BORIS Johnson was “bamboozled” by the graphs and data presented to him by scientists during the pandemic, the Covid-19 Inquiry has heard.
Diary entries by former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance were shown to the probe on Monday.
One entry from May 4 2020 said: “Late afternoon meeting with the PM on schools. My God, this is complicated. Models will not provide the answer. PM is clearly bamboozled."
Others, also written in May 2020, said: “PM asking whether we’ve overdone it on the lethality of this disease. He swings between optimism, pessimism, and then this.
“PM still confused on different types of test. He holds it in his head for a session and then it goes.”
In June, Vallance wrote: “Watching the PM get his head round stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.”
An entry from September 2020 said: “Clare Gardiner talked PM through the graphs. It is difficult, he asks questions like which line is the dark red line – is he colourblind? Then ‘so you think positivity has gone up overnight?’ then ‘oh god bloody hell’. But it is all the same stuff he was shown six hours ago.”
Vallance told the inquiry: “I think I’m right in saying that the Prime Minister gave up science at 15.
“I think he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte and that he struggled with the concepts and we did need to repeat them – often.”
