Closing summary
That’s the end of the day’s hearing. Here’s a summary of the key events:
Boris Johnson said he avoided cooperating with devolved administrations for political reasons. The former prime minister was confronted with his own insistence that it would have been “optically wrong for the UK prime minister to hold regular meetings with other devolved administration ministers”. And he was asked about the claim of one of his key advisers that he refused to deal with the Scottish first minister during the pandemic because of a personal enmity – despite the potentially disastrous effect that course of action could have on the effectiveness of anti-Covid measures in the UK.
The former prime minister was described as “self-serving” and “unfit for power” by bereaved families. “As his messages showed today, even when he knew measures needed to be taken to protect lives, he delayed for fear of how it might impact his reputation with certain sections of the press,” their spokesperson said.
No scientists attended meetings about the “eat out to help out” scheme before it launched, Johnson said. He said he had “frankly assumed” they were involved in talks about the scheme with the Treasury and he was “surprised it was smuggled past them”.
Johnson was shown repeated instances of Patrick Vallance attributing the phrase “let it rip” to him in contemporaneous diary entries. Johnson has denied he used the phrase. The inquiry was shown several diary entries from Vallance with recollections of Johnson using the phrase “let it rip”.
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'Self-serving' Johnson unfit for power, say bereaved families
After Johnson’s second appearance at the inquiry, Becky Kummer, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, says:
Our questioning today showed that Johnson’s claims about the pandemic fall apart under the slightest scrutiny.
He did not ‘get the big calls right’, he failed to take the pandemic seriously in early 2020 leaving us brutally unprepared, and failed to learn from his mistakes meaning that the second wave had an even higher death toll than the first. The NHS was in fact severely overwhelmed, which he would know if he had met with the many thousands of bereaved families whose loved ones either couldn’t get in to hospital, or couldn’t get the treatment they needed once there. The UK was not ‘in the middle of the pack’, it suffered the second highest death toll in western Europe.
As his messages showed today, even when he knew measures needed to be taken to protect lives, he delayed for fear of how it might impact his reputation with certain sections of the press.
If his vanity hadn’t taken priority over public health, many thousands of people, including my dad, might still be with us today. There are many lessons from the pandemic that might save lives in the future, but one of them is undoubtedly that someone as self-serving as Boris Johnson is not fit for power.
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