Right from the get-go, it was obvious that Boris Johnson was treating the Covid inquiry as a giant operation in reputation management.
From the way he arrived three hours early to avoid images of him being confronted with protestors to the heavy pre-briefings of what he was going to say, there was more spin than substance.
Shrugging off the light reprimand by inquiry chair Lady Hallet about the leaks of his evidence (just as he’d previously shrugged off light reprimands by Commons Speaker Hoyle about misleading Parliament), the former Prime Minister made plain his audience was public opinion not the judge or the inquiry itself.
The presentational aim was to say he was “deeply sorry” for lives lost, admit “mistakes” but overall say he got “the big calls right” in circumstances that were trying for all leaders across the western world.
Fortunately, inquiry lead counsel Hugo Keith was an effective interrogator. When he cited Johnson’s own statement on first setting up the inquiry – “the state has an obligation to examine its actions as rigorously and as candidly as possible” – it was clear Keith would focus on his candour, or alleged lack of it.
True to form, Johnson showed a slipperiness with the truth that nailed his eventual departure from Parliament during the Privileges Committee inquiry into “Partygate”. I kept a running tally of the number of times he said “I don’t remember” in response to key questions, and it was hard to keep up.
Johnson has confessed to friends for years that he partly owes his political success to “the blessed sponge of amnesia”, his distraction and obfuscation techniques serving as a kind of Jedi mind trick to persuade the voters to focus on other things.
Here he was again, dodging key issues. How many official notes told him about the seriousness of Covid when he was on holiday in Chevening? Was there a factory reset of his phone that deleted key WhatsApps? Were Cabinet bypassed in ordering the second lockdown?
There was a delicious moment when the trick failed. After claiming he couldn’t recall being warned about the toxic culture in his Downing Street office, Keith countered that former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill had directly messaged him “lots of top drawer people” were being put off. Caught red-handed, but not remotely red-faced, Johnson simply nodded.
The mask similarly slipped when Johnson snapped that the KC had implied he had “put his feet up” at Chevening, but was then forced to withdraw the allegation against his inquisitor.
Keith was instead a one-man fact-check machine. At one point, he countered the ex-PM’s spin that the UK was a middle-ranking performer in the grim league table of “excess deaths” in Europe or the world. When it came to comparable Western European nations, the UK was the second worst after Italy, Keith observed.
Johnson’s spin was similarly exposed when he tried to suggest that his own chaotic, quixotic leadership style which had harmed the Covid response was actually a good thing.
Put to him that one aide said he was “criminally incompetent” and that one senior official had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, Johnson tried to argue that such criticism was “creatively useful”.
But when he declared “My job was to try to get a load of quite disparate, quite challenging characters to keep going”, it laid bare that he’d tried to run the country in the same louche, hapless manner he’d used to edit The Spectator magazine. Not only was there no attempt to herd the cats, the lead cat was a Macavity in a time of national crisis.
Still, perhaps the best public service the inquiry counsel served was to get away from the personalities and sweary WhatsApps and focus on whether there had been a “system failure” on Covid – from civil servants to scientists to politicians.
And one of the most telling moments of the session came when Johnson blurted out that had “everybody stopped to think about it, they could see the implications” of what was happening in China. “I don’t think they necessarily drew the right conclusions..it was not escalated to me as an issue of national concern until much later”.
Keith ignored the subtle attempt to spread blame (one of many Johnson deployed, conceding “mistakes” of others, all the while spinning he took full responsibility) but rightly focused on that admission that no one had indeed “stopped to think” and to take action swiftly.
It elicited perhaps the most important admission of the morning. “I look at all this stuff, in which we seemed so oblivious, in horror now, we should have collectively have twigged much sooner, I should have twigged,” said Johnson.
But just as telling was Johnson’s focus in WhatsApps on “the comms” of what he was being warned about (particularly an early warning that Covid had a higher fatality rate than any previous pandemic).
Of course, getting the right public health communications turned out to be crucial later, but when Johnson said “I don’t think we should deprecate the importance of messaging” – it felt like a lame justification for someone who spent more time spinning than acting.
Boris Johnson’s 'can’t remember' act on Covid won’t be forgotten by the public
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06.12.2023
Right from the get-go, it was obvious that Boris Johnson was treating the Covid inquiry as a giant operation in reputation management.
From the way he arrived three hours early to avoid images of him being confronted with protestors to the heavy pre-briefings of what he was going to say, there was more spin than substance.
Shrugging off the light reprimand by inquiry chair Lady Hallet about the leaks of his evidence (just as he’d previously shrugged off light reprimands by Commons Speaker Hoyle about misleading Parliament), the former Prime Minister made plain his audience was public opinion not the judge or the inquiry itself.
The presentational aim was to say he was “deeply sorry” for lives lost, admit “mistakes” but overall say he got “the big calls right” in circumstances that were trying for all leaders across the western world.
Fortunately, inquiry lead counsel Hugo Keith was an effective interrogator. When he cited Johnson’s own statement on first setting up the inquiry – “the state has an obligation to examine its actions as rigorously and as candidly as possible” – it was clear Keith would focus on his candour, or alleged lack of it.
True to form, Johnson showed a slipperiness with the truth that nailed his eventual departure from........
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