Boris Johnson has insisted he was not properly warned about the potential severity of Covid in early 2020, dismissing abusive messages between his staff as the inevitable passion of people “doing their best”.
In an at times combative start to his testimony before the Covid inquiry in London, which began with the removal of protesters from the hearing room, Johnson apologized for mistakes made but then argued that they were not necessarily mistakes that could have been avoided .
Asked why he had not acted more urgently in January and early February 2020 amid warnings that Covid was spreading rapidly and could infect and kill large numbers of people, Johnson portrayed himself as at the mercy of a government-wide mentality of understandable complacency, given that that previous viruses such as Sars and Mers had not led to this.
“When you read that an Asian pandemic is about to sweep the world, you think you've heard it before, and that was the problem,” the former prime minister told the inquiry.
“I was not told that this was something that would require urgent and immediate action.”
He similarly dismissed the idea that he had “taken his eye off the ball” later in February when he spent most of the holiday at the prime minister's country retreat in Chevening, where cases were rising rapidly. “There were clearly things we could and should have done if we had known and understood how quickly the virus was spreading. But we didn't do that,” he said.
Johnson continued to argue this despite some in the government showing greater concern at this point, including a WhatsApp message from Dominic Cummings on February 6 in which his chief adviser told a group, including the Prime Minister, that he had been informed the virus was “ is now likely to have gotten out of control and will engulf the world.”
When asked by Hugo Keith KC, the research adviser, why he had left Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, to chair the first five meetings of the government's Cobra emergency committee on Covid, Johnson said the virus was then ' was not something that had actually happened'. broken on the political world,” adding that it had not been raised by anyone during the Prime Minister's Questions at the time.
He added: “I think it would certainly be fair for me, the entire Whitehall establishment, including the scientific community, including our advisers, to say that we have underestimated the scale and pace of the challenge.”
He added: “We should have collectively intervened much earlier. I should have sprung.'
The investigation also confirmed that it was impossible to retrieve around 5,000 WhatsApp messages from Johnson's old phone, covering the key period from January to June 2020, possibly caused by the device undergoing a factory reset.
Johnson began the first of two days of testimony by saying he was sorry “for the pain and loss and suffering of the Covid victims” – an apology that was interrupted when Heather Hallett, the inquiry chair, ordered four protesters out of the room to leave. because he held up a sign that said “The dead can't hear your excuses.”
Although Johnson said he took ultimate responsibility for all the biggest decisions of the pandemic, he refused to say under sharp questioning from Keith that his apology meant avoidable mistakes had been made.
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Keith then asked Johnson whether, by accepting mistakes, he meant that avoidable mistakes had been made, or whether, in retrospect, some things could have been done differently. The former Prime Minister replied: “I cannot give you the answer to that question. I'm not sure.”
During lengthy questioning about WhatsApp messages shown earlier in the investigation, which showed a sometimes insulting and misogynistic tone, as well as occasional despair and disgust at Johnson's leadership and the wider culture of Number 10, Johnson strongly pushed back on the idea that this meant his government was dysfunctional. .
Instead, he argued, such conflicts could be “a good and healthy thing” and have occurred in other governments, for example those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
“I think in all of these things you're actually looking at a lot of very talented, very motivated people who are concerned about what's happening with the pandemic, who are doing their best and who, like everyone else, will be under a lot of stress and deeply concerned about themselves and their own performance, tend to be critical of others,” he said.
“And I would argue that any powerful and effective government, and I'm thinking of the Thatcher government or the Blair government, has many challenging and competing characters whose views of each other may not be fit for publication but who get an awful lot . done – and that's what we did.”