While Matt Hancock was facing a grilling in the antiseptic surroundings of the Covid inquiry last week, Boris Johnson was in the rather more rarefied atmosphere of the Inns of Court at the offices of 2 Bedford Row, the lawyers preparing him for his own inquisition on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
Johnson’s team has collated a 6,000-page “bible” of all the relevant evidence he might be quizzed about. Media attention so far has focused on the profane exchanges between No 10 aides, particularly Dominic Cummings and cabinet secretary Simon Case. Johnson’s appearance will trigger the release of a huge raft of new papers.
The former prime minister has submitted a 200-page written statement that will be published on the inquiry’s website. Alongside it will be thousands of pages of official submissions to Johnson through his red box: the formal, written advice he received in power. “This is what he was being told by officials, unmediated by the spin,” said an ally.
Johnson has spent, aides say, almost a year preparing for his appearance in front of Baroness Hallett and her panel. He will make the case that many of the explosive WhatsApp exchanges that have left his government looking like it was in the middle of a civil war were simply conversations around the issues, or “dark humour” — but that the key decisions were made in formal meetings based on this official advice. One minister from the Johnson government who has read his written evidence said: “I think he gives a good account of himself, actually.”
The inquiry resembles a municipal magistrates’ court, with its low polystyrene ceiling squares and cheap furniture. Hugo Keith KC, the lead barrister for the inquiry, has not been seen in such lowly premises for decades. But his presence and approach — that of a criminal silk — means this is not just a fact-finding enterprise seeking to learn the lessons of the pandemic: it is a trial by another name, a trial of reputations.
Johnson has had the best help taxpayers’ money can buy. His KC, Brian Altman, is described by the Legal 500 guide to the best lawyers as “the heavyweight champion of the inquiry world — a brilliant operator”. Altman recently represented the Post Office in the Court of Appeal when the convictions of 39 sub-postmasters were quashed. He was instructed in that case by Nick Vamos, a solicitor at Peters & Peters, who is also Johnson’s solicitor. As with all former ministers’ representatives, his legal fees are being paid by the Cabinet Office.
But for all his help, Johnson will have to go alone into the inquiry, without notes, to defend his handling of the pandemic. Like the other witnesses, he has been given no indication of where the inquiry will focus its questions. The list of potential topics fills three pages of A4. “It’s basically everything,” said a source who has seen the list. “The first, second and third lockdowns, care homes, tiering, borders, vaccines, how central government worked, relations with ministers, NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] and the economy.”
Counterintuitively, Johnson is said to be “looking forward” to getting over his side of things. “This will be the first time people will have heard him give considered reflections about what the UK should do next time. It’s very likely there’s another zoonotic [animal-to-human] pandemic. The hope is that the inquiry will be interested in his thoughts.”
The former prime minister knows, however, that he might have to wrestle the agenda from Keith, who some say is fixated with who swore about who on WhatsApp rather than meticulous inquiry into the pros and cons of lockdown and how that should inform policy-making in any future pandemic. A legal source who knows Keith said: “Hugo is a criminal barrister and this is his moment. For the time being he’s the most famous barrister in the land. Every day he wants a ‘gotcha’ or a moment of drama to keep the inquiry in the news.”
Last week there was evidence even Lady Hallett has tired of this approach. When Keith repeatedly tried to wrongfoot Michael Gove about a decision to exempt shooting from the “rule of six”, Hallett told him to “move on” and said of such issues: “They’re not preoccupying me, I can assure you Mr Gove.”
Johnson’s team has spent months trying to identify where he is vulnerable, but they insist he is unlikely to be caught out by abusive private messages. “They’re fairly relaxed about the WhatsApp/email sphere of things,” an ally said. “There are some outbursts of frustration — but nothing like the bad language that has been directed at individuals by some of the others. There are three or four areas they have been concentrating on.”
When it comes to the excess of swearing, Johnson will not accept that the atmosphere was toxic because of him. “He’s not Machiavellian enough to construct an architecture of terror,” said one supporter. That is likely to see the blame thrust in the direction of Cummings, though friends suggest that Johnson will try to avoid being drawn into personal criticisms of key figures such as Cummings, Rishi Sunak or Hancock. He will say Hancock was “doing a good job in very difficult circumstances”.
Johnson is bound to come under fire for failing to chair the first five Cobra emergency meetings on Covid-19, something that Hancock suggested last week would not have happened under David Cameron or Theresa May. The former health secretary said the first lockdown should have begun three weeks before it did and that many lives might have been saved as a result. Johnson will claim it was actually “probably timely”.
Cummings accused his former boss of taking a week’s holiday in February 2020 at the government retreat of Chevening in Kent to work on his biography of Shakespeare while the virus spread, a claim that Johnson plans to refute by producing his official diaries. “They show that he returned to Downing Street for three full days of meetings,” a source said.
Johnson then clashed with Cummings and his spin doctor Lee Cain over whether to introduce a second lockdown in October 2020, something that was delayed until the following month. Both Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser, and Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, both gave evidence that they tried to make him act sooner.
Cummings and Cain have accused Johnson of indecision and a desire to put his libertarian views above scientific evidence. Cummings has labelled him “the trolley”, because he veered from side to side. Cain said: “It was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skillset. He’s somebody who would often delay making decisions. He would often seek counsel from multiple sources and change his mind on issues. You need quick decisions and you need people to hold the course.”
Johnson’s main challenge will be to turn an adversarial trial of his individual decisions into a seminar on the nature and use of political power and governance at a time when he was forced to mediate an ever-changing evidence base and ministers, officials and scientists with strong but contradictory views.
Johnson believes that “the majority of decision-making came to his desk — the system referred a lot of things up to him” and that only he could make decisions between the scientists, Hancock and Michael Gove, who were pressing for lockdown, and Sunak, then the chancellor, who was advocating keeping the economy open — a position echoed with increasing vehemence by Conservative MPs by the autumn of 2020. Johnson is likely to claim that his views changed as the advice and the evidence kept changing.
A senior Tory sympathetic to Johnson said: “He was the only one who saw the entire system from the bird’s-eye view. He was the one guy who was in charge of making the trade-offs between those differing views. A lot of the time he had imperfect information and it was constantly changing.”
Johnson can request documents to be placed on the screens in the inquiry, which will give him the ability to move on to terrain where he has a point to make.
So far, it has appeared as if the inquiry believes the scientists were consistent and blameless, while the politicians were too consumed by their own infighting to mount a timely response. Vallance said it was “hard work” to get Johnson to understand the science. “He did struggle with some of the concepts and we did need to repeat them often.” In his diary, Vallance said Johnson was “bamboozled” by graphs and data and that watching him “get his head round stats is awful”.
But Johnson’s position is that both Vallance and Whitty were arguing throughout March 2020 that the public would not tolerate a tough lockdown for long due to “behavioural fatigue” and that it had to be timed correctly.
“The scientists changed their views on herd immunity, they changed their views about whether the public would stomach a lockdown, they changed their views on masks, they changed their view on schools and they thought it would take two years to get a vaccine,” said one senior Tory. “Ministers felt they needed to take action even when the scientists were not sure what it should be.”
Johnson will also have to defend the way he makes decisions: he has been accused of adopting contradictory views even within the same meeting. A cabinet minister in Johnson’s time said: “He likes to stage an argument in front of him so he can hear the different sides. He plays devil’s advocate a lot.”
Another who has worked closely with him said: “He says things in a colourful way, often so that he can test the views of his advisers and see exactly where they are coming from. The quickest way to do this is to push the limits.” Dominic Raab, his former deputy, touched on this last week, calling Johnson’s way of arranging an argument as “Hegelian” — listening to two fundamentally different sides.
The former prime minister has already issued an apology for the deaths of so many and is likely to find an opportunity to say something similar to the inquiry, as Gove did last week.
But Johnson will also argue vociferously that he does deserve credit for bringing Britain more quickly out of lockdown than a lot of western countries, for resisting the noisy calls from the health establishment and the Labour Party to return to restrictions in the winter of 2021-22, and for putting the full force of his office behind the vaccine development programme. “He feels he did lead that and drive that through,” a friend said. “That was well suited to his campaigning style of politics. There wasn’t anyone better suited to pushing that through.”
Johnson will also defend the UK’s overall performance which put the country “well down the global league table of excess mortality”. A friend said: “It didn’t always look like that. The NHS didn’t collapse like it did in other countries, where they were burning bodies in the streets.”
Offering advice for the future, Johnson is expected to argue that criticism of “government by WhatsApp” is naive and that Whitehall has not caught up with the way people communicate. He will suggest that there should be a secure government messaging system, which would preserve such communications for the national archives, similar to one operating in the White House. Similar systems allow the legal profession and City dealers to exchange documents securely in a way that is visible to a regulator.
Johnson will also argue that, in a future health emergency, decisions should be taken on a national level, with the UK as a “single epidemiological unit”, rather than leaving Scotland and Wales to set their own lockdown regimes. Hancock echoed this in his evidence when he said: “The virus did not respect borders.” Most Tory ministers complained that Nicola Sturgeon leaked details of national decisions made and, in their minds, deliberately enforced tougher rules in Scotland than in England in a bid to embarrass the government in London.
One cabinet minister said: “The interesting thing is that people in Scotland locked themselves down harder than anywhere to start with. But the evidence from mobile phone and car movements shows that they were also the first to start ignoring the restrictions of their own government.”
Among the other lessons Johnson has been considering is the need for improvements in public health and a realisation that the next crisis might have a very different fatality profile. It was a quirk of fate and biology that the virus did not kill lots of children or 20 to 30-year-olds and that, apart from long Covid, it was not permanently disabling.
His team knows that Johnson’s reputation rests not just on the substance of what he says, but in how he handles himself under fire. The last time he had to account for his behaviour, before the privileges committee in parliament, it did not end well. Johnson was fairly well prepped but overly combative and the committee found he had lied to the Commons, a decision that precipitated his resignation from parliament in June.
Friends hope Johnson can remain calm, but one observed: “I’m hoping he will be less combative. Two whole days will be exhausting. I hope he can hold it together.”
