Boris Johnson at the COVID inquiry

The UK’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has told the COVID inquiry that he should have realised just how serious the virus was sooner than he did. Mr Johnson added that it was necessary to lockdown the country to control the virus in March 2020, and that no other option was available.  So, what did we learn? George Parker is the political editor at the Financial Times...

George - He's been striking a sort of contrite, quite a serious tone, not the kind of demeanour one necessarily associates with Boris Johnson. There was a time this week where he looked slightly emotional as he looked back at the very sad events of 2020. But generally, the big takeaway from this is that he admitted that the government vastly underestimated the danger of COVID and the threat that faced the country in those crucial weeks leading up to the pandemic arriving in the UK.

James - In response to the fact that Britain has experienced some of the worst excess deaths across Europe, he couched the fact that we've got an elderly population and the densely populated nature of our population as excuses, that's my kind of assertion. How do those stack up?

George - You're right, certainly in the earliest phase of the pandemic, Britain's excess death rates were much higher than many other comparable countries. And the fact we live in a relatively densely populated country, it's faintly risible. I mean, the previous health secretary, Matt Hancock, the guy who was in charge of the health department at the time, thinks that many thousands of lives could have been saved had Britain locked down earlier. But Boris Johnson's been admitting that basically we didn't lockdown earlier because nobody was really taking it all that seriously. And as an illustration at that point, Boris Johnson went away on holiday for a week at the end of February and didn't share his first meeting on the subject until the beginning of March, literally three weeks before the whole country was closed down.

James - He started yesterday with an apology, one that had been leaked beforehand. Now leaking is par for the course in politics, of course, but perhaps less so in the kind of legal sphere. And I wonder if that will have rubbed the inquiries up the wrong way right from the get go?

George - I think so. Look, I mean, there are other aspects of Boris Johnson's interaction with the inquiry which will have wound them up. And as you say, there was the advanced briefing of what he was going to say. There was the disclosure that some of his WhatsApp messages relating to the first lockdown had disappeared from his phone. This was the phone you probably remember, which he switched and then had to be opened by security. The fact that WhatsApp messages on his phone were unavailable to the inquiry shows that for some technical reason nobody can quite get their head around. Those are WhatsApps relating to the first crucial lockdown period. So look, I mean, they'll be glad to have him in front of the inquiry for two days, and I think he's been given a fairly rigorous going over by the legal counsel.

James - As we are on the subject, the communications going on between members of the government over the past couple of years, and their teams at the times, has also been the focus of the inquiry. There's been obscenity rid ones, there are ones questioning the faculties of the people in the top jobs. Now, Mr. Johnson, he essentially shrugged his shoulders and said 'that's just par for the course in politics.' You've covered UK and European politics for many years. Is that your analysis?

George - I think the thing is that WhatsApp has replaced, in modern politics, what used to be oral snatch conversations between colleagues in corridors and around the photocopier. The people say things in WhatsApp, messages they might say in a normal conversation, which are exposed to the harsh life that they appear temperate or unprofessional. Having said that, there's no doubt that Boris Johnson ran an extremely chaotic and dysfunctional government, which reflected his own personality. There was an atmosphere of suspicion. There was a feeling that Boris Johnson changed his mind from one day to the next. So it's not my experience of covering British politics for 30 odd years, that is normally the way things are done in government. And you know, I think it's certainly true that Boris Johnson had exactly the wrong kind of personality type for the crisis that we saw.

James - The inquiry's aim is to learn the lessons from COVID. Are you able to distil what those might be or is it too early to tell with the testimony of so many still yet to come?

George - I think it's a little bit too early. I think there's a danger. I think people have discussed that the inquiry has been seen very much through the prism of people settling scores and the lurid WhatsApp messages that you were just referring to there. And it's more like the equivalent of putting people in the stocks, which I think has a cathartic value to the country actually because people want to see people in the dock, in inverted commas, and being held to account. But in terms of lessons learned, I think the most important lesson to be learned is how do we prepare for possible pandemics in the future? And you certainly wouldn't want to prepare for it in the way that the UK government did in the early weeks of 2020. No preparation for acquiring protective personal protective equipment, no preparation for acquiring testing facilities for COVID, and basically no forward planning about the possibility that we might need to go into a lockdown, even though that policy was taking effect in other countries in the world, including China and Italy. So advanced planning is obviously going to be one of the big lessons to be drawn out this whole process.