The story of the Covid inquiry is becoming clear. The plot has a useless clown called Boris Johnson who gains access to Downing Street with his chums, ignores scientists and lets thousands die. A foul-mouthed mob of beta-politicians and officials fight tooth and nail against a star villain, Dominic Cummings. There is a background chorus of a delighted media and weeping victims. It is all yours for three years and staggering amounts of public money.
Covid now joins Post Office computers, poisoned blood, Grenfell cladding and other topics enriching the new monitors of Britain’s public sector: lawyers. The cost is enormous as lawyers get paid on the nail – while any victims must wait to the end. The Covid inquiry has already somehow spent £100m and its costs are expected to balloon to over £200m by 2026. Half a million pounds is going on public relations consultants alone. This is indefensible and is crippling the legal budget, where the average court delay in criminal cases has stretched to a record 50 weeks.
A public inquiry is a quite different form of accountability from that of parliament. Competence does not matter, only blame. Blame is what lawyers are trained to handle and what attracts publicity. This inquiry in its Paddington chamber was delayed by rows about what it should reveal. The chair, Heather Hallett, claimed the right to decide on the participants’ privacy. I am no defender of Johnson, but I sympathised with him being asked to hand over every personal email, text and scribbled note he made at the time, to be decided by a judge as to whether it was “relevant” to her needs.
Lady Hallett said she needed every jot of paper and phone text to decide if the government was “potentially distracted” during the crisis. I can see why she needed public relations advice. This is intrusion worthy of Beijing and could cover everything. Is this to become the norm for all future government crises? To hell with privacy or official secrets when News at Ten is waiting. Given the delight with which Hallett’s KC, Hugo Keith, reads out every expletive, it is hard to believe this is not a staged drama.
Some privacy must surely attach to dealings at the apex of government if leaders are to be frank with each other in a crisis. This is a parody of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, in which politicians are forced to wear livestreaming cameras around their necks wherever they go. There must be such a thing as confidentiality or all government will disappear behind the curtain.
The search for blame rather than truth inevitably leads to bias. These inquiries pre-select the crime, the accused, the heroes and the victims and put them in court. The Covid inquiry is clearly based on the thesis that lockdown was recklessly postponed by Johnson and thousands died as a result. All that follows is humiliation fuelled by hindsight.
There is no defence for much of what Johnson did in office. But his capacity for attracting ridicule is now far exceeding his charisma. The purpose of the inquiry should not be to judge him as a leader – that is for politics to decide. It is to see if the government’s response to the crisis offers any lessons for the future. Other countries, such as Sweden and Australia, have held their inquiries quietly and scientifically and, we assume, are implementing their lessons. Ours offers no lessons until 2026. This is absurd.
Johnson was not alone in asking pertinent question of his advisers as the crisis deepened in March 2020. He was being driven by Imperial College, whose team of modellers were notoriously alarmist and quick to jump to headline-grabbing “worst case scenarios”. One of the Imperial scientists, Neil Ferguson, had in 2005 warned that 200m deaths were possible as a result of bird flu, but the casualties turned out to be minimal. Johnson asked, albeit in florid terms, about the significance of deaths being overwhelmingly among the over-80s. He asked about the role of herd immunity, the impact on the economy and the effectiveness of different forms of social distancing.
At the time, the lockdown faction on the 150-strong Sage committee prevailed. They excluded lockdown sceptics, but they won over Downing Street and the toughest ever controls on social behaviour were imposed. The delay in this decision looked damaging, possibly resulting in many old people dying needlessly. Hard lockdown advocates became heroes and the sceptics became baddies. Shorn of balanced advice, Johnson was conned into backing the test-and-trace system, which blew a staggering £29bn before its failure. There has been no inquiry into its costs or corruption.
Everyone can be wise after the event. The argument over the response to Covid was clearly crude and messy. This was partly because Johnson had a habit of sacking any able minister or civil servant he encountered. But the argument itself was taking place in every country in the world. Nor has it gone away. There is a debate to be had on the timing and ferocity of lockdowns, and how much impact they had on excess deaths in 2020/21. Sweden, the outlier in rejecting tough lockdown, fared better than some and worse than others.
Depending on criteria, Britain fared somewhere in the middle, but we still do not know the secondary costs, the damage to young people, to the care of elderly people, to the health service or to the wider economy. This was the dispute which Johnson and Rishi Sunak at the Treasury were having and it was a necessary dispute. There is now a national interest in resolving it, which should have been done two years ago. It needs serious scientific analysis, not a pantomime in Paddington.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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