In his appearance before the Covid inquiry this week, Boris Johnson defended his handling of the pandemic. The former prime minister also expressed surprise that scientists were not consulted about the “eat out to help out” scheme, justified saying that older people should “accept their fate”, and claimed reporting on the Partygate scandal was a “travesty of the truth”.
Here five people whose personal and professional lives were deeply affected by the pandemic share their verdict on his performance.
Suzanne Ford-Dunn, palliative care consultant
On day one, Boris Johnson had quite a lot of responses where he said he couldn’t recall and it struck me he’s quite good at forgetting, whereas I have memories of that time that are etched on my brain that I would love to be able to forget.
I can still see the young woman who looked at me through her Cpap [continuous positive airway pressure device] and mouthed: “I can’t breathe”. The young man who begged me not to turn off his ventilator, to give him another day. Almost more traumatic was the relatives who would come to the hospital and beg to be let in to say goodbye.
[On Partygate], so many of us within healthcare absolutely followed the guidance even when it did seem to change every day and was difficult to keep up with, or seemed irrational or incoherent. Johnson’s excuse was his staff were working extremely hard, and in the conditions they were working it would be very hard to follow. I think that’s how we were all working in the NHS, yet we weren’t having parties.
His apparent lack of remorse and defending of all of it is very difficult for people to hear. But particularly people who have either worked through it like I have, or people who have been very unwell themselves or have lost loved ones.
For most doctors as we watched scenes unfold in Lombardy, absolutely it twigged for us – we realised there was no way we were going to escape this. We knew we were already working in a broken healthcare system. It’s interesting that it didn’t twig, as Boris puts it.
Mandy Yin, restaurateur and owner of Sambal Shiok, north London
It didn’t really surprise me, anything he said, but it was quite astonishing – one of the phrases he used, he should have twigged earlier. It’s mind-blowing. It shows that he is completely out of touch.
I, as a restaurateur, was watching very closely what everyone else worldwide was doing. In New York, restaurants had already started to close in mid-March. I remember a customer walking in completely covered head to toe with full protective gear. The severity of the situation had already started to pass to the general population.
For a PM and his team to tell people to stay away from restaurants, but not shut us down properly, that was incredibly traumatic. I had to unilaterally make the decision to shut both my sites on the 16th for the safety of my team. There was no leadership, no clarity, confusion everywhere and that permeated the rest of the two years.
[On Johnson’s surprise that scientists weren’t consulted on eat out to help out] – it’s just sheer utter incompetence as a leader to not double check things – you don’t assume something. Eat out to help out was incredibly stressful and put a lot of strain on hospitality businesses going from only being able to do takeaway to suddenly coping with three, four, five times the number of customers. Especially when there wasn’t even a vaccine at that point, it was just very shortsighted. We would have appreciated not having that slight bump in sales but not having a second lockdown.
We were left rudderless. I’ve blocked this whole time out of my mind because it was so traumatic. Having to think about it is quite stressful.
Naomi Fulop, member of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice
My mother, Christina Fulop, died of Covid aged 94 on 8 January 2021 at the height of the second wave. I blame the government – I hold Boris Johnson accountable for my mother’s death.
In the summer of 2020, Johnson did not learn the lessons from the first wave. There were thousands of unnecessary deaths that winter, including my mother’s. The NHS was overwhelmed, which he denied – there was a gasp in the public gallery when he said that.
Johnson claimed that the UK did pretty well because we came in the middle of the pack. Pete Weatherby KC put to him evidence commissioned by the inquiry that is a league table of countries’ excess deaths – the gold standard measure – and compared with France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, in western Europe, we are second from bottom: only Italy did worse than us. Countries like South Korea and Japan did a lot better.
Hugo Keith, KC for the inquiry, put to him the comments such as people dying having “had their innings”, which I found incredibly painful. Johnson clearly did not like that. One of the KCs called them shamefully ageist comments, which is what they are. It’s very painful to hear; he’s talking about my mother and thousands of other people who died before their time and in an awful context. It really got to me.
He’s trying to rewrite his legacy. We challenged it yesterday and he didn’t like it, he said: ‘I don’t believe your evidence stacks up.’ He doesn’t like when evidence is put to him that shows he failed. He failed in the thing he’s meant to do, which is keep people safe.
David Wilson, who received a £1,000 fine after hosting an outdoor party he believed followed coronavirus rules at his restaurant, Calypso, in Blackburn
Obviously it makes me feel quite angry. Even Johnson himself said it was all so confusing: it just kept on changing, the rules. I think it was really confusing to us.
We got permission to have an event, there were football matches on throughout the country, but the government were saying one thing, the police a different thing. Then they came and fined us £1,000 because someone was sitting with seven people instead of six – [No 10 staff] didn’t get fined £1,000, they got nothing like that. And they were blatantly breaking the rules.
The strain of it all, being fined and going to court, it was like no end. Seeing on the news them partying, and now watching him in the inquiry, and all right he looked upset, saying they should have done things differently – but the photos don’t lie, they were pure partying.
Even with the inquiry, what’s going to happen – all the millions of pound spent on it. Nobody is going to be charged or brought to book about it. If it was us that did it, we would have been prosecuted.
Stephen Brierley, headteacher, St Margaret’s school, south-west London
Decisions that were made regarding schools back in 2020 and 2021 have had profound effects on the education system going forward and I hope the inquiry is able to give significant airtime to whether the best decisions were made.
[On Johnson’s defence of going against advice from scientists to implement a “circuit breaker” lockdown in September 2020] – that was a period when we were contact tracing and where any report of any kid with Covid, we had the responsibility to work out who they’d been in contact with – which was not easy – and to tell other students they had to isolate for a period of days. That was an incredibly labour-intensive thing to have to do.
The workload for teachers was certainly significant during that time, the responsibility as well – we weren’t just responsible for education of students but the social aspects, poverty relief, we became responsible for health in a big way.
I think most people would have gone for a lockdown earlier and Boris is almost saying: ‘yes, I vastly underestimated’ in the early stages of the pandemic. If we’d locked down for less time would public finances have been in a better state? We would have benefited if they had. And the impact on student mental health has been significant.
