Back to the UK Covid Inquiry and today it’s in Cardiff, where Welsh Prime Minister Mark Drakeford has given some rather, er, colourful evidence. After watching Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon being grilled in previous hearings, Drakeford had some idea at least of what to expect and prepare — and he’s certainly not left the media with a shortage of sound bites.
The Welsh PM isn’t holding back. He slammed the former PM for trying to ‘minimise the seriousness’ of Covid, Hancock was described as getting ‘the most basic things wrong’ and Cummings criticised for saying ‘no’ to a mass gathering ban. Drakeford described Boris’s refusal to meet the leaders of the devolved nations — in case it gave ‘the false impression that the UK was a federal state’ — as ‘extraordinary’ and says he didn’t agree that a ‘UK-wide’ approach would have been better.
But was there was a hint of hypocrisy in Drakeford’s evidence? He criticised Johnson for not chairing Cobra meetings sooner in the pandemic, adding that it would have ‘sent a stronger signal about the seriousness with which the gathering storm was being taken’.
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