Boris Johnson says sorry to Covid inquiry – but claims it wasn’t all his fault
Boris Johnson said sorry for the mistakes his government made at the height of the Covid pandemic – but made clear that he believes his ministers, scientific advisers and officials should also shoulder the blame.
On the first of two days of evidence to the Covid inquiry, the former prime minister offered bereaved families an “unreserved” apology for the “pain, loss and suffering” they experienced due to decisions made.
Yet Mr Johnson provoked anger from relatives by appearing to spread the blame for a lack of action as the virus took hold in early 2020, saying: “It would certainly be fair to say of me, the entire Whitehall establishment, scientific community included, that we underestimated the scale and the pace of the challenge.
“We should have collectively twigged much sooner. I should have twigged.”
He claimed he and his advisers did not put enough “credence” in forecasts warning of a reasonable worst case scenario at the start of February 2020, but also blamed civil servants, saying: “collectively in Whitehall there was not a sufficiently loud enough klaxon of alarm”.
Mr Johnson is expected to spend more than 10 hours on the witness stand at Lady Hallett’s inquiry, before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gives evidence next week.
The former prime minister was heckled by bereaved family members several times as he tried to apologise for mistakes.
Mr Johnson admitted he was “rattled” by scenes of hospitals being overrun with Covid patients in Italy in the middle of February, telling his No 10 advisers he feared the UK might follow suit.
But inquiry KC Hugo Keith also confronted him with emails, Cabinet briefing notes and WhatsApps from the time which showed he was keen not to “overreact” to a potential threat.
As the Cabinet Office’s emergencies committee was warning of a possible pandemic in which 520,000 people could die, Mr Johnson told his aides there was a risk that the “biggest damage” could be done by “overreacting”, the inquiry heard.
Mr Johnson told Baroness Hallett he was merely trying to “strike a balance” between assessing the public health threat and not panicking the public, insisting that previous health threats such as BSE and swine flu had not materialised on the same scale as the pandemic.
The former PM was asked about a comment he was said to have made in March 2020 during discussions over lockdown, in which he said: “We’re killing the patient to tackle the tumour. Why are we destroying everything for people who will die anyway soon?”
But Mr Johnson insisted this was merely “an indication of the cruelty of the choice that we faced, and the appalling balancing act that I had to do throughout the pandemic”.
In an apparent attempt to spread the blame among others, Mr Johnson said there were different messages from the Westminster government and the devolved administrations which risked causing confusion, and that some scientific advisers like chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty had warned him that lockdown should not have been imposed too early.
He insisted that advice he received in March 2020 against cancelling mass gatherings because it would lead to crowing in pubs “sounded reasonable at the time” but “with hindsight, as a symbol of government earnestness rather than just being guided by the science, we should perhaps have done that.”
Mr Johnson also appeared to blame the “bewildering” and “puzzling” data and graphs he was presented with at the time, and claimed that Cabinet ministers were “more reluctant to impose NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdown]” than he was.
Naomi Fulop, spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said Mr Johnson’s evidence was “not the conduct of a man who wanted lessons to be learnt, and his apology rang utterly hollow”, adding: “It’s a painful reminder of his refusal to take Covid seriously in early 2020 and start preparing testing and other public health measures. His indecisiveness when he refused to lockdown, causing the NHS to become overwhelmed. And his failure to learn from his mistakes in the second wave, leading to an even larger death toll than in the first.
“Ultimately, however much Johnson blusters, the proof was in the UK’s awful death toll, the second-worst in Western Europe. Everyone in the country has, in some way, been let down by Johnson’s handling of Covid-19. He was the worst possible prime minister at the worst possible time.”
