Boris Johnson's first day at the Covid-19 Inquiry in highlights

NationalWorld.com

Watch Boris Johnson's first day at the Covid-19 Inquiry in highlights - NationalWorld.com on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00 Hello, my name is Raph Blackburn. I'm National World Politics Editor and myself and David George,

00:07 our Health Editor, have been spending the last day watching Boris Johnson give evidence at the

00:14 COVID inquiry so that you don't have to put yourself through that. Now, David, you watched

00:22 his evidence for most of the morning yesterday. What were your main takeaways?

00:28 I think the main takeaway for me, Raph, was just how defensive Boris Johnson came across.

00:32 We've seen from the likes of Matt Hancock, from Rishi Sunak, even David Cameron, who's made an

00:38 appearance at this inquiry, they were very quick to apologise and in fairness to them,

00:43 whether it was sincere or not, they were very open about some of the mistakes that were being made.

00:47 With Boris Johnson, he chose every single point that was brought up as a hill to die on.

00:53 I know that we've got a clip ready about what he said about the COVID statistics, so we'll just run

00:58 that for you very quickly. The evidence before Milady is that the United Kingdom had one of the

01:04 highest rates of excess death in Europe. Almost all other Western European countries had a lower

01:14 level of excess death. Italy was tragically in a worse position than the United Kingdom.

01:23 I don't wish to contradict you, Mr Keith, but the evidence, the LNS data I saw put us, I think,

01:30 about 16th or 19th in a table of 33. In Western Europe, we were one of the worst off,

01:37 if not the second worst off. So what we saw there was Ugo Keith Casey putting Boris Johnson under

01:44 the microscope about the number of excess deaths. And even though there are statistics, you know,

01:50 the case he is arguing statistics that have been widespread throughout Europe,

01:54 Boris Johnson is claiming different statistics. I've actually seen the statistics he's arguing

01:59 about. And he's looking at total deaths from the Office of National Statistics. So he's just

02:03 trying to completely skew things. Rayfords, you sat in on both sessions as well. Did you find that

02:10 Boris was sort of arguing the toss over every single point as well? I feel like he apologised

02:18 quite quickly at the start. He arrived at the inquiry, he got there very early, 7am, probably

02:25 to try and avoid going past the bereaved families who were waiting outside. And then as soon as

02:31 you're about to start, he was interrupted by some protesters, and he very quickly apologised

02:37 for people who'd lost loved ones. However, when they got into the kind of meat of the evidence,

02:45 you know, like you, David, I kind of found he was, he was kind of a bit agitated. It struck me,

02:53 looking on from a kind of politics view, that this was a kind of like a Boris we don't really

03:01 see very much, you know, we kind of remember Boris as this kind of like quite vigorous,

03:06 quite positive, quite punchy campaigner. Whereas, you know, at the Covid inquiry, under the lights,

03:16 I guess, in the bright lights in Paddington, he's kind of hunched over, he looks quite pale,

03:21 he just kind of seemed quite tired. Yeah, it was kind of quite a remarkable change from the man who

03:30 so convincingly won an election four years ago. And yeah, that that that kind of continued into

03:38 the afternoon session. So yeah, we've got a clip here of Boris being confronted by

03:44 some of the most controversial statements that have come out in the inquiry so far.

03:49 We needed constantly to challenge ourselves and constantly to try to do better.

03:56 Your own chief advisor, Mr. Cummings, described on the 4th of May, something the government had

04:01 done as being the best success of the whole criminally incompetent government performance.

04:06 How could that be a good thing? Because what he is trying to do is to he's he's not for me to

04:16 explain his his quotation, you can you can ask him yourself. But what we were generally trying to

04:22 to do was to make sure that we delivered the best possible service for the people of the UK,

04:29 who were going through an absolutely terrible, terrible time. And it would not have been right

04:36 to have a load of if we'd had a load of WhatsApp saying, aren't we doing brilliantly, folks?

04:41 Isn't this going well? I think your criticisms might have been frankly, even more pungent.

04:48 On the 27th of March, after Mr. Cummings had asserted that Whitehall had nearly killed huge

04:55 numbers of people and cost millions of jobs, and that Mr. Hancock had failed to get on top

05:00 of the testing problems, you yourself said these three words, totally fucking hopeless.

05:06 That was a reference to the performance of an important part of government.

05:10 I'd stress the word nearly in that.

05:13 Your response, Mr. Johnson.

05:15 And I would say that my job was not to, not uncritically to accept that everything we were

05:26 doing was good, though I, as it happens, as I said to you, I do think that the one the country

05:34 as a whole had notable achievements during the crisis. My job was to try to get a load of quite

05:44 disparate, quite challenging characters to keep going and through a long period and to

05:52 keep doing their level best to protect the country. That was my job.

05:57 So there we had Boris kind of tacitly admitting, saying two things which had come up in notes from

06:06 his aid previously. So he said, why are we destroying everything for people who will die

06:12 anyway? This is talking about whether they should bring in the Covid lockdown. And it's obviously,

06:18 you know, quite an awful comment, which he was he was trying to defend there.

06:23 But it goes, it also shows us a bit about the chaos in number 10 at the start of the pandemic.

06:33 And, you know, the main issue there was that Johnson, who was obviously the prime minister,

06:39 he just couldn't make a mind up his mind up whether to lock down or not, so much so that

06:44 his aides described him as this trolley, he's kind of careering down the aisle from one decision to

06:48 the other. So these comments he made here, or four days before the actual Covid lockdown came in,

06:55 on the 23rd of March 2020. By then, I think most other people had kind of decided that,

07:01 you know, the UK had to lock down, otherwise, there were going to be serious excess deaths

07:07 and the NHS would be overwhelmed. But he was still obviously, arguing that we shouldn't then

07:12 then obviously, four days later, he gives the speech, which I'm sure most people remember,

07:16 urging people to lock down. And then further evidence came out just after that, only three

07:21 days later, where he's basically arguing against locking down again. So it kind of showed the chaos

07:28 inside inside number 10. You know, what else did you make the afternoon evidence, David?

07:35 Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing is, because of how everything went down, the things that were

07:40 said during the pandemic by Boris Johnson himself, there was no outcome, there was no scenario where

07:47 he comes out on top from this Covid inquiry. To me and to a lot of others, sort of

07:54 giving evidence are the days to essentially fall on your sword. It's every single failing,

08:02 because at this point, it's not about him. I don't know if he fears he's going to be prosecuted for

08:06 what happened or anything like that. But it screams of a man who's desperate to save his own face.

08:11 And this is the time or the place for that. Now, this is the time to be completely honest about

08:16 every mistake that was made. And then he could probably come out and say, look, I can I admitted

08:21 to everything so that when the next pandemic comes around, Britain will be ready. Look how patriotic

08:26 I am. But instead, like I say, he's arguing the toss over the smallest things. Now even stuff,

08:31 such as the WhatsApp messages, which was brought up in the morning and in the afternoon.

08:36 And there's one where he described Matt Hancock as useless and said, you know, at some point,

08:42 yes, we thought about getting rid of him, but he was the best man for the job. Meanwhile,

08:47 Dominic Cummings is submitting evidence suggesting that they kept him around as a sacrificial lamb.

08:51 It's it reeks of hypocrisy. And I'm so curious to see what happens today

08:57 and how he's actually going to sort of present himself.

09:00 Yes. Speaking of the WhatsApp messages, obviously, there's a huge chunk of WhatsApp messages,

09:08 which Boris Johnson has not been able to provide to the inquiry from the 31st of January. So I think

09:15 June, because of an issue with his old phone. This is a phone that he was using while prime minister

09:20 before the security services noticed that the number had been readily available online

09:25 for 15 years. And they basically cannot get these WhatsApp messages off this phone. So that's a big

09:32 chunk of evidence they haven't been able to hear. And yeah, I think there's a clip now of Boris

09:38 trying to explain why he doesn't have the WhatsApp messages. Do you know why your phone was missing

09:46 those 5000 odd WhatsApps? I don't know the exact reason, but it looks as though it's something to

09:53 do with the app going down, and then coming up again. But somehow, not automatically erasing all

10:09 the things between that date when when it went down, and the moment when it was last backed up.

10:18 So I can't give you the technical explanation, but that's the best I'm able to give.

10:24 So yeah, believe him if you like, I'm slightly sceptical of that answer. And yeah,

10:33 Boris has got another day of evidence today, where I believe they're more likely to kind of get into

10:39 some of the partygate stuff, some of that controversy. So yeah, there'll certainly be

10:44 no let up for him. So yeah, if you want to follow that, we'll have a live blog on nationalworld.com.

10:52 But yeah, in the meantime, thanks very much for watching,

10:55 and make sure you follow the rest of our coverage on our website or app. Thank you, David.

11:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended