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Boris Johnson believed the UK should “let old people” contract Covid-19 to protect the economy and young people from strict lockdown measures during the pandemic, according to the government’s former chief scientific adviser.
In diary entries from 2020 that were shown to the official Covid inquiry on Tuesday, Sir Patrick Vallance wrote that the then prime minister appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and considered the virus to be “just nature’s way of dealing with old people”.
In December 2020, weeks before England entered a third national lockdown, Vallance wrote: “Chief whip [Mark Spencer] says ‘I think we should let the old people get it and protect others’. PM says ‘a lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them’.”
The entries add to the string of damaging revelations from former top officials about Britain’s response to the global health crisis under Johnson, who served as prime minister between 2019 and 2022.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, told the inquiry on Tuesday that a “dysfunctional system” of government had led to “widespread failure” in responding to the pandemic. He described the Cabinet Office, the department that runs the machinery of government, as a “dumpster fire” and “bomb site”.
Meanwhile, private messages sent by Lee Cain, ex-Downing Street head of communications, and seen by the inquiry showed Johnson did not believe Covid was a “big deal” in March 2020 and thought “his main danger [was] talking [the] economy into a slump”.
Cain told the inquiry on Tuesday that the government announced a full UK lockdown more than a week after senior aides backed the move.
“I don’t think there was any clarity of purpose, any really serious outline, plan to deal with Covid at that particular point,” he said, describing Johnson as a “challenging character to work with” because he would “oscillate”.
“It was the wrong crisis for [Johnson’s] skill set,” he added.
The inquiry is examining the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, including the UK’s preparedness and senior decision-making, and is due to run until the summer of 2026.
It heard on Monday that the government’s most senior civil servant had claimed in private messages that Johnson changed “strategic direction every day” as the crisis took hold.
In a WhatsApp message to Cain in October 2020 that was seen by the inquiry, Johnson wrote: “Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate.”
Cain on Tuesday admitted the government got its assessment of the virus “wrong” in early 2020, having initially considered the UK “incredibly well prepared”. He said no “warning flares” had been communicated to Johnson at the beginning of the year to suggest the UK was not well prepared.
In a WhatsApp message on March 3 2020, Cain told Cummings: “He [Johnson] doesn’t think it’s a big deal and he doesn’t think anything can be done and his focus is elsewhere, he thinks it’ll be like swine flu and he thinks his main danger is talking economy into a slump.”
But in further WhatsApp messages shown to the inquiry, Cummings told Johnson there were “big problems coming” as the Cabinet Office was “terrifyingly shit”.
Johnson announced the first national lockdown on March 23. In written evidence submitted to the inquiry, Cain said Johnson met his most senior advisers on March 14, and that “the collective agreement in the room was that a full lockdown was the only strategy which could suppress the spread of Covid-19, save the NHS from collapse and ultimately buy the government more time”.
Cain conceded that a lack of diversity in Johnson’s top team had led to “blind spots” when it came to making policy, but insisted that there “had been a decade of pre-preparedness and we were amongst the best in the world to deal with a pandemic and it was being monitored closely”.
“Clearly, we got that assessment wrong, but I think you can see why we made the judgments that we did at the time”, he said.