It came across as disrespectful. It's not that he'd have done anything organisationally. If the Queen had died, you know he'd have come winging back. Or even if it had been some senior colleague.

I suppose, if you were trying to spin it in his favour, you'd say that he stayed put because coming back would have been a way of poaching the headlines and being a sort of compassion vulture. I suspect the truth is he may have decided that it would look like that, and it might backfire.

It's rather a pity he was on holiday in Egypt rather than somewhere further afield, such as Sri Lanka. I don't mean I wish he'd been one of the victims, but I think it would have been a good way of fixing his attention on the scale of what needs to be done, and the massive effort that is going to be needed.