Boris Johnson referred to Rishi Sunak’s Treasury as “the pro-death squad” as he sought to gain support for a gradual end to Covid restrictions, the official inquiry into the pandemic has been told.
The inquiry also saw messages between two senior Downing Street officials complaining that Johnson was too slow to tackle a second wave of the virus, with one saying: “We are so fucked.”
Johnson and others inside No 10 used language that “pejoratively termed as pro-death” the Treasury, then led by Sunak, because of its focus on lifting Covid measures, according to diary entries by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser at the time.
Stuart Glassborow, Johnson’s deputy principal private secretary at the time, a role that involved liaising between No 10 and the Treasury, was questioned about a meeting in January 2021, where Johnson set out his ambitions for the gradual easing of Covid restrictions.
“The PM is on record as saying that he wants tier 3, 1 March; tier 2, 1 April; tier 1, 1 May; and nothing by September, and he ends up by saying the team must bring in ‘the pro-death squad from HMT’,” said the entry, read out by Dermot Keating, a counsel to the inquiry.
Glassborow said of Vallance’s words: “I wouldn’t dispute what he’s recorded, but I don’t recall the phrase at all.”
Glassborow, who spent more than a decade as a civil servant in the Treasury and returned there after leaving No 10, also professed no knowledge of Johnson’s reported view that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people”, another detail from Vallance’s diary that was revealed last week.
Subsequent evidence on Monday heard that advisers inside No 10 were increasingly worried during early 2020 that ministers were too slow to consider a lockdown, and then became alarmed that autumn that a second wave was not being treated seriously.
Ben Warner, a data scientist brought into No 10 by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s then-chief adviser, told the inquiry he was worried about “a lack of scientific capability within the different teams and groups that I was working with”.
The inquiry was shown WhatsApp messages during September and October 2020 between Warner and Lee Cain, Johnson’s head of communications, in which they bemoaned Johnson’s decision to not impose a so-called circuit-breaker lockdown, to slow the pace of infections, saying this repeated the errors of spring.
“I feel like we have accidentally invented a time machine,” Warner wrote to Cain. In an earlier message, Cain said: “We are so fucked. Why are we not acting in London and urban areas now? Same errors as March.”
Warner replied: “Agreed. Feel like we are where we knew we would be three/four weeks ago.”
In evidence about decision-making at the start of the pandemic, the inquiry was shown pages from a report on Exercise Nimbus, a February 2020 theoretical planning operation about Covid, which was told that leaving the virus unchecked was “effectively rendering it a ‘survival of the fittest’ situation”.
It also saw a page from a notebook entry Warner made at the same time, in which he wrote: “NHS fucked in any scenario”, something Warner said may either have been his own personal view or a reflection of the wider sentiment among officials.
Another piece of evidence described Johnson and Cummings castigating Mark Sedwill, at the time the cabinet secretary, in mid-March 2020 for being “miles off the pace”, as Johnson termed it, in terms of realising the threat from Covid.
“YOU need to tell Sedwill this,” Cummings told the prime minister in a WhatsApp message on 14 March, a Saturday. “The fucker shd be in the office now.”
Asked about the messages, Warner said: “I agree with that entire message.” Sedwill is scheduled to give evidence on Wednesday.
