Boris Johnson’s decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic was described as “bipolar” and “completely inconsistent” by Sir Patrick Vallance, the Covid inquiry has heard.
The government’s then chief scientific adviser acknowledged his frustration in his diary entries, which he has submitted to the panel as evidence, at the “chaos” in Downing Street and Johnson’s “flip-flopping” when making decisions about restrictions.
Vallance wrote of the former prime minister: “This flip-flopping is impossible. One minute do more, next do nothing.
“He doesn’t seem to push actual resolutions. Morning PM meeting, he wants everything normal by September, and then you deal with things locally and regionally.
“He’s now completely bullish on opening everything. As another person said, it’s so inconsistent. It’s like bipolar decision-making.”
The Covid inquiry resumed its public hearings on Tuesday with the second module focusing on government decision-making and the response to the pandemic between January 2020 and February 2022.
Vallance also wrote in his diary about something said by the cabinet secretary at the time, Simon Case: “He says Number 10 is at war with itself. Carrie faction with Gove and another with spads downstairs. The PM is caught in the middle. He, the cabinet secretary, has spoken to all his predecessors … and no one has seen anything like it.”
He also accused ministers of “cherrypicking” information provided by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) in a Cabinet Office document reviewing the 2-metre social distancing rule. Ministers have said they followed the science in tackling Covid.
In June 2020, Vallance wrote: “I’m worried that a ‘Sage is trouble’ vibe is appearing in No 10. It may even be the government selected on occasion from Sage what it wanted.
“There is a paper from No 10 Cabinet Office for the 1 metre/2 metre review. Some person has completely rewritten the science advice as though it’s the definitive version.
“They’ve just cherry picked. Quite extraordinary.”
Johnson told the House of Commons in June 2020 that the 2 metre rule, which was introduced in March, should continue to be followed but introduced a 1 metre plus guideline as a secondary option.
In another diary entry, Vallance wrote: “No 10. Chaos as usual. On Friday the two-metre rule meeting made it abundantly clear that no one in No 10 or the Cabinet Office really read or is taking time to understand the science advice on two metres. Quite extraordinary.”
In September 2020 when the government was deciding whether to put England into a circuit-breaker lockdown six months after the first national lockdown, the former scientific adviser wrote of Johnson: “He’s all over the place and completely inconsistent. You can see why it was so difficult to agree to lockdown the first time.”
Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, described the atmosphere inside Downing Street as “toxic”.
Keith said he had received messages from more than 250 WhatsApp groups from “24 custodians”, as well as thousands of pages of one-to-one WhatsApp threads.
He said WhatsApp messages between Johnson and Dominic Cummings, his then chief adviser, paint a “depressing picture of the toxic atmosphere” in No 10 at the height of the pandemic.
It also emerged that neither Vallance nor Prof Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, were consulted by Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, over his “eat out to help out’” scheme before it was announced in 2020.
Vallance and Whitty said in their witness statements that “had they been consulted, they would have advised it was highly likely to increase transmission”, Keith said.
Sunak has insisted he is “expansively” helping the inquiry after it was claimed he is unable to provide WhatsApp messages because he failed to back them up.
The Guardian reported the prime minister wrote in his witness statement to the inquiry that he does “not have access” to the messages from when he was chancellor because he changed his phone several times.
Asked by the BBC at the Conservative party conference in Manchester whether it was true he no longer had the WhatsApp messages, Sunak refused to be drawn, saying: “What I can tell you because obviously this is a legal process which is going on, is that I’m helping the Covid inquiry fully and very, very expansively with everything.”
• The headline of this article was amended on 4 October 2023 to include a different comment about Boris Johnson from Patrick Vallance’s diary.
