Boris Johnson has rejected claims he presided over a toxic and chaotic culture at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic, and accused the COVID-19 Inquiry of being “totally muddled”.
The failure to take COVID-19 seriously cost 23,000 lives in the pandemic’s first wave in 2020, according to Baroness Heather Hallett’s report into the government response to the crisis.
But in a newspaper article, Boris Johnson said the inquiry – which he set up – had failed to answer the “big questions”, specifically: where the virus came from, and whether lockdowns were worthwhile.
Writing in the Daily Mail, the former prime minister said the report should be filed “vertically”, and insisted those involved in the pandemic response were “doing our level best”.
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He wrote: “Some judge has just spent the thick end of £200m on an inquiry, and what is the upshot?
“She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough – just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone.”
The inquiry found that the first and second lockdowns of the pandemic were not inevitable, but the government was left with no choice after failing to implement measures such as social distancing and household quarantine earlier.
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Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.
Baroness Hallett criticised all four UK governments for failing to appreciate the scale of the threat and described the response to the pandemic as “too little, too late”.
But Mr Johnson accused her of “breathtaking inconsistency”, being “hopelessly incoherent” and relying on “hysterical predictions” about COVID deaths.
“I am afraid, the inquiry seems to be totally muddled,” he wrote.
He also argued that, a week before the first lockdown, he told people to self-isolate if they had symptoms, work from home and avoid inessential contact.
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Read more from Sky News:
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Explainer: COVID-19 Inquiry
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He added: “I am of course grateful to Lady Hallett for her labours, which have clearly been extensive, and I repeat that I remain full of regret for the things the government I led got wrong and full of sympathy for all those who suffered – whether from the disease or from the steps we took to protect the population.
“All I can say is that everyone involved was doing our level best, under pretty difficult circumstances, to get it right and to save lives.”
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