Boris Johnson has admitted the UK “vastly underestimated” the dangers posed by Covid-19 in early 2020 and did not take the scientific evidence seriously enough in testimony to the public inquiry into his government’s response to the pandemic.
The former prime minister on Wednesday said his administration “may have made mistakes” but that before late February 2020, the threat of the virus was not being escalated to him as “something of truly national concern”.
Johnson, who has been the subject of damaging claims by former aides and ministers, said he should have “twigged much sooner” what impact the new virus might have as scenes emerged from Italy in February.
Officials did not pay enough attention to the evidence being presented about the infectiousness and lethality of Covid in the early weeks of the crisis, he said, meaning the government “vastly underestimated” the scale of the problem.
“I don’t think we attached enough credence to . . . forecasts,” said Johnson, adding that he himself had been “agnostic” about the scale of the danger.
Johnson said his government did not take worst-case scenarios seriously enough because it was operating under a “fallacious inductive logic”, based on the outcome of previous viruses such as Sars and Mers.
“I think that, actually, everybody, had they stopped to think about it, could see the implications of the data,” said Johnson, who was in office between 2019 and 2022.
In his first of two days of evidence, Johnson defended his decision not to chair any meetings of Cobra, the emergency committee that helps co-ordinate a pan-Whitehall response to crises, until March 2020.
Boris Johnson’s Covid inquiry evidence: key takeaways on day one
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Admits UK ‘vastly underestimated’ virus threat.
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Says officials did not take scientific evidence seriously enough.
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Concedes his government ‘may have made mistakes’.
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Declines to say whether his government’s decisions increased death toll.
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Dismisses claims by former officials that his leadership was incompetent.
The Covid public inquiry is examining the government’s response to the virus, including the UK’s preparedness and senior decision-making.
It is due to run until the summer of 2026, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expected to appear before the end of this year.
Among the most grave criticisms Johnson has faced is that he ordered the first UK lockdown on March 23 2020 too late.
Last week, former health secretary Matt Hancock told the inquiry that a lockdown three weeks earlier “would have saved many, many lives”. Last month, it heard that senior advisers to Johnson recommended the move on March 14.
Asked by Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, whether he believed ministers’ decisions led to more deaths during the pandemic, Johnson said: “I can’t give you the answer to that question, I’m not sure.”
More than 50,000 deaths connected to Covid were recorded during the first wave. To date, Covid has killed more than 227,000 people in Britain and infected many millions more.
Johnson — who was admitted to hospital with the virus in April 2020 — began his evidence on Wednesday by apologising “for the pain and the loss and the suffering of the Covid victims”.
“So many people suffered . . . Inevitably in the course of trying to handle a very, very difficult pandemic in which we had to balance appalling harms . . . we may have made mistakes,” he added.
Johnson disputed data presented by Keith during an earlier stage of the inquiry showing the UK recorded the second-highest death toll in Europe. He said he had seen different figures.
Asked whether decisions about when to implement lockdowns may have affected the number of excess deaths, Johnson said: “Given that other countries have excellent healthcare systems, and ended up statistically with more deaths . . . the answer is I don’t know.
“We have an extremely elderly population, we do suffer from many Covid-related comorbidities, and we are the second most densely populated in Europe,” added Johnson.
Excess deaths are the difference between deaths from all causes during the pandemic and the historic seasonal average.
Since its second module, which covers “core political and administrative decision-making”, began in October, several former senior officials have strongly criticised Johnson’s leadership in oral and written evidence.
Lee Cain, former Downing Street head of communications, said Johnson had “oscillated” on key decisions and would “take a decision from the last person in the room”.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, described him as a “shopping trolley”.
Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary between 2020 and 2021, last month said Number 10 under Johnson was “toxic”, “macho” and “contaminated by ego”.
Johnson dismissed claims that the characterisation of his leadership as incompetent was “extraordinary”.
“If you’d have had the views of the mandarinate about the Thatcher government in unexpurgated WhatsApps, m’lady, I think you would have found that they were pretty fruity,” he said.
Asked whether he was aware that people were not willing to work in his government because of its atmosphere, Johnson said he “didn’t see any sign of that”.
But he admitted that the “gender balance should have been better . . . too many meetings were male-dominated”.
Johnson confirmed he had been unable to provide the inquiry with any of the 5,000 private messages he sent to colleagues during almost the whole period of the first lockdown, but denied deleting them.