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Boris Johnson rejects claims his Covid policy was “let it rip” across UK
Boris Johnson has insisted he did not pursue a “let it rip” strategy during the coronavirus pandemic.
Giving evidence to the Covid inquiry, he said he did offer counter arguments in order to challenge the consensus in meetings.
He argued his actions proved he worked to curb the virus, rather than allowing it to spread through the population.
He also rejected the idea that he was slow to act when cases began rising again in the autumn of 2020.
This was Mr Johnson’s second day of giving evidence to the public inquiry.
During the session, he was pressed on decisions he made ahead of the second wave of Covid.
More on Covid and the Covid Inquiry
In summer 2020, the government, in a bid to boost the hospitality sector, launched the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, where diners were given discounts on their restaurant meals.
Mr Johnson said the measure was not seen as a “gamble” when introduced and that he had not subsequently seen evidence that proved it “made a big difference” to the infection rate.
There has been conflicting evidence as to whether the scheme did propel the virus, and a surge of cases in the UK mirrored rises in other European countries, which did not have the scheme.
In previous hearings, the inquiry has been told that neither senior scientific advisers nor Matt Hancock, health secretary at the time, were told about the scheme before it was announced.
Mr Johnson said he was “perplexed” at the suggestion top advisers had been unaware of the plan, adding that it was not a secret and had been “discussed several times in meetings in which I believe they must have been present”.
The former prime minister also told the inquiry:
He “agonised” over whether to introduce a circuit breaker in autumn 2020 but decided a regional approach – or tier system – was “worth a try”
The tier system was “divisive and difficult to implement” involving “laborious” negotiation over local financial support
By October the approach was “running out of road” and abandoned in favour of national lockdowns
He was “desperate” to keep schools open in January 2021 but “it just wasn’t a runner” given schools were “terrific reservoirs” of the virus
Media representations of Partygate – rule breaking events in Downing Street – were “a travesty of the truth” and “a million miles from reality”
The controversy over Dominic Cummings’ journey to Barnard Castle was “a bad moment”
Social distancing guidance was “logistically impossible” to follow at all times in No 10 given the number of meetings being held during the pandemic
The world still needed answers about “the real origins of Covid”.
The inquiry was shown extracts from the diary of Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser during Covid, in which he says Mr Johnson “argues that we should let it rip a bit”.
Asked by the inquiry’s counsel if this stance prevented him from introducing a national lockdown until “the last possible moment”, Mr Johnson replied: “No, the implication that you’re trying to draw from those conversations is completely wrong.
“My position was that we had to save human life at all ages.
“If you look at what we actually did, never mind the accounts that you have culled from people’s jottings from meetings… if you look at what we actually did, we went into lockdown as soon as we could.
“I had to challenge the consensus in the meeting.”
Mr Johnson later said he regretted the “hurt and offence” some of his language had caused, before adding: “A lot of what has been reported is incorrect, and there are words that are described to me that I simply don’t recognise.
He explained that he spoke “in an unpolished way” because he wanted others to “speak freely”.
“I think when you’re sitting in a room full of conversations conducted in learned or bureaucratic language about these complex phenomena, you do need people to feel that they have the space without being embarrassed to say things simply, even if taken out of context they can be made to look unfeeling or uncaring, when people really aren’t being unfeeling or uncaring.”
The inquiry also saw extracts from Sir Patrick’s diaries which included the line: “Wales very high – PM says ‘it is the singing and the obesity…I never said that’.”
Mr Johnson was not asked about the alleged remark about Wales, which appeared in a entry dated 11 September 2020.
The former prime minister was largely measured during the hearing but robustly defended himself against accusations he did not care about people’s suffering during the pandemic.
Becoming emotional, he recalled his time in intensive care after contracting Covid.
“I saw around me a lot of people who were not actually elderly – in fact, they were middle aged men and they were quite like me.
“And some of us were going to make it and some of us weren’t.
“I knew from that experience what an appalling disease this is… To say that I didn’t care about the suffering that was being inflicted on the country is simply not right.”
Mr Johnson’s successor Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is due to give evidence to the inquiry on Monday.
Becky Kummer, spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said Mr Johnson’s evidence showed he “failed to take the pandemic seriously in early 2020 leaving us brutally unprepared, and failed to learn from his mistakes meaning that the second wave had an even higher death toll than the first”.
“He delayed for fear of how it might impact his reputation with certain sections of the press…. there are many lessons from the pandemic that might save lives in the future, but one of them is undoubtedly that someone as self-serving as Boris Johnson is not fit for power.”