Whitty called Sunak’s Covid scheme ‘eat out to help out the virus’, Johnson says

Chris Whitty called Rishi Sunak’s controversial discount meals scheme “eat out to help the virus” weeks after it was launched, the Covid inquiry has heard.

Boris Johnson revealed that England’s chief medical officer made the disparaging remarks about Eat Out To Help Out at a top level government covid meeting in September 2020.

The inquiry has previously heard how former health secretary Matt Hancock described the policy in similar terms.

Prof Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance have both told Lady Hallett’s inquiry they were not consulted about the scheme before it was announced in July 2020.

Mr Johnson insisted the policy, which had been discussed between him and then chancellor Mr Sunak as early as May 2020, was “not a secret” that had been “smuggled past the scientists”.

He said: “I think it was something like September 16 or thereabouts… when I heard Chris in a Covid-S [strategy meeting] say ‘It’s eat out to help the virus’ and he looked at me meaningfully.

“I thought, ‘well, that’s funny, because I didn’t remember this being something that had previously seemed to attract objection or controversy’.”

Professor John Edmunds has told the inquiry that the Eat Out To Help Out scheme was not only “taking the foot off the brake” but putting the “food on the accelerator”.

But Mr Johnson insisted “it did not seem it was not presented to me as an as an acceleration, simply something to make sense of the freedoms that we were already we were already giving” and seemed to be “within the budget of risk”.

The inquiry was also shown WhatsApp messages from July 2020 when Mr Johnson told his advisers: “Folks, looking at Spain and France and remembering March it is completely obvious: we’re about to be hit by a second wave” and on 31 August he said: “We’ve seen the wave coming from miles so we should be ready”.

His chief adviser Dominic Cummings and Sir Patrick were calling for a short “circuit breaker” from September 2020 to curb rising cases of the virus, but Mr Johnson did not impose a second lockdown until November.