According to all the people he’s leaked his witness statement to, Boris Johnson will tell the Covid inquiry not to pay much attention to WhatsApp messages on the basis that we can never know “the tone in which they were intended … Dark humour is lost or morphs into mockery.” Totally. Who among us can honestly say we are capable of parsing a WhatsApp message from Dominic Cummings dated 23 August 2020 that reads: “I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or shd believe on anything, and we face going into autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of NHS still.”
Does it help that Cummings has appeared before the inquiry and explained that this meant he was stressing that leaving Hancock in post was a big mistake, because he was a proven liar who nobody believed or should believe on anything, and that the UK faced going into an autumn Covid crisis with the … health secretary … in charge of the NHS still? No. No it doesn’t help. That could mean anything, right? I’m positively drowning in its subtleties here, and like many people I simply can’t wait for Johnson to take the stand at the inquiry on Wednesday and Thursday so he can explain that what this message actually implied was, “Boris Johnson saved lives”.
Anyway, did you hear the one about invading the Dutch vaccine factory? According to other reports, Johnson’s witness statement will also reveal he ordered the security services to draw up plans to investigate “military options” for a raid on a Netherlands pharmaceutical plant after the EU apparently “effectively blocked” the export of some AstraZeneca jab doses. Fortunately I can parse newspaper lingo, so you should know that “effectively blocked” means “did not actually block” – but that’s not important right now, because nothing saddens me more than batshit special forces operations that leaders never got to go through with. It’s like the old motto has it: Who Dares Wins Five Million Vials of Bill Gates. I firmly believe our boys could have taken the Dutch chemists down by any means necessary, and been back to Downing Street in time for a Victoria Cross and the contents of the booze suitcase.
Ahead of his appearance, then, Johnson’s version of events has somehow found its detailed way into the newspapers every day since last Friday, when a Times story got the ball rolling with: Johnson: My Covid Decisions Saved Lives. For some reason, I can only hear that headline in the voice of Jack Nicholson’s colonel in A Few Good Men, specifically the bit where he’s barking: “My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, SAVES LIVES.” Of course, no one could be less gross and incomprehensible than Boris Johnson – but the suggestion that he in any way did the nation a solid on the old lives-a-roonies feels a stretch.
Alongside the fact that most people would really rather forget such an awful time, I can’t help feeling the reason the Covid inquiry doesn’t get much airplay is that people feel they already know it all. This is absolutely not to disrespect the inquiry itself, nor the bereaved families having to go through it – that process and their pain is inarguable. But the lack of sensational revelation from the inquiry is perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the fact that a good part of the tragedy was avoidable, because it underscores how very much of the mishandling was known and understood at the time. It seems very odd to see think-pieces decrying the “hindsight” of the present moment, given that all the criticisms of the government of the day were said and written while it was happening, and by many people. This is the depressing non-revelation of the inquiry. Things reported and commented on contemporaneously, only to be flatly and aggressively denied by the government, turn out to have been true all along. The most significant hindsight currently at play is the type exhibited by those who have convinced themselves in hindsight that they would have been super-cool with thousands of people dying in streets and hospital car parks because there wasn’t any room for them.
As for what else to expect from Johnson’s forthcoming self-justification … untruths, would seem to be the safest answer, given the lifetime of practice. For all Dominic Cummings’s unpleasantness, we can probably live without Johnson distancing himself from him. Cummings was the man Johnson chose to make the most powerful person in government, because he couldn’t be bothered doing the job himself.
Hopefully we’ll be spared any maths lessons, given the former PM has been cast by earlier witnesses as someone utterly incapable of understanding graphs and basic statistical concepts. And yet, the lengthy advance leaks of Johnson’s inquiry strategy suggest he will seek to explain that he delayed implementing the first lockdown because going too early might mean it would go on too long for people to cope with. It’s incredible, really, that more than three and a half years after the event, Johnson still fails to understand that locking down earlier would probably have meant locking down for less time – or thinks he can butch out pretending to believe this. Then again, back when we were in the middle of it, the most unforgivable part of Covid was surely his administration’s apparent failure to learn a single thing for the second wave, so we had to do it the hard way all over again. A notable case of history taking place first as tragedy, then second as tragedy.
This is really the only exceptionalism to which Johnson can lay definite claim. It should be stressed again and again that the behaviour in public office that the inquiry has had to pick through is abnormal. No other British public inquiry into anything, ever, has produced such an endless parade of supposed public servants slagging each other off so much, to achieve so shamefully little. WhatsApp messages and the like may give us a modern form of insight into their private thoughts, but the dysfunction and backbiting were not a function of the new technology. None of the diarists of ages and administrations past have ever given anything close to this impression of rats fighting in a sack, and being so very bad at it. This is the world Johnson made, and, with a few honourable exceptions, these were the inadequates he peopled it with. The fact his inquiry appearance is just a two-day break from the lucrative trolley-dash of post-prime-ministerial life feels like a perfect vignette of decline – the sort of thing that happens in a country that deserves better, but that no longer expects it.
• This article was amended on 6 December 2023 to correct a quote from A Few Good Men.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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