Thursday, December 07, 2023

UK
COVID VICTIMS FAMILIES

People removed from COVID inquiry as Boris Johnson apologises for 'pain and suffering'

Sky News
Updated Wed, 6 December 2023 



Boris Johnson was interrupted by protesters as he apologised for the "suffering" caused by COVID.


During his appearance at the official inquiry into the pandemic on Wednesday, four people were removed from the public gallery after holding up pictures, along with the words: "The dead can't hear your apologies."


Mr Johnson told the hearing he was "deeply sorry for the pain and loss and suffering".


But he said he hoped the probe would be able to "get answers to those very difficult questions" that victims and their families were "rightly asking".

Boris Johnson COVID evidence - as it happened

During the evidence session, that will continue on Thursday, the inquiry heard varied testimony from the former prime minister, including:

• The government "underestimated the scale and pace of challenge" from COVID - thinking the peak would come in May or June;

• The tone of private WhatsApp exchanges was a "reflection of the agony" the country was going through;

• A denial he was on holiday over the half-term break in February 2020 - as claimed by former aide Dominic Cummings

• Mr Johnson explaining that he "can't say" whether he would have "gone earlier" in ordering the first lockdown, but that he took "full responsibility" for the decisions made;

• The former prime minister offering an apology to sufferers of long COVID, having described the condition as "b*****ks" in 2021;

• He stood by Matt Hancock, saying the then health secretary did "a good job" whatever his "defects".

Read more:
Whatever Boris Johnson said, the evidence pointed to leadership failures

Key points from Boris Johnson's evidence

Speaking on his first day of questioning at the COVID inquiry he set up to learn the lessons of the pandemic, Mr Johnson said "unquestionably" mistakes were made by his government, adding that he took "responsibility for all the decisions that we made".

Within that included the lockdown decisions and their timeliness, the circulation of the virus in the residential care sector, and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

The ex-prime minister, who was ousted from Downing Street in the summer of 2022, said he acknowledged that "so many people suffered, so many people lost their lives".

But he said the government was "doing our best at the time, given what we knew, given the information I had available to me at the time, I think we did our level best".

Mr Johnson placed some blame on the different messaging coming from the different governments in the devolved nations of the UK.

"There was far, far more that united us than divided us," he said. "[But] understandably they're looking to talk directly to their own electorates, there were going to be times when they differed from the main UK government message.

"And I thought that was sometimes at risk of being confusing at a time when we really needed to land messages simply."

But Hugo Keith KC, who led the questioning for the inquiry, asked Mr Johnson why he did not foresee the scale of destruction the COVID pandemic would cause in early 2020, given that the inquiry had seen evidence to suggest others in Westminster were concerned as early as February.

Mr Johnson admitted the wider government "underestimated" the threat posed by the virus, saying the "concept of a pandemic did not imply to the Whitehall mind the kind of utter disaster that COVID was to become".

He said in the "early days of March", government figures and officials "were all collectively underestimating how fast it had already spread in the UK" and thought the peak would be in May or June which turned out to be "totally wrong".

"I don't blame the scientists for that at all," he said.

"That was the feeling and it just turned out to be wrong."

Long COVID


Mr Johnson was also questioned about his remarks over long COVID - a condition which, according to Oxford University, affected up to 10% of people who caught the virus.

Documents shown to the inquiry had scribbles alongside by the prime minister, referring to it as "b*****ks" and "Gulf War Syndrome stuff".

Mr Johnson said he realised the remarks had "caused hurt and offence", adding: "I regret very much using that language and should have thought about the possibility of future publication".

But he claimed he was trying to "get to the truth of the matter" and to get officials "to explain to me exactly what the syndrome was".

Hancock criticism


A running theme of the inquiry has been criticism of the then-health secretary Mr Hancock, with former advisers and civil servants having revealed they called for Mr Johnson to fire him for his performance during the pandemic.

But when asked about these calls for Mr Hancock to go, the former prime minister appeared to stand by his decision to keep the secretary of state in post.

He said he was "aware" that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) was "under fire from loads of people", but added: "The point is you have got a lot of very talented, sometimes super-confident, sometimes egotistical people, who are crushed with anxiety about what is happening to their country, who are wracked secretly with self-doubt and self-criticism, and who externalise that by criticising others and it is human nature.

"When you are the leader in those circumstances, your job is to work out what is justified and what is people sounding off, and what is political nonsense, and my judgement was that Matt was, on the whole, doing a good job in very difficult circumstances and there was no advantage in moving him as I was being urged to do."

Pushed again on the other calls for him to go and reports of "chaos" in the DHSC, Mr Johnson said he thought his health secretary was "intellectually able" and "top of the subject", adding: "Whatever his failings may or may not have been, I didn't see any advantage to the country at a critical time… in moving him in exchange for someone else when I couldn't be sure that we were necessary going to be trading up."

Missing WhatsApps

In the days leading up the inquiry there were reports anticipating Mr Johnson's apology and the fact that not all of his WhatsApps would be made available to the inquiry - with about 5,000 messages on his phone from January 30, 2020 to June 2020 missing.

Baroness Hallett, who is chairing the inquiry, raised the issue of people briefing the press ahead of a witnesses' appearance, arguing that a leak "undermines the inquiry's ability to do its job fairly, effectively and independently".

Mr Johnson said he did not know the "exact reason" the messages had not been located, but said it was "something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date".

"Can I, for the avoidance of doubt, make it absolutely clear I haven't removed any WhatsApps from my phone and I've given you everything that I think you need," he said.

Mr Keith told Mr Johnson that other figures' WhatsApp messages that have previously been shown to the inquiry "paint an appalling picture, not all the time but at times, of incompetence and disarray".

Mr Johnson argued that plenty of successful governments have "challenging and competing characters whose views about each other might not be fit to print but who get a lot done".

Read more:
Gove apologises for pandemic 'errors'

The former prime minister said the tone of the private messages was a "reflection of the agony" the country was going through.

"It was a very difficult, very challenging period," he said. "People were getting - as you can see from the WhatsApps - very frazzled because they were frustrated."

Mr Johnson is the latest in a line of government ministers to have appeared in front of the inquiry, including Mr Hancock, former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab and Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, but by far the most anticipated.

He will return to the hearing on Thursday morning to continue to give evidence.


Opinion

Lazy and fraudulent: we saw the true Johnson at the Covid inquiry – and why his like must never have power again


Martin Kettle
THE GUARDIAN
Wed, 6 December 2023 


François Mitterrand once said that the most essential single attribute for success in politics is indifference. France’s former socialist president possessed that quality to his core. His views could turn on a centime, from right to left to centre and back again, as the political situation and his own power required. Indifference, skilfully translated into policy and action, was an essential driver of his 14-year presidency.

Boris Johnson is blessed – which may not be the right word – with an indifference of his own. Johnson is lightly encumbered with political principles, since he believes in little except himself. He famously wobbled about which side to take on Brexit. His instinctive capacity for indifference took him right to the top of the greasy pole. If that is his blessing, his curse is that, unlike Mitterrand, he could not then turn it into effective government action.

On his first day giving evidence to the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry, Johnson wrapped himself in the cloak of indifference. In the middle of the morning, the inquiry counsel, Hugo Keith, confronted Johnson with a list of angry WhatsApp verdicts from No 10 insiders about his government’s failure to take the right decisions at the right time during the pandemic. He quoted the cabinet secretary Simon Case – Johnson’s choice for the job, remember – saying that he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”.


Related: Boris Johnson says it is nonsense to claim he kept Matt Hancock in post so he could be ‘sacrifice’ for the UK Covid inquiry – live

For any other figure facing a public inquiry of this kind, this would be a genuinely perilous moment, exposing them to charges of indecisiveness and failure to lead. Yet Johnson revelled in it. This was what politics is like, he replied, visibly relaxing after some sticky earlier exchanges. Angry views were wholly to be expected, he said. If WhatsApp had existed when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, the mandarinate would have been revealed as equally angry and critical with her.

Except that they would not. Johnson was wrong about that. In their different ways, prime ministers such as Thatcher, Clement Attlee or Tony Blair – the trio of postwar premiers whom Keir Starmer invoked this week for their achievements – all knew their own minds, perhaps to a fault at times. If WhatsApp had existed back in Thatcher’s 1980s pomp, there might have been complaining ministers and advisers. But every one of them would have been complaining about the firmness or wrongness of her views – not that they were unclear, as they were in Johnson’s case.

Whatever else you can say about Thatcher, Attlee or Blair, they were all up to the job of being prime minister. Inside their heads, all three had an idea of Britain that they were in Downing Street to try to achieve. The same is not true of Johnson. Unlike fanatical Brexiteers, he lacked any idea of the kind of Britain he sought to create, except one that would glorify and gratify him. He was in Downing Street not because of what he wanted to do but because of what he wanted to be. He was there because he wanted to be prime minister.

Unlike Attlee, Thatcher and Blair, however, Johnson was not up to the job. Michael Gove told the inquiry last week that Johnson liked to listen to contending arguments about courses of action before coming to a decision. He called it a gladiatorial method of policymaking. It was sometimes the way Attlee governed too. But it is useless if you don’t take the decisions once the arguments have been laid out. And in a crisis like a pandemic, it is fatal.

Yet this was what happened with Johnson. Much of Wednesday’s afternoon session returned to the question of whether the first lockdown in March 2020 should have been called earlier. Keith led Johnson through the crucial days in mid-March, when the argument inside government moved more decisively towards lockdown – a moment at which, according to Matt Hancock last week, 30,000 otherwise lost lives could have been saved by an earlier imposition.

Johnson told the inquiry that he was “more or less in virus-fighting mode” by 15 March. Note the slippery language. Not so, countered Keith, you were oscillating. There was a “seemingly perennial debate in your own mind”. Dominic Cummings was still complaining on 19 March that Johnson “still won’t absorb it”. My job was to test the policy, Johnson countered. The lockdown did not start until 23 March. Perhaps it was a poor example of leadership, Keith whispered gently, as his stiletto went in.

The historian AJP Taylor once wrote that the first world war-era prime minister, David Lloyd George, could arouse “every feeling except trust”. The same is true of Johnson. The two prime ministers, a century apart, had other things in common too. “He cared nothing for the conventional rules – neither the rules of personal behaviour nor those economic rules of free enterprise,” adds Taylor. “Lloyd George lived in the moment, a master of improvisation.” He could almost be describing Johnson there.

But there is one absolutely crucial difference. Unlike Lloyd George, Johnson was lazy. Lloyd George could also take a decision. He may not have had a plan, and he certainly did not have a system. In that respect, he was quite similar to Johnson. But, as Taylor puts it: “When faced with a difficulty, he listened to the ideas of others and saw, in a flash, the solution.” It is the difference between a great national leader who saved his country in a crisis and a fraudulent one who did not.

Johnson suffers from a fatal combination of qualities in any leader. He combines indifference to principles and disregard for others with disorganisation of mind and behaviour, and indecisiveness and laziness in action. These qualities have never been hidden. They are part of the role he played in public life. Yet in the unlikely event that anyone switched on the live coverage of the inquiry to see Johnson for the first time, they will have been aghast.

Seeing him in action once again, and with more to come on Thursday, it is the reckless incompetence and manifest unsuitability that stand out most. Three-quarters of this country thinks Johnson handled Covid badly. The Conservative party members who gave Britain such a leader, and the electors who then voted him into office, will have to carry the shame of it with them to their graves.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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