Sadiq Khan privately pleaded with Boris Johnson to put London into lockdown to prevent “thousands of lives being endangered”, the Covid Inquiry was told on Monday.
He warned that he was prepared to speak directly to Londoners and advise them to stay at home unless the Prime Minister recognised the scale of the health crisis the capital was facing.
Extraordinary details emerged of an email the mayor sent to the then Prime Minister in March 2020 after the capital was found to be “weeks ahead” of the rest of the country in seeing infection rates soar and hospital intensive care units start to fill up.
In a Sunday phone conversation between Mr Khan and Mr Johnson to discuss the email, Mr Khan said he was happy for London to “go another way” and for restrictions to be imposed in a bid to limit transmission of the virus.
But Mr Johnson said such an approach risked “displacing the problem” – as he warned the Government was having to contend with “heaving numbers in Cornwall and the Peak District and people behaving as if they are on holidays”, according to documents submitted to the inquiry.
Mr Khan wrote a confidential email to the Prime Minister on Sunday March 22, 2020, urging an “immediate strengthening of the public health messaging to London”.
He said advice to limit interactions and avoid public transport journeys was not being followed and a hardline “lockdown” order had to be made by Downing Street.
“Advice is being seen as something that can be ignored,” Mr Khan wrote “I do not use the phrase lockdown lightly, but I believe Londoners must be told to stay at home unless they are an essential worker, are buying food or collecting medication from pharmacists.
“Alongside this, there must be clear reassurances about the supply of food to further avoid stockpiling and panic buying.”
He warned the Prime Minister: “I feel I must again express to you in the strongest terms possible my serious concerns that the current approach, and the messaging to the public, is failing. As a result, the lives of thousands of people are being endangered.”
That weekend, shopping areas were busy, many people were out and about and many were using public transport.
He concluded: “If you insist on continuing with the same continuing with the same course, I will be left with no choice but to speak directly to Londoners with a tougher message if it means thousands of people’s lives could be saved.
“I need to hear back from you on this as a matter of urgency this evening. I do not believe this matter can wait any longer. We must speak to Londoners immediately.”
The following day, March 23, Mr Johnson announced that a national lockdown would begin, on March 26, 2020.
About 20,000 Londoners died with covid over the course of the pandemic, including 105 transport workers.
Mr Khan told the inquiry that the transport worker deaths was particularly upsetting, “bearing in mind who my dad was.” His late father was a London bus driver.
Mr Khan also told the inquiry that he believed “lives could have been saved” if he had been invited to attend the Government’s Cobra emergency meetings.
He was excluded from the first six Cobra meetings in February and March 2020. This meant the Government was uninformed about London’s specific risks from covid, such as the greater risk of transmission in multi-generation households and the large number of Londoners who were on zero-hours contracts and thus could not afford to stay at home.
Mr Khan, under questioning from Andrew O’Connor KC, said: "I think lives could have been saved if we were [invited to Cobra meetings] earlier."
He recalled a meeting with the chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, in early March 2020, at which he was told that London was several weeks ahead of the rest of the country in terms of the spread of covid.
Mr Khan said: “It’s difficult to articulate the impact this meeting had on me. It was quite clear it was coming our way, this virus, and we would be affected badly.
“I had been kept in the dark as the elected Mayor of London. I felt almost winded in relation to what was happening in London… the lack of power, lack of influence, not knowing what was happening in our city.”
He claimed Mr Johnson had been “hesitant” to bring in restrictions – and appeared not to know what was happening in countries such as Italy, where the virus was causing devastation.
“The Prime Minister wasn’t aware that in other parts of the world they had lockdowns in place and fines could be issued. It was surprising he wasn’t aware what was happening elsewhere,” Mr Khan said.
“Had we got a grip of the virus earlier, it would have been shorter and has less of an impact on the economy.”
