I wonder if any other PMs gifted themselves job sharing, let alone telling the other poor sod of his fate.
Pretty sure WW1, WW2, etc didn't need the PM to backdoor his ministers.
As for Covid as reason for the contingency; back in 1919 Spanish flu infected ~2m people and killed 15,000 of them, out of a population of 5.2m, more than covid and way more by % .My bet is even Billy Hughes, for all his authoritarian and abrasive tactics, didn't take it upon himself to use that pandemic to grant himself a one man show executive council.
