Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson oversaw a toxic, chaotic and dithering response to the Covid pandemic, with a delay to locking the country down resulting in about 23,000 more deaths, a report by a public inquiry concluded yesterday.
Britain recorded more than 230,000 deaths from Covid, a similar death rate to the US and Italy but higher than elsewhere in western Europe, and it is still recovering from the economic consequences.
An inquiry, which Johnson ordered in May 2021, delivered a blistering assessment of his government’s response to Covid, criticising his indecisive leadership, lambasting his Downing Street office for breaking its own rules and castigating his top adviser Dominic Cummings.
“There was a toxic and chaotic culture at the centre of the UK government during the pandemic,” the inquiry chair, former judge Heather Hallett, said in her report.
She said if earlier action had been taken to prevent the spread of the virus, lockdown might have been avoided altogether.
But she said the failure to act made it unavoidable.
Hallett said Johnson had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the virus after it emerged at the start of 2020, believing it would amount to nothing and was distracted by other government business, with Britain at the time bogged down in talks over its departure from the European Union.
She said he had “reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making.”
When he appeared before the committee in 2023, Johnson said his government had been too complacent and had “vastly underestimated” the risks.
He apologised and said he understood the public’s anger.
A campaign group for bereaved families said “it is devastating to think of the lives that could have been saved under a different Prime Minister”.
&uuid=(email))