Johnson at the Covid Inquiry – what happened this morning

Boris Johnson doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. If there is anything that will come out of Johnson’s disastrous first morning of testimony to the Covid inquiry, it is that it will spell the final death knell of any suggestion that behind-the-scenes Johnson is some sort of genius.

The reality of his incomprehension is hard to believe. The inquiry format was never going to play to Johnson’s strengths, but he has spent the last ten days preparing for this showdown and has not so much fallen at the first hurdle as self-immolated. Johnson spent a morning muddling basic concepts, confusing his evidence, and being obviously unaware when he was saying something shocking or incriminating.

To cover his evidence was to be constantly interrupted by public tweets or private WhatsApps pointing out the contradictions or ludicrousness of his evidence. This was not a practiced liar at work – this was instead someone with no idea of what was going on in his government either at the time, or later.

One of the most quietly shocking but most significant admissions of Wednesday’s evidence was Johnson saying he had read “one or two” sets of minutes from SAGE, the scientific advisory committee that was providing the evidence for Covid.

The minutes of those meetings were released to journalists – they were summaries, generally no more than ten pages long, of urgent advice on a crisis. Johnson had apparently been content to have a summary of the summary, from the chief medical officer, instead. That means that many journalists covering today’s inquiry (myself included) have read more of the scientific advice to the government than the prime minister did. That alone should be enough to end a career.

Perhaps Johnson being so indolent that he didn’t do his ministerial red boxes even as a prime minister handling a crisis shouldn’t be a shock. But his memory was terrible time and again. One recurrent theme was the chaos and dysfunction of his administration, and its “toxic” work environment.

At one stage Johnson said every government was like that on the inside – cue repeated public contradictions from officials who have worked in more normal administrations – or that no-one had directly raised that issue with him, a stance which collapsed when after several tries the inquiry’s lawyer Hugo Keith KC managed to get Johnson to realise the WhatsApp he was looking at had, after all, been sent directly to him.

Johnson casually admitted having confused a bad outbreak of seasonal winter flu with a flu pandemic (not seeming to understand the difference even now), and at one stage claimed that because Covid-19 hadn’t been raised at PMQs he couldn’t be expected to pay attention to it politically – even though COBRA meetings on the subject were already taking place, albeit without his attendance.

But it was almost at the very beginning of questioning that Johnson truly told on himself. Indulging in the opportunity to ignore the first question, and instead to deliver an apparently remorseful statement taking full responsibility for the mistakes of his government, Johnson was then asked what those mistakes were.

After a pause that felt like an eternity, Johnson waffled something resembling mild regret about the differences in Covid messaging between England and Scotland. Asked – with reasonable incredulity – if that was the most serious mistake over that period Johnson could identify, the former prime minister once again failed to hit on a single substantive mistake he made. But, he wanted to be clear, whatever they were, he was (after much thought) very sorry about them.

Time and again, the inquiry has seen evidence about how out of his depth Boris Johnson was at the time of the Covid crisis. This morning has been enough to show that we did not know the half of it.