software you impose on other people.” The PM's allies have claimed that he will not resign even if he is fined by the Metropolitan Police for breaching Covid rules. The crisis has demanded dedication and stamina, but Whitty has also needed the trust of those around him. One of his skills has been to maintain the confidence of politicians and academics – two groups that do not always see eye to eye, Prof David Heymann notes. “That is quite an accomplishment: it takes integrity to satisfy both groups.” This is Gaskins’s key insight: a presentation’s message is inevitably diluted when its production is outsourced. In the early ’80s, he meant that literally. The first two versions of PowerPoint were created to help executives produce their own overhead transparencies and 35-millimeter slides, rather than passing the job off to their secretaries or a slide bureau. In the late ’40s, multimedia was a novelty. But by the early 1960s, nearly all companies with national advertising budgets were using multimedia gear—16-­millimeter projectors, slide projectors, filmstrip projectors, and overheads—in their sales training and promotions, for public relations, and as part of their internal communications. Many employed in-house A/V directors, who were as much showmen as technicians. Because although presentations have a reputation for being tedious, when they’re done right, they’re theater. The business world knows it. Ever since the days of the Vitarama, companies have leveraged the dramatic power of images to sell their ideas to the world. Next slide, pleaseI want to be clear that I have tremendous respect for the teams of people involved in creating these maps and graphics. I also have sympathy with the scientific advisers themselves, who are treading the increasingly strained tightrope between science and politics. The fact that they are showing such a rich array of data in some quite interesting ways is a really good thing, and we need more of it. Getting these things right is important. We’ve seen previously and in this pandemic that trust in government influences whether people follow public health guidelines. And in a UK survey earlier this year, those who had low levels of trust in the government’s ability to handle the outbreak were twice as likely to think its response had been confused and inconsistent. While a set of confusing slides won’t alone dictate how people behave, these things add up. Whitty was born in Gloucester, the first of four sons, and spent much of his early childhood in northern Nigeria. His mother, Susannah, was a teacher, his father, Ken, a British Council official. Whitty was sent to the UK for schooling, first to Windlesham House in West Sussex and then to Malvern College in Worcestershire. Among his early influences was his maternal grandmother, Grace Summerhayes, with whom he sometimes stayed. In 1928 she set up the first maternity hospital in Ghana, one of the first to provide midwifery and obstetric training in Africa. The connection instilled a passion for global health that is still in evidence today. Labour MP Fabian Hamilton raised the photo in PMQs - and contrasted the merriment to a constituent who was unable to have visits from her family while having cancer treatment. Several of those in Whitehall who have worked with Whitty describe what one calls his “dry sense of humour”, while another says he is, “funny – in an academic way”. One former senior Downing Street insider who worked on the pandemic response agreed: “He is just a decent bloke. Got a few calls wrong at the start, but otherwise was bang on with advice, is very smart, works hard and is just thoroughly decent to people in a high pressure environment.”