Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has launched a scathing attack on the official Covid-19 inquiry, labelling its critical findings as "muddled" and suggesting the report should be "filed vertically" - a euphemism for discarding it.
Inquiry finds government failures cost lives
The damning report, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, concluded that Mr Johnson presided over a "toxic and chaotic" Downing Street culture that severely hampered the UK's pandemic response. The investigation found that a failure to take Covid-19 seriously early in the crisis cost approximately 23,000 lives during the first wave alone.
According to the inquiry's modelling, implementing lockdown measures just one week earlier, on 16 March instead of 23 March, could have reduced deaths in the first wave by 48%, potentially saving those 23,000 lives in England. The report stated that while lockdowns were not inevitable, the government's failure to implement earlier social distancing and household quarantine measures left them with no alternative.
Johnson's defiant response
Mr Johnson, who originally established the inquiry during his premiership, responded with fierce criticism across multiple platforms. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), he called the investigation "hopelessly incoherent" and claimed it failed to answer what he described as the "two big questions" about Covid-19: the virus's origins and whether lockdowns were worthwhile.
Writing in his Daily Mail column, the former prime minister questioned the value of the £200 million inquiry, stating: "She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough - just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone."
Mr Johnson defended his government's actions, arguing that he had advised people to self-isolate with symptoms, work from home and avoid non-essential contact a week before the first lockdown was formally implemented.
Mixed political reactions
The report has prompted varied responses from political figures. Former cabinet minister Lord Michael Gove offered an apology on behalf of the government and Conservative party, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I want to apologise for mistakes that were made during that period."
However, Lord Gove added the qualification that in a crisis, "the business of government can't be carried out in the manner of a Jane Austen novel," suggesting the extraordinary circumstances warranted some understanding of the challenges faced.
Meanwhile, Mr Johnson's sister, Rachel Johnson, used her LBC radio show to condemn the report as "vindictive rubbish" that portrayed her brother as a "Grim Reaper."
Despite his strong criticism, Mr Johnson expressed gratitude to Lady Hallett for her extensive labours and reiterated his "regret for the things the government I led got wrong." He maintained that everyone involved in the pandemic response was "doing our level best, under pretty difficult circumstances, to get it right and to save lives."
