The COVID inquiry is possibly the most sophisticated and wide-ranging blame game that has ever played out in British politics. That said, the great benefit of public inquiries, as opposed to parliamentary scrutiny, is that their breadth allows for an exploration of issues in a way that promotes “cool thinking” (balanced, reflective, evidence-based) over “hot rhetoric” (aggressive, adversarial, emotive).
Although hotly awaited, Dominic Cummings’s appearance before the inquiry was a fairly cool affair. Gone was the “mad man in the wings” who had caused controversy and chaos in Whitehall as chief adviser to former prime minister Boris Johnson. The edgy and unrepentant dissident who sat in the garden of No.10 and sought to justify his lockdown-breaking drive to Barnard Castle replaced now by a far calmer character.
There were, of course, the juicy soundbites about poor planning (the Cabinet Office described as a “dumpster fire”) and even poorer leadership (Johnson apparently being “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life”). The scale of dysfunctionality was captured in the use of a new language of disarray and disorder. Johnson, for example, was known as “trolley” due to his tendency to change direction. Shifts in policy were the result of “poppins” (moments when officials would “pop in” to see Boris Johnson to drip-feed thoughts of doubt into his mind).
