In her final report into what we might now call the Covid-19 negligence scandal, Baroness Hallett, a retired senior judge, was as damning in her remarks as the laws of libel, good taste and the usual conventions of a public inquiry allowed her to be.
Successive governments – not just the one headed by Boris Johnson at the time the pandemic broke out – had failed at the most basic level to prepare properly for the emergency that eventually arrived at the start of 2020. Such shortcomings were then compounded by poor decision-making by ministers. The care sector, which by definition is full of the most vulnerable people, was unforgivably treated as an “afterthought”.
