UK Covid inquiry: Boris Johnson defends 'let it rip' comment

Over a series of entries between August and October 2020 as Covid rates were rebounding, Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson favoured "letting it rip" and had remarked that "yes, there will be more casualties but so be it, 'they've had a good innings'"

On other occasions, Mr Johnson was said by Sir Patrick to have been "obsessed with older people accepting their fate" so that the young could "get on" with their lives and the economy recover.

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Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, suggested that these were the "secretly held" views of the Prime Minister during a time when scientific and medical advisors were pushing for a short circuit breaker-style lockdown to arrest the spread of Covid infections.

Mr Johnson said this was "completely wrong", adding: "My position was that we had to save human life at all ages and that was the objective of the strategy and by the way, that is what we did."

The former PM insisted that he "had to challenge the consensus" and "speak for everybody who wasn't in the meetings and who wanted these points put to the scientists."

Long Covid campaigners outside UK Covid inquiry in London (Image: PA)

He cited the example of calls from some supporters to "segregate" the population with the goal of shielding the most vulnerable from Covid while allowing young and healthy adults to live normally, saying that he had interrogated his advisors on such a policy before ruling it out.

He said: "Intuitively it sounds like a very reasonable thing to do - to protect those who are going to be most vulnerable, principally the elderly and those with chronic conditions.

"The problem is that when the R starts circulating above a certain rate, the velocity of transmission of the disease becomes so extreme that it just breaks the segregation that you you try to impose and that vulnerable population, a percentage of them, will inevitably get the disease, and as you know a small percentage of a very large number is a very large number."

Later the former PM - who was given a 50/50 chance of survival after he was admitted to intensive care with Covid in April 2020 - became tearful as he hit back at suggestions of "indifference" to the pandemic and to deaths among the elderly.

He said: "When I went into intensive care, I saw around me a lot of people who were not actually elderly - in fact, they were middle aged men and they were quite like me. Some of us were going to make it and some of us weren't.

"The NHS, thank God, did an amazing job and helped me to survive. But I knew from that experience what an appalling disease this is.

"I had absolutely no personal doubt from March onwards - to say that I didn't care about the suffering being inflicted on the country is simply not right."

Protesters outside the UK Covid inquiry headquarters on December 7 2023 (Image: PA)

Over roughly two and a half hours of evidence, Mr Johnson told the inquiry that he had not been warned that the Eat Out to Help Out scheme in summer 2020 "was a gamble" that could accelerate Covid spread, and had been "surprised" when his chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty later referred to it in a government meeting as "eat out to help the virus".

However, Mr Johnson said he "can't see anything that conclusively shows that it made a big difference" to virus rates.

As Covid cases began to climb more rapidly during August and September of 2020, Mr Johnson was asked why the UK Government did not take action sooner to suppress the virus.

Evidence shown to the inquiry shows the Covid taskforce repeatedly recommending a circuit breaker but a regional three-tier system was adopted in England instead, and replicated in Scotland as a five-tier system.

Mr Johnson accepted that the tiers "didn't work" and became "very invidious" as neighbouring local authorities ended up under different rules.

However, he said it had seemed "a sensible way to go, worth trying".

He denied that he had been opposed to lockdown and insisted that a circuit breaker had been put to him as "an option" rather than something he was urged to enforce.

Mr Johnson added: "The problem with this whole period is that we'd found a way out of lockdown and we'd got the R below one but we didn't yet have either good enough therapeutics or a vaccine so our only tools remained NPIs, and the question was 'do you go straight back into lockdown?' - which is what a circuit breaker is.

"Circuit breaker is a glib phrase but it actually means an immensely difficult, costly exercise which falls hardest on the poorest and neediest in society.

"You might then have to do it again, and again, and even then there's no guarantee that it's going to work. And you don't know what the end stage is because you've got no vaccine.

"That's why I thought it was sensible to continue to throw everything we had at a combination of intensified national measures, plus the regional system - the tiering system."

Lockdown was reimposed from October 31 2020.

Boris Johnson arrives to give evidence for a second day to the UK Covid inquiry (Image: PA)

Aamer Anwar, lead solicitor for the Scottish Covid Bereaved said Mr Johnson had "failed to show any genuine regret for his failures". 

Mr Anwar added: "Johnson claims he got the ‘big calls’ right, however, on the biggest life-saving decisions, the facts are that Boris Johnson delayed, failed, and sided with death and ‘let the bodies pile up’."

Becky Kummer, spokeswoman for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said it was clear that Mr Johnson "failed to take the pandemic seriously in early 2020" and "failed to learn from his mistakes meaning that the second wave had an even higher death toll than the first". 

Mr Johnson also told the inquiry that revelations in May 2020 that his chief of staff Dominic Cumming's had made a lockdown-breaching trip from to London to Durham with his family - who had Covid - was a "bad moment" but denied, contrary to research, that it had been instrumental in reducing the public's willingness to follow guidance.

He said that adherence with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing "fray over time".

Questioned about the Downing Street 'Partygate' scandal - a series of boozy workplace get-togethers and leaving do's held in Number 10 at the height of the pandemic - Mr Johnson accepted that it had "exacerbated" the grief felt by the Covid bereaved.

However, he said that the "version of events that has entered the public consciousness about what is supposed to have happened is a million miles from the reality of what actually happened in Number 10", adding: "I certainly thought what we were doing was within the rules".

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - who was Chancellor during the pandemic - will give evidence to the inquiry on Monday.