The UK’s former prime minister Boris Johnson has issued a series of apologies about mistakes made during the pandemic.
But, on the first of his two days of evidence to the Covid inquiry, he also defended the bulk of his decision-making.
Here are some of the key points from day one of his evidence:
• Johnson began his appearance by issuing an apology for “the pain and the loss and the suffering”
As Johnson was attempting to deliver his prepared apology, four people staged a protest inside the inquiry room. One held a sign saying: “The dead can’t hear your apologies.” They were led away.
Johnson said: “Can I just say how glad I am to be at this inquiry and how sorry I am for the pain and the loss and the suffering of the Covid victims.”
• About 5,000 WhatsApp messages on Johnson’s phone from 30 January 2020 to June 2020 were unavailable to the inquiry
A barrister acting for the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, said a technical report provided by Johnson’s solicitors suggested there may have been a factory reset at the end of January 2020 followed by an attempt to reinstate the contents in June 2020, but Johnson denied knowledge of that.
“I don’t remember any such thing,” he said.
• Johnson defended the “disputatious culture” in No 10
A toxic culture of backstabbing and misogyny has already been laid bare at the Covid public inquiry. A key figure has been Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former and now-estranged chief adviser, who was accused in October of “aggressive, foul-mouthed and misogynistic” abuse toward others working in government.
Johnson avoided mentioning Cummings by name. He said: “I knew that some people were difficult. I didn’t know how difficult they were clearly.
“But I thought it was better on the whole for the country to have a disputatious culture in No 10 than one that was quietly acquiescent to whatever I or the scientists said.”
• Johnson defended his decision not to sack Matt Hancock as health secretary
The inquiry has heard that Hancock became a lightning rod for criticism and that Johnson was urged to sack him by Cummings and the then-cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill.
Johnson said: “If you’re a prime minister, you are constantly being lobbied by somebody to sack somebody else. It is perfectly true that this adviser in particular had a low opinion of the health secretary.
“I thought he was wrong. I thought the health secretary worked very hard and whatever he may have had [in] defects, I thought that he was doing his best in very difficult circumstances and I thought he was a good communicator.”
Asked about claims from Cummings that Johnson wanted to keep Hancock as a “sacrifice for the inquiry”, he said: “I don’t remember that at all. And it’s nonsense.”
• Covid decision-making was too male-dominated, Johnson admitted
“The gender balance of my team should have been better,” Johnson told the inquiry. The inquiry previously heard from Helen MacNamara, a senior civil servant who held the role of the deputy cabinet secretary, that there was “institutional bias against women” in Covid decision-making.
Johnson said: “I think sometimes during the pandemic too many meetings were too male-dominated.”
• Johnson apologised for failing to call out misogynistic attacks on a civil servant
The inquiry previously heard that Cummings urged Johnson to sack MacNamara and complained to him of “dodging stilettos from that cunt”. Asked why he did not put a stop to such language, Johnson said: “I’ve rung Helen MacNamara to apologise to her for not having called it out.”
• Johnson repeatedly disparaged those suffering from long Covid
The inquiry heard that Johnson scribbled “disparaging remarks” about long Covid, including describing it as “bollocks”. In February 2021 he suggested it was similar to soldiers falsely claiming they were suffering from Gulf War syndrome.
Johnson apologised for the remarks, saying they were not intended for publication.
He said: “I’m sure that they have caused hurt and offence to a huge numbers of people who, who do indeed suffer from that syndrome and I regret very much using that language. I was trying to get my officials to explain to me exactly what the syndrome was.”
• Johnson admitted ‘vastly underestimating the risks’ in the early stages of the pandemic
The former PM said both he and Whitehall more generally failed to understand the seriousness of the pandemic in late January and February 2020.
Asked why information on 29 January about the virus spreading outside China did not become a “lightbulb moment”, Johnson said: “I don’t think that we were able to comprehend the implications of what we were actually looking at.
“The problem was that I don’t think we attached enough credence to those forecasts and, because of the experience that we’d had with other zoonotic diseases [infections transmitted between species], I think collectively in Whitehall there was not a sufficiently loud enough klaxon.”
He added: “It’s clear that we vastly underestimated the risks in those early weeks. If we properly understood how fast Covid was spreading and the fact that it was spreading asymptomatically, there are many things we would have done differently … we were operating on a fallacious inductive logic about previous reasonable worst-case scenarios.”
• Johnson insisted he was working during the February half-term school break of 2020, the focus of controversy over an alleged lack of engagement
The inquiry previously heard that from 14 February to 24 February 2020, Johnson was on a break in Chevening House, a country residence used by Britain’s prime ministers, and was not updated by his staff about Covid and had no briefings on two Cobra meetings that took place during this period.
But Johnson insisted this was not accurate. “There wasn’t a long holiday that I took … I was working throughout the period and the tempo did increase.”
He said he rang both the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in part to discuss the origins of Covid “and to compare notes on what was happening”, and the then US president, Donald Trump, to discuss the same thing.
Johnson said that in a 28 February meeting the worst-case scenario (WCS) figures were presented and were a “horrifying figure and I couldn’t believe it”.
“I thought: ‘Well, we have plenty of bad flu pandemics in the UK and if it’s milder than that then it won’t be an exceptional thing at all, so why am I also being told that the WCS is 520,000?’”
• The inquiry chair rebuked Johnson for leaks of his witness statement
Before Johnson’s evidence began, the chair of the inquiry, Heather Hallett, complained about media briefings about what he would tell the inquiry.
Lady Hallett said: “I’d like to express my concern about reports in the press over the last few days of the contents of Mr Johnson’s witness statement to the inquiry and what his evidence will be.
“Until a witness is called and appears at a hearing, or the inquiry publishes the witness’s statement, it’s meant to be confidential between the witness, the inquiry and the core participants … failing to respect confidentiality undermines the inquiry’s ability to do its job fairly, effectively and independently.”
• Johnson’s remarks about people dying anyway showed “cruelty of choice’
A March 2020 internal government note showed that Johnson questioned why damage was being inflicted on the economy “for people who will die anyway”. Asked about the note, Johnson said it was an indication of “the cruelty of choice” at the time.
He was also asked what he meant in a handwritten note that said: “We’re killing the patient to tackle the tumour.”
Johnson said “if I did say something like that” he was referring to the need to do things that were damaging in other ways in order to “stamp down” the virus.
Johnson also confirmed that the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, warned him about risk to the UK’s bond market and the ability to raise debt. Previous evidence has suggested that Sunak was among those in government who had been more reluctant than others to countenance a national lockdown.
• Johnson “almost certainly” discussed Covid with the Russian media mogul Evgeny Lebedev just days before lockdown
Previous evidence has raised questions about the closeness between Johnson and Lebedev, who was controversially given a life peerage in 2020.
Records read out showed that Johnson met with the newspaper proprietor and also phoned him at the height of what counsel for the inquiry described as a 10-day “crisis” about a change of strategy in the run-up to the first lockdown.
Asked about this, he said that Lebedev, who owned London’s Evening Standard newspaper, “doubtless wanted to know what was happening in London” and Johnson said he wanted to inform and support him.
