Boris Johnson has responded to the Covid Inquiry in exactly the way you would expect from a man who crashed the car, reversed over the wreckage, then demands a refund because the accident report is “totally muddled”.
This is the inquiry he himself set up. He wrote the terms of reference. It has gone through years of evidence, witnesses, documents and WhatsApp messages, and reached a very simple conclusion: the UK response was too little, too late. February was a lost month. The culture in No 10 was toxic and chaotic. An earlier lockdown could have saved around 23,000 lives in the first wave alone. Faced with that, Johnson’s instinct is not to reflect, but to shout at the judge. In the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, “Never launch an inquiry for which you don’t already know the outcome.” Johnson plainly assumed he could defy that rule. He has now discovered why Sir Humphrey was right.
So he pops up in the Daily Mail to tell us the inquiry has failed to answer the “big questions”. Not questions like: why did you ignore your own scientists, why was No 10 a clown car, and why did you spend the crucial early weeks faffing about with herd immunity and cheery guff about “taking it on the chin”. No, the “big questions” are where the virus came from and whether lockdowns were worthwhile. Things that are either outside the inquiry’s scope, or already answered in painful detail.
He complains that Baroness Hallett has relied on “hysterical predictions” about deaths. Those “predictions” are based on the same modelling and data his own advisers showed him at the time. If they are hysterical now, they were hysterical then. Yet at the time he was quite happy to stand behind the lectern, flanked by the very people producing those numbers, and tell the country to trust the science. Now that the numbers are attached to a verdict on his own performance, suddenly the science is unreliable and the judge is “hopelessly incoherent”.
Then we get the familiar Johnson flourish about cost. “The thick end of £200m” on an inquiry, he splutters, as if that is the real outrage here. This from the man whose government burned through similar sums on duff PPE contracts through the VIP lane, and signed off on Test and Trace at £37bn. Spending a fraction of that once to find out how tens of thousands died unnecessarily is, apparently, the extravagance that really sticks in his craw. It is the old trick: make the price tag the story so people stop looking at the bill in lives.
He also tries a sort of legalistic sleight of hand on timing. A week before lockdown, he says, he told people to self-isolate, work from home and avoid inessential contact. As if that were some devastating rebuttal. It is exactly the timeline the inquiry cites as the problem. Those measures should have come earlier. By the time he finally dragged himself to a full lockdown, the virus was already everywhere and a gentler approach was no longer enough. He is literally repeating the evidence against himself and hoping no one notices the punchline.
Underneath the bluster is something more basic. The inquiry’s message is unforgiving but clear: if you are in charge during a crisis, your job is to take it seriously, listen to the people who know what they are talking about, and act fast. Johnson did none of that. He treated the early months as another political game, staffed No 10 with people who thrived on chaos, and only moved once the walls were already on fire. He now calls the written record of that behaviour “muddled” because his entire political survival depends on muddying the water.
What really irritates him is that Hallett has refused to play the old Westminster game. She has not wrapped her language in comforting euphemisms. She has not pretended that “difficult trade offs” and “balancing the economy and health” are some kind of exoneration. She has done the unforgivable thing: written down in plain English that people died who did not need to die, because those in charge wasted time and treated exponential growth like a PR problem.
Johnson’s article reads less like a serious critique and more like a man addressing the jury inside his own head. The rest of the world can see what has happened. A former prime minister, confronted with a sober, detailed account of his failure, reaches for the only defence he has ever really had: charm, distraction, and a wounded sense of entitlement. The trouble is that Covid was not a column for the Telegraph or a funny speech on after-dinner rates. It was real, it was deadly, and the decisions he made – or ducked – are written in the death statistics.
“Too little, too late” is Hallett’s verdict on his government. His reaction to that verdict only confirms it. Faced with responsibility, Johnson is once again exactly what he was in office: not a grown-up statesman, but a man frantically rifling through his own script for a line that lets him dodge the blame. Sir Humphrey would at least have had the grace to tell him, in private, that launching an inquiry without a pre-cooked whitewash was an act of sheer, world-class stupidity.
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