Michael Rosen is pondering his feelings towards health secretary turned I’m A Celebrity insect-muncher Matt Hancock and our elected leaders over their handling of the covid pandemic that nearly cost him his life. “How do I feel about the way Matt Hancock and the Government handled the Covid crisis?” he wonders aloud.

“People are entitled to feel bitter, but I try not to feel bitter. I don’t feel angry, I just feel contemptuous. He was a fool for having got it wrong and a fool for having broken the Covid rules himself when he was having his cuddles with his girlfriend.”

While Rosen, now 76, spent six weeks on a hospital ventilator in an induced coma, in the spring of 2020 after contracting first Covid, then pneumonia, his family dutifully obeyed social distancing guidelines and the ban on hospital visits. As we all now know, the then-health secretary was engaged in a clandestine affair with his work colleague.

“I don’t buy his whole, ‘We fell madly in love, what else can you do?’ thing,” continues Rosen, who was Children’s Laureate between 2007 and 2009, and has published more than 140 books. “We’ve all fallen madly in love. Sometimes, we just have to sit on opposite sides of the room. Hancock made a fool of himself then, and he’s still making a fool of himself.”

Rosen was treated in the same ward as broadcaster Kate Garraway’s husband, Derek Draper, who still requires 24-hour care.

“She was fighting back tears interviewing Matt Hancock on GMTV recently,” Rosen recalls. “And all he could do was talk in banalities, saying, ‘I know how you feel’.”

He pauses, leaving unspoken the obvious next line, which is, “I don’t think you do”.

Rosen lives in leafy Muswell Hill, north London, with his third wife Emma and the eldest of their two children Emile, 18. He has just published his latest book, Getting Better, a deeply poignant memoir recounting his near-death experience and lessons learned.

Almost three years after his ordeal at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, north London, he is still learning to live with a range of post-Covid health issues.

He now suffers blurred and double vision in his left eye and has 90 per cent hearing loss in his left ear. “I’m a bit lopsided,” he admits. He has intermittent balance problems, so his damning verdict on Hancock and his ministerial colleagues is perhaps no surprise.

“Obviously Hancock was the health minister, but the mistakes must have been a Cabinet decision. There were some key moments they got wrong,” he continues.

“They screwed up the PPE thing terribly by going with their mates and misspending billions, and they never thought through the test and trace thing.

“The first thing to do, if you’ve got a contagious infectious illness, is to think how you can isolate vulnerable people, and how you can trace people who are infected. They did exactly the opposite thing by taking people out of hospitals and banging them into care homes – which was an absolutely terrible thing to do.

“In Boris Johnson’s hands at the start of the pandemic was the greatest public health instrument the world has ever invented – the NHS. But his crucial, and lethal, first reaction, was to say, ‘We don’t have to bother with this. I’m not segregating the market’.”

Rosen does not believe poor decision-making was entirely to blame. But there is clearly a seething anger, bubbling below the surface, as he talks.

“I’m not saying nobody would have died had different decisions been taken but it would have mitigated it. The UK had more than 200,000 deaths from Covid, and I’m not saying that number would have been zero, but it could have been way fewer.”

Thanks to the heroics of the NHS, Rosen, who has had five children from his three marriages, is not among that horrifying number, but he’s aware how close he came to death, and the lasting effect the drama has had on his family.

“The doctor told me I only had a 50-50 chance of making it and when I got that secondary infection – Klebsiella it’s called – they were very, very worried. It must have been horrendous for my family when I was put in a coma.

“Every time they rang the hospital or any time the phone rang it might have been to say I was dead, so it was a nightmare for them.

“And then I came out of the coma and came home. I was in this weird hallucinating, delirious state and I couldn’t stand up and they didn’t know if I was going to be in a wheelchair forever. And who was going to wheel me around in the wheelchair?”

With his prominent eyes and gangly frame, Rosen might be said to resemble one of the more fantastical characters from one of his many children’s books – perhaps his most famous, his iconic and bestselling 1989 book, We’re All Going On A Bear Hunt, was adapted for television in 2016, starring the voice talents of Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman – but he was unaware of the physical toll that Covid had taken on his body.

“I was just delighted to be home and I had no idea how terrible I looked until several people, six months, nine months, a year, even two years later, said to me: ‘My God, you look so much better. And I said, ‘Oh, did I look bad?’

“And they said, ‘Yes. Your skin was all kind of papery. And you looked drawn. And you were grey under your eyes and you seemed sort of bewildered’.”

Three months before his 77th birthday, bewildered is the last adjective you’d use to describe Rosen, whose latest book, also explores with heartbreaking candour the sudden death in 1999 of his son Eddie, aged just 18, from meningococcal septicaemia.

“It’s been incredibly cathartic writing it all down,” says Rosen. “It’s been both a release and a relief.” It has also inadvertently turned Rosen into a willing but unqualified grief counsellor.

“People have stopped me on trains, and I’ve had emails from people sharing their experiences of grief and obviously I’m not a guru and I’m not trained, but people seem very glad to share their stories with somebody who’s tried to put the words of their version of grief down in an order because, when a tumultuous thing like grief happens in your life, it’s like chaos in your head.”

Inevitably Eddie’s death and Rosen’s own brush with mortality has brought his future into sharper focus too.

“My daughter told me that I’m an optimistic nihilist. I don’t believe there’s an afterlife, or there’s any kind of deity watching over me so that makes me a form of nihilist but I’m not somebody that thinks there’s no point to anything,” he smiles.

“I just think life is without a point; it’s pointless, but that’s a good reason to be optimistic, and think, ‘Well, I’d better make the most of it.’

“I have to accept the fact that I could pop off at any moment and that there may not be a lot of time left, so I have to work out what I feel about that but I don’t feel an urgency to hurry up. I’m just glad that I’ve got things to do. And if I don’t finish them all, well… in fact I know that I won’t finish them all.

“I can imagine myself just fading out, going, ‘Oooh, I could write that great big 500-page novel right now,’ and then, Clunk. Dead. I can well imagine I’d be in that state of mind.”

Time will tell if Rosen’s grand opus ever materialises, but one certainty is that his lifelong love affair with books – and with libraries’ pivotal role in increasing literacy for all walks of society – will prevail, whatever the current government policy.

“It may not appear as a great disaster for all people, but in my world, cutting funding to libraries is one of the great disasters,” he says.

“It’s relatively easy for people who are very well off, well off, and quite well off to get all the reading matter they want, but for people who are poor, it’s actually difficult.

“You either need a computer, which many people can’t afford, and a library also provides that lovely free space, that access, that peace, where you can pull a book off the shelf, and not be asked, ‘Sorry, have you bought a drink?’

“And when you’ve got kids, you can take ten books away and you can give your children this fantasy pathway, this gateway into education.

“It is an incredible platform and the idea that we’re closing them and preventing them, it seems to me like a form of class war and it fills me with fury and deep, deep anger.

“But I still have hope for the future. I hope that we’ll have a change of government in two years time, and if Labour are true to their historical ideals of access for all, they will do something to secure the future of libraries in this country.”