Awkwardly for the Government, that man was one of its own advisers, the multi-millionaire financier Ben Goldsmith.
The Daily Mail can disclose that Mr Goldsmith, who is on the board of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is staying in the UAE with his wife and young children.
‘We are in Abu Dhabi, which has strict quarantine requirements on arrival and almost no cases of Covid,’ he told this newspaper.
However, direct inbound flights from the UAE were banned by Britain from 1pm yesterday after evidence that a more infectious South African strain of Covid-19 had been detected there. Business trips to the UAE will no longer be considered essential.