Boris Johnson ‘beyond contempt’ for attack on Covid inquiry’s findings
Families of Covid casualties have attacked Boris Johnson for being “beyond insulting” after he used his column in a national newspaper to lampoon those “still arguing” about deaths in the pandemic.
The disgruntled former prime minister refused to apologize for the extra Covid deaths he is blamed for causing by delaying action, instead launching a blistering attack on the pandemic inquiry itself.
Mr Johnson and other senior Conservative ministers at the time were blasted for the “toxic and chaotic” culture in Downing Street during the pandemic in the Covid inquiry report chaired by former Court of Appeal judge Baroness Heather Hallett.
It concluded that unnecessary delays in lockdown led to an extra 23,000 deaths, and families of those who died said they were considering legal action against Mr Johnson.
But the former prime minister, who initially remained silent, used a footnote in his Daily Mail column to attack Baroness Hallett and the investigation she had initiated.
“Have these people lost their minds?” he wrote. He accused the former judge of being “breathtakingly incoherent” and “hopelessly incoherent.”
“More than three years after the epidemic ended, they are still arguing about what went wrong,” he said.
The comment infuriated campaigners seeking justice for those who have died needlessly during the pandemic.
A spokesperson for the Covid Bereaved Families group said: “For Boris Johnson to choose to respond to the Covid Inquiry by attacking Covid Bereaved for “continuing to argue” about the deaths of our loved ones is beyond contempt.
“Rather than repent, regret or even apologize, Johnson is using a newspaper column to do what he could not do while under oath at the Covid Inquiry: distort the truth, promote debunked myths and ignore facts.
“But the truth that Mr Johnson never engaged with is now clear: he was responsible for thousands of preventable deaths. The only promise he kept was to ‘let the bodies pile up’.
“He has no place in public life and we are once again calling for Boris Johnson to lose all former Prime Minister privileges following the investigation report.”
Their response followed the former Prime Minister’s surprising speech in his weekly column.
Mr Johnson fumed: “A judge spent the better part of £200m on an investigation, so what’s the outcome?
“He appears to have wanted more lockdowns. He appears to have been angry at the previous Tory government for not imposing lockdowns hard enough or fast enough, while the rest of the world thought lockdowns were probably greatly exaggerated.”
He continued: “Bozhe moi, you say, wiping away tears of laughter. Oh my God, these Britskis!”
Instead, he made it clear that his biggest regret was quarantining the country.
“Suddenly the idea comes to your mind that you could easily paralyze the entire UK in the future by state intervention by convincing them that they need to take precautions against a new virus originating from Russia.
“This is the logic of Baroness Hallett’s report, and I’m afraid people are hitting it on the head not only in Moscow but all over the world.
“As far as I know, all other countries have already completed their official investigations into Covid.”
He said: “If we are to prevent a disaster like Covid from happening again, there are and remain only two big questions that need a proper answer, and they are: How did it really come about?
“And to what extent have non-pharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, social distancing, etc.) made enough difference to the center curve to justify the enormous social, economic, educational and psychological damage caused by these measures?
“On the first question, about the origins of Covid, the report is silent. On the second big question, which is of real strategic importance for this country, Lady Hallett is hopelessly inconsistent.”
He claimed that the figure of 23,000 extra deaths, originally put forward by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, was “speculative and unsubstantiated”, arguing that his “hysterical predictions were largely invalid at the time”.
He claimed the charge of causing excess death was “totally confused”.
In his defense, he noted that while the country went into full quarantine on March 23, 2020, it started to take precautions from March 12.
He suggested: “I think it is quite clear that Lady Hallett was unable or unwilling to answer the really important questions.
“So, faced with the suffering of Covid victims and their families, and their entirely understandable desire for some form of catharsis, he decided that the best thing was to sensibly kick the Tory administration, which no one but me had much interest in defending, and move on.”
