Michael Gove has apologised to the victims of the pandemic for “mistakes made by government” as he gave his evidence to Covid-19 Inquiry.
The veteran Conservative politician was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and at the head of the Cabinet Office when the pandemic struck the UK in early 2020.
He accepted the department at the heart of government was “dysfunctional”, after years of being loaded with a diverse collection of policies and responsibilities unwanted by other departments.
“I want to take this opportunity to apologise to the victims who endured so much pain, the families who endured so much loss as a result of the mistakes made by the government in response to the pandemic”, Mr Gove said in his evidence.
“As a minister responsibile for the Cabinet Office, and also close to many of the decisions made, I must take my share of responsibility for that.
“Politicians are human beings, we are fallible, we make mistake and we make errors.”
He added: “I, and those with whom I worked, were always seeking at every point - in circumstances where every decision was difficult and every course was bad - to make those decisions we felt we could in order to try and deal with an unprecedented virus and a remarkable assault on the institutions of the country.”
Mr Gove, now the Levelling Up Secretary, said he was charged by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson with leading ‘no deal’ Brexit planning before being given the task of intergovernmental relations.
The Inquiry has already heard damning evidence that the Cabinet Office in early 2020 was “dysfunctional” and “chaotic”, and ill-prepared for coping with the coming crisis.
“There has been a tendency among successive Prime Ministers to shove into the Cabinet Office responsibilities that do not appear to fit conveniently or easily elsewhere”, said Mr Gove.
“It becomes a sort of Mary Poppins bag into which different Prime Ministers will shove things that they believe require to be dealt with by the government’s nanny.”
At the Inquiry on Monday, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan accused the Government of failing to keep him informed about the severity of Covid-19 in early 2020, and said “lives could have been saved” if he had been invited to emergency Cobra meetings.
The Labour politician said he met with Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, on March 11, 2020, and was told of “really serious” consequences ahead for London within two or three weeks.
Mr Khan said his attempts to attend the emergency meetings had been rejected in early 2020, he cancelled London’s St Patrick’s Day parade after the Chris Whitty meeting, but it was not until a March 16 Cobra meeting that he was invited to that the Mayor says he understood the full extent of the crisis.
“I remember that the PM referred to the need for draconian measures and said the country would not have faced anything like it since the Second World War”, he said.
“I simply could not understand why, particularly given the increasing severity of the outbreak in London and my repeated requests to attend previous (Cobra) meetings in order to be kept informed, this information was only being shared with me at this stage.
“I was both deeply worried and furious that London had not been involved in conversations until this point.”
The inquiry continues.
