When Boris Johnson finally agreed to hold a judge-led public inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, he showered praise on the eminent former judge he chose to lead it.
“She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and I know shares my determination that the inquiry examines in a forensic and thoroughgoing way the government’s response to the pandemic,” the former prime minister said of Heather Hallett and her future endeavours, back in December 2021.
Lady Hallett, the daughter of a policeman, had already made her mark, repeatedly, in the course of a long and stellar legal career. In 1998, she became the first woman to chair the Bar Council, before being made a high court judge in 1999. In 2009, she was chosen to act as coroner for the inquest into the 52 victims of the 7 July London attacks. At one stage, she was heavily backed to become the first female lord chief justice of England and Wales.
A good friend in the legal profession describes her as “not only a brilliant lawyer but also incredibly politically astute”.
For Johnson, however, the appointment is turning into something of a nightmare – even before Hallett holds her first public hearings next month.
Last week, her inquiry demanded that the Cabinet Office release Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages and diary entries from the time in order to form a full picture of how government was working and, presumably, to get a feel for how professionally or otherwise things were being run at the heart of power as the Covid crisis grew.
Hallett has said a failure to hand over the unredacted material, which also includes Johnson’s notebooks containing contemporaneous notes, would be a criminal offence.
The inquiry is now on collision course with the former prime minister who set it up, and the Cabinet Office, which sits at the heart of government.
All this – together with news that the Cabinet Office had, in a separate move, referred Johnson to the police after his diary revealed hitherto-unreported visits by friends to Chequers during the pandemic – has, according to friends, sent Johnson into a mood of bleak despair.
It is only a few months since his allies were talking up a political comeback by the former prime minister. Now, with the privileges committee also soon to report on whether he misled parliament over Covid parties at Downing Street, nothing but more controversy and trouble seem to lie ahead.
His fellow MPs are beginning to wonder in increasing numbers if it is wise, or good for his party, for him to stand again at the next election. One senior Tory said: “If he remains an MP, he stays more in the limelight – he will be more of a target. Why would he want that? The Covid inquiry will go on for years with him at the centre of it all.”
Interviewed on TalkTV on Friday, his close supporter, the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, appeared to concede that Johnson’s comeback hopes were over. Dorries said that after a lengthy, long-distance phone call with Johnson following the latest controversy, another pitch for high office was “the last thing on his mind”.
She implied that there were too many forces pitted against him and added that the new investigation into Covid rule-breaking “stinks to high heaven”.
Even before it has got under way, the Covid inquiry led by Hallett has become another huge obstacle in the way of a return to power for Johnson.
