WILTSHIRE Council leader Jane Scott was too ill to visit Salisbury after the recent nerve agent attack, but she did attend the House of Lords three times.

Her deputy, John Thomson, said she had picked up “a rather nasty disease” while on a working trip to South Africa, which had stopped her from coming to Salisbury after the incident in the Maltings on March 4.

But Baroness Scott, a life peer, was in Westminster on each of the three days after the attack.

She said she had been “exceptionally ill” with a very high fever and had been on “very strong antibiotics”.

“Many people of my age have ended up in hospital with what I had,” she said. “I honestly can’t remember one day to the next.

“I was trying to run the recovery as best I could from my bed.”

She said she returned from her trip to Africa on the Sunday of the incident.

“I probably went to London that Monday,” she said. “I didn’t know anything at the time, nothing was known.”

She was in London again on the Tuesday, but said she “probably came home very ill”, and on the Wednesday she said she went straight to the office of a minister, whom she would not name, to discuss the Salisbury incident.

Baroness Scott said she did not know if it would have been appropriate for her to have come to Salisbury, even if she had been well, adding that Cllr Thomson had been in the city on her behalf.

“The important thing for me is to make sure everyone is working together to get Salisbury back on its feet as quickly as possible,” she said. “That’s what I have been doing from my sick bed.”

She added: “I will work my socks off to recover that city. Yesterday I spent all day in meetings of central and local government trying to make sure this city gets absolutely everything it needs.”

Baroness Scott will be in Salisbury all day tomorrow and again on Tuesday when Wiltshire Council’s cabinet meets in the city.