Boris Johnson.
Credit: Reuters Photo
London, Dec 6 (PTI) Britain’s former prime minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday said he is “deeply sorry” for the pain and the loss caused by Covid-19 as he gave his evidence to the ongoing official public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic which hit the country in early 2020.
Johnson, who was in charge as the prime minister of the day, admitted he should have “twigged” the widespread health impact of coronavirus but insisted he had to take “very, very difficult decisions” as the crisis was fast unfolding. Inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett, who has been hearing evidence in London since June, had to get a protester removed from the room as they held up a poster reading: 'The dead can't hear your apologies”.
“I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering of those victims and their families,” said Johnson, after swearing on the ‘Bible’ for his evidence."
“I do hope that this inquiry will help to get the answers to the very difficult questions that those victims and those families are rightly asking so that we can protect ourselves better, help each other to protect ourselves better and prevent further suffering,” he said.
The former PM was reminded by barrister Hugo Keith of the more than 230,000 Covid-linked deaths in the country as a “shocking figure and a terrible loss of life”. Johnson acknowledged that was the “core of the tragedy” and that “inevitably...we may have made mistakes”.
“The tragedy is that we were operating on a fallacious, inductive logic about previous reasonable worst case scenarios, and this one and this was the one where I am afraid the worst predictions turned out to be correct,” he told the inquiry.
“I think we were doing the best we could at the time, given what we knew, given the information we had at the time, I think we were doing our level best. Were there things that we should have done differently? Unquestionably,” he said.
He revealed that the government “underestimated the scale and pace of the challenge”, thinking the peak of the virus would come in May or June 2020. Johnson also said he took responsibility for the speed of the government's response to the pandemic, the lockdown decisions and their timelines.
His evidence is expected to last for two days and follows the evidence of his Cabinet colleagues from the time, former health secretary Matt Hancock and levelling up secretary Michael Gove. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor of the exchequer at the time, is expected to give his evidence in the coming weeks.