Boris Johnson wasn’t in attendance at the Covid Inquiry this morning, but he was certainly there in spirit. The ex-Prime Minister suffered a bevvy of blows in absentia, in the form of WhatsApps published from his former No. 10 team. Among the more explosive were his blunt views on a second national lockdown in October 2020: ‘We should let the old people get it [coronavirus] and protect others’ he wrote in one. ‘The median age is 82-81 for men & 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer.’ A diary entry from Sir Patrick Vallance complained that Johnson is ‘obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going.’
The messages were published as part of an evidence session with his former No. 10 communications chief Lee Cain. He admitted that the pandemic was the ‘wrong crisis’ for his bosses’ ‘skill set’, painting a picture of dither and delay. Cain argued that the government had a strategy but lacked a plan for a pandemic like Covid. He argued it was a stressful time, saying ‘the challenges that we were dealing with were greater than probably any since 1945’ but that the government had a ‘huge’ problem with leaking. Cain also suggested that a lack of diversity in gender, social backgrounds and ethnicity created problems in No. 10’s decision-making: ‘If you lack that diversity within a team, you create problems in decision-making and policy development and culture.’ One such example, he said, was the row over Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign. Cain pointed out that none of the cabinet had received free school meals themselves, resulting in a ‘policy and political blind spot.’
This afternoon Cain will be followed by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser turned bête noire. He has begun his evidence session by turning his fire on Johnson’s cabinet which, he says, was not a serious decision making body during the Covid crises of 2020. Cummings contends it was too bloated, chaired badly and full of ministers who would leak news of decisions. As he began his early exchanges with Hugo Keith KC, Sky News was forced to warn viewers to expect ‘bad language.’ Cummings has defended his trenchant assessments of Johnson’s cabinet in contemporaneous messages on the grounds that ‘My appalling language was obviously my own but my judgement of a lot of senior people was widespread.’ More in a similar vein is expected this afternoon.
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