Boris at bay: the Covid Inquiry

Far from delivering the coup de grace to Boris Johnson’s career, his performance at the Covid Inquiry has been a reminder of what we have lost.

In fact, Boris’s resilience under forensic examination may well be winning the former Prime Minister new admirers. We saw yesterday how different politics might have been if he had not been brought down prematurely.

Once again, Boris was at bay. Once again, he was being blamed for chaos at the heart of government. And once again, he reminded us why, when the voters were last consulted in 2019, he was elected with a thumping majority.

Faced with the silkily hostile interrogation of Hugo Keith KC, Boris stood his ground. Always polite, and where appropriate contrite, he endured a barrage of claims that he had done too little, too late to “follow the science”.

Unlike his accusers, Boris was persuasive: both when telling the bereaved “how sorry I am”, and when defending his record against criticism, even when unfair and based on hindsight. He conceded, for example, that “the loss of life chances for young people has to be put in the scales”.

Boris articulated just how nightmarish his predicament was during the pandemic. There was no consensus about how to stop the virus spreading, he was navigating in the dark and early on he nearly died.

Badgered on Partygate, he told the Inquiry that the popular version of events was “a million miles” from the reality of what happened. Boris apologised yet again for the offence caused, but he repeated that it had been impossible for Downing Street staff to do their jobs while staying within the letter of the law.

But when Mr Keith directly accused him of “not caring” about how these gatherings would look, Boris bridled. That was “simply not right.” He added: “I did care and I continue to care passionately about it.”

Briefly, the good old Boris was back: pugnacious yet deeply humane. He described how it felt to find himself in intensive care at St Thomas’s Hospital, seeing other middle-aged men stricken with Covid like himself and knowing that “some of us would not make it”.

He knew from experience “what an appalling disease this is”. Nobody watching Boris yesterday, as he relived those dark days, could still lend credence to the callous, cyncial caricature presented by a hostile media.

Another episode was equally telling. Pete Weatherby KC, a particularly pedantic and pompous barrister, quibbled over Boris’s suggestion that the UK had ended up in the middle of the European table on excess mortality, claiming to apply instead the “cold steel” of evidence.

But Boris hit back hard: “I don’t believe that your evidence stacks up.” He cited a study in The Lancet to counter Mr Weatherby’s claim that the UK did “far worse” than others.

Boris was repeatedly accused by lawyers of delaying measures until too late. His reply to Mr Weatherby was typically robust: “That’s total rubbish.” Actually, it was Boris who kept the balance between the lockdown enthusiasts and the libertarians who wanted to rely on herd immunity.

He was asked about the phrase “let it rip” and whether he had used it, as suggested by contemporaneous diary entries recorded by Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientist. Mr Keith alleged that he had wanted to let the elderly die, because they had “had a good innings”.

Angrily, Boris rejected the implication of indifference to suffering: “I think frankly it does not do justice to what we did, our thoughts, our feelings, my thoughts, my feelings, to say that we were remotely reconciled to fatalities across the country.”

Reader, I believe him. The evidence yesterday went into excruciating detail on circuit breakers and tiers, on Alpha and Omicron, on closing schools and shutting down firms, on Eat Out to Help Out. What it showed was not that Boris didn’t give a damn about deaths, but on the contrary that he was doing his damnedest throughout both to save lives and to keep the country afloat.

The Northern Irish KC Brenda Campbell could barely contain herself as she accused him of ignoring the needs of the Province. Boris dealt courteously with her undisguised fury, despite having earlier been obliged to defend himself against Mr Keith precisely for taking a regional approach.

Feelings are still raw and the Covid Inquiry is being conducted in an atmosphere that one can only describe as hysterical if not unhinged. One woman outside had a placard proclaiming: “Boris Johnson killed my husband”. Boris was being denounced by Aamer Anwar, yet another barrister (there are about 50 of them present), as though the ex-PM were a mass murderer.

Far from being the Vladimir Putin of the pandemic, Boris was, as he said, acting as “the lay person in the room” with scientists and other experts. This was a vital role, not least because the scientists often disagreed at the time.

Often, Boris came across as the most honest person in the Inquiry. He alone grasped that lockdowns “fell hardest on the poorest and neediest”. He denied private conversations ascribed to him (he presumably meant the phrase “let the bodies pile high”) but he rightly defended his plain speaking, rather than hiding behind jargon.

The real danger of this Inquiry is that it risks becoming an exercise in scapegoating and back-covering, while ignoring its proper purpose: to ensure that when Britain is hit by a pandemic, we shall be better prepared next time.

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