Boris Johnson: Covid lockdown was 'appalling balancing act'

The inquiry has previously seen notes taken in March 2020 by Imran Shafi, Mr Johnson’s former private secretary, which described the PM stating during a meeting that “we’re killing the patient to tackle the tumour - why are we destroying the economy for people that are going to die soon anyway?”.

Asked by Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, to respond, Mr Johnson said the comments were “an indication of the cruelty of choice that we faced and the appalling balancing act that I had to do throughout the pandemic”.

He added: “If indeed I said something like that, what I was saying is the truth - that in order to drive down the virus, to stamp out the virus, you are going to have to do things that are going to be damaging in all sorts of other ways."

ANALYSIS: Clownish, callous, or contrite? Boris Johnson makes his debut at UK Covid inquiry

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces stay-at-home lockdown order on March 23 2020, which was replicated across the UK (Image: PA)

Mr Johnson insisted that it had been “reasonable” not to ban mass gatherings such as the Cheltenham Festival or Champions League football matches in the first half of March 2020 because doing so would "push people into pubs" and other indoor venues.

By mid-March, he said it was clear the UK had a “massive problem” and a stay-at-home order had become inevitable.

Asked by Baroness Heather Hallett, who is chairing the inquiry, whether he considered arguments against lockdown at that point, Mr Johnson said he had given them “short shrift”.

He added: “My job was to protect human life. I thought that if the NHS was overwhelmed then the risk of truly tragic scenes in the UK of the kind we'd seen in Lombardy was very real...I had no other tool, literally nothing else [except lockdown]."

Earlier, Mr Johnson told the inquiry that a fear of behavioural fatigue was "fundamental" to explaining why the UK was slow to impose restrictions.

He said that it was the "prevailing view" among his medical and scientific advisors until March 2020 that imposing restrictions too soon could backfire, despite modelling indicating that 520,000 lives could be lost to the virus.

Mr Johnson said: "My anxiety - without therapeutics and vaccines - was what would happen if we went into a hard lockdown early and then had no option but to come out?"

The former PM, who resigned in June 2022, said that the threat from Covid had been a "cloud on the horizon" in January and accepted that the UK Government had initially "underestimated the scale and the pace of the challenge" posed by the new pathogen as it spread beyond China.

Mr Johnson insisted that the country had been facing a "once in a century event", but that during January and February of 2020 policymakers were influenced by what they "had seen and observed in their lifetimes".

"What the system did remember were things like SARS and MERS and swine flu that had an impact on Asia but were relatively if not wholly benign in the UK - that was the default mindset," he said.

READ MORE: 

• Who is 'explosive' Covid inquiry witness Dominic Cummings?
• The Covid inquiries and the WhatsApp bourach
• Sick pay in the UK is far too low, Matt Hancock tells inquiry

He added that while he had been "really rattled" by scenes in Italy as the country locked down 11 of its towns and cities in February, he was "struggling to conceptualise what we should be doing" having excluded border closures, been told that PPE supplies were "ample", and finding that the UK's test and trace capacity was "not as good as it's cracked up to be".

However, the former PM told the inquiry that he would have accelerated the expansion of test and trace if he had been told earlier that Covid could spread asymptomatically.

Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, said that England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty had told then-health secretary, Matt Hancock, on January 28 2020 that there was "credible evidence" of asymptomatic transmission in Germany, and that the issue was widely discussed in government scientific advisory groups such as Nervtag during February.

Mr Johnson said this contradicted the advice being given to him during that period, adding that had he known the "panic level would have been much higher".

He said: "The information that I was getting right up to the middle of March was that you were unlikely to have Covid unless you had symptoms."

The opening of the day's proceedings saw Mr Johnson's attempts to apologise to the Covid bereaved interrupted as protesters from the National Covid Memorial Wall group stood up, brandishing placards stating "the dead can't hear your apologies".

Campaigners were ejected from the Covid inquiry for brandishing placards stating 'the dead can't hear your apologies' as Boris Johnson began giving evidence (Image: PA)

Baroness Heather Hallett ordered ushers to remove the campaigners from the room, as the former PM told the inquiry that he understood "the feelings of these victims and their families".

He said he was "deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering of those victims and their families" and that he hoped the inquiry "will help to get the answers to the difficult questions that those victims and their families are rightly asking so that we can protect ourselves better in the future".

He was later seen to choke back tears as he described 2020 as a "tragic, tragic year", adding "we did lock down - but then it bounced back".

Aamer Anwar, lead solicitor for the Scottish Covid Bereaved group, said Mr Johnson had presided over the "meltdown of the British state" and a "chaotic and dysfunctional" operation at Downing Street, adding: "Mr Johnson apologised, but that apology is not accepted by many of the bereaved, because he also claimed his government saved thousands of lives and that for many is a grotesque distortion of the truth."

Mr Johnson's appearance at the inquiry came hours after it was confirmed that some 5000 WhatsApp messages from January 30 to June 2020, covering the period of the first lockdown, could not be retrieved from his phone due to a "technical issue".

He said: "I don't know the exact reason, but it looks as though it's something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up."

Mr Keith said a technical report provided by Mr Johnson's solicitors suggested there may have been a factory reset at the end of January 2020, followed by an attempt to reinstate the contents in June 2020, but the former prime minister denied knowledge of that.

"I don't remember any such thing," he said.

Johnson denied being aware of concerns about a 'toxic' culture at Number 10 (Image: PA)

The former PM was also grilled about a "toxic" culture in Downing Street.

In July 2020 Simon Case, the then-head official in Downing Street and now the Cabinet Secretary, said "I've never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country" in a message to then-Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill.

Mr Johnson insisted that such exchanges were "wholly to be expected" given the stressful circumstances of the time, as the Covid virus was rebounding.

He insisted that WhatsApp conversations "tends to the pejorative and hyperbolical".

Mr Keith also pointed to evidence that Mr Johnson had been warned via WhatsApp in July 2020 by Mr Case - one of his senior advisors - that "lots of top drawer people had refused to come [and work at Number 10] because of the toxic reputation of your operation".

He suggested that this atmosphere had been fostered in particular by Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson's chief of staff until November 2020.

Mr Johnson insisted that he "didn't see any sign of that", but conceded that "the gender balance of my team should have been better".

During the pandemic "too many meetings were too male dominated", he added.

The inquiry continues.