Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.
In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.
The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.
Another note from Vallance, after a meeting in December 2020, hinted at the power wielded by the right of the Conservative party during the pandemic: “PM told he has been acting early and the public are with him (but his party is not).
“He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.
Johnson, despite Covid infection numbers going up at that time, told the meeting that he wanted to move to tier 3 restrictions instead.
The documents emerged during a bruising session of the Covid inquiry for the former prime minister, with the former senior aides Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings questioning in evidence his suitability for the role during the pandemic.
Cummings had previously, in July 2021, claimed that Johnson was not prepared to impose lockdown restrictions to stop the spread of Covid in autumn 2020 because “the people who are dying are essentially all over 80”.
In response to the messages published by the inquiry, Cain told the inquiry’s lawyers on Tuesday: “I think he was concerned about the damage on society as a whole and he was trying to view it through that lens.
“Some of the language is obviously not what I would have used but for me the core argument was always the same, which was your choice is that we lock down and control the virus and we do so as quickly as possible to minimise cost to health and cost to the economy at the same time.”
In a WhatsApp exchange between the then prime minister and Cain in October 2020 Johnson wrote: “I must say, I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 – 81 for men, 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer.
“Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4%) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate. There are max 3m in this country over 80.”
In his evidence to the inquiry, Cain said: “I think he [Johnson] acted too late on some of the … particularly the later lockdowns, but he did actually do what I believe to be the moral and responsible course of action. It was just later than it should have been.”
However, the former No 10 director of communications said he and other officials were concerned that the lessons of the previous lockdown had not been learned.
“I think you can forgive some of the errors in the first lockdown because things are moving at incredible speed. We were, you know, this sort of building the train tracks as the train was moving,” Cain said.
“By the time we moved into this later period, I think the rump of No 10 felt that while we’ve learned all these lessons from the first period of lockdown, why are we now trying to ignore them again and repeat the exact same mistakes?”
Brenda Doherty, spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “While Covid-19 was ripping through the country and I was doing everything I could to protect my mum, Boris Johnson was unable to take decisions, and left the country at the mercy of the virus he was supposed to be protecting them from.
“By the time the second wave came around and thousands, like my mum had died, he was saying that if you caught Covid you would ‘live longer’, that he didn’t buy ‘all this NHS overwhelmed stuff’ and agreeing that ‘we should let the old people get it’.
“He clearly didn’t see people like my mum as human beings, and thousands others died unnecessarily after the same mistakes were repeated because of Johnson’s callous and brutal attitude. I’d do anything to spend another day with my mum, and now we know that we might have had years and years together if only the country had a more humane prime minister when the pandemic struck.”
