Boris Johnson’s testimony to the Covid inquiry on Wednesday began with an apology to victims of the pandemic and their relatives, but when pressed to specify what he was apologising for, the former prime minister could not say. That tension between affected sincerity and evasion of responsibility characterised Mr Johnson’s appearance.
The function of the inquiry is not to solicit contrition but to establish facts. That task is hampered in Mr Johnson’s case by the disappearance of thousands of WhatsApp messages dating from the crucial period in early 2020 when vital decisions were being taken – or not taken. Mr Johnson’s explanation for this gap in the record was too garbled to be convincing.
There is enough material from other sources to assemble a picture of chaos and mistrust at the heart of government, aggravated by the then prime minister’s absent leadership. This damning testimony from advisers and civil servants was dismissed by Mr Johnson as “a reflection of the agony the country was going through”.
On the question of whether poor administration cost lives, Mr Johnson insisted that his government performed no worse than other comparable countries. The essence of his defence is that, in the early weeks of 2020, the scale of the calamity about to hit the UK was unknown and unknowable, and that once the gravity of the situation was understood he acted on scientific advice expeditiously and in good faith.
That is untrue. There are messages and accounts of conversations flagging a likely, severe emergency. There were several Cobra meetings dedicated to the issue, which Mr Johnson chose not to attend. When confronted with this evidence, he submerged his own responsibility in a collective failure to process the data.
And so it went on: Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry’s barrister, showed Mr Johnson proof that he had failed to handle the crisis professionally and was told that the government acted no differently to “any administration facing the same sort of challenges”. Chronic equivocations were explained, implausibly, as “testing the arguments”. Confronted with some of the most incriminating conversations – warnings that should have been heeded – Mr Johnson’s memory failed him.
Tactical forgetfulness is not the only reason Mr Johnson is an unreliable witness. He is the only prime minister in history to have been censured for contempt of parliament. He wilfully misled MPs multiple times regarding breaches of lockdown regulations in Downing Street. He is guilty of serious breaches of the code of conduct underpinning British democracy. Losing jobs through dishonesty has been a pattern in his career, first as a journalist, then as a politician. He is a liar. There is no reason to suppose that he would be bound by the oath he swore to tell the truth to the Covid inquiry more than by any of the other rules he has flouted in his life.
Unsurprisingly, relatives of Covid victims reject Mr Johnson’s non-apology. The account he has so far given of his actions during the pandemic is not merely short on candour. It lacked any discernible comprehension of what it would mean to take proper, moral responsibility for the fact that tens of thousands of people died because his government was unequal to the task it faced.
In one respect, Mr Johnson’s testimony was honest, albeit inadvertently so. By his repeated attempts to dissolve his personal culpability in a generalised and collective failure to respond adequately to the pandemic, the former prime minister revealed that he was unable and unwilling to assume the basic functions of a leader. That is not news. But it is remarkable that he is so impervious to shame as to admit it to the inquiry.
