Among the most eagerly awaited testimony at the official inquiry into how the UK handled the Covid pandemic is not from a politician, but from the scientist – at the centre of decision-making who, it later emerged, kept a detailed diary.
Sir Patrick Vallance, who is giving evidence to the inquiry on Monday, was the UK government’s chief scientific adviser for a five-year term that ended in April this year, taking him all the way through the Covid period.
As such, the man who filled a vital but usually backroom and low-profile job was suddenly on TV screens on a regular basis. Co-hosting press conferences about the virus with politicians, he was tasked with providing scientific context to their answers.
Alongside Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, and Jonathan Van-Tam, who was Whitty’s deputy, Vallance became a public constant of the pandemic, his gentle, almost owlish demeanour not always masking mild exasperation with the approach of Boris Johnson and others.
One of the revelations of the inquiry so far has been that throughout this period, Vallance kept a contemporaneous and detailed diary. While described by Vallance as simply a “brain dump”, in part to keep him calm, the nightly diary is a vital chronicle of the period, written by someone outside the day-to-day of politics.
Vallance’s lawyers have battled to prevent full pages of the diary being shown at the inquiry, something contested by media organisations, with the legal tussle still ongoing.
But even the carefully selected and typed up extracts revealed so far have proved explosive at times, setting out Vallance’s frustration with politicians including Johnson and Rishi Sunak, as well as telling recollections of what they said.
One extract read to the inquiry showed Johnson in October 2020 describing Covid as “just nature’s way of dealing with old people”, while another cited Mark Sedwill, at the time the UK’s most senior civil servant, calling Johnson’s government “brutal and useless”.
Other diary recollections relate to Sunak, who was chancellor during Covid. One has Johnson calling Sunak’s department “the pro-death squad” due to its resistance to lockdown measures; in another entry, Vallance himself said Sunak had been making “increasingly specific and spurious arguments” against new restrictions on hospitality businesses.
None of these have so far been denied by witnesses to whom they have been put. Contemporaneous diaries and journals have long been seen as particularly credible evidence, and Vallance himself is highly trusted.
Like Whitty, Vallance is also an eminent doctor, but was an expert in vascular medicine rather than an epidemiologist. Born and educated on the eastern fringes of Greater London, he worked and researched at St George’s hospital in the capital, rising to become head of medicine for University College Hospital.
Vallance then moved to the private sector, spending over a decade at GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant that went on to produce one of the vaccines for Covid, working as head of medicines development, before he moved to become chief scientific adviser.
During his five-year term, Vallance worked with four prime ministers – Theresa May, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak – but it was his affable, if occasionally strained press conference double act with Johnson, for which he is remembered.
Vallance’s diary has already dealt Johnson some significant blows. It remains to be seen if his testimony to the inquiry will do yet more damage.
