Can Boris Johnson remain calm during the UK Covid inquiry?

Boris Johnson, the ousted prime minister who led Britain through the pandemic, will testify before an official inquiry Wednesday, giving his first detailed public account of how he grappled with a raging virus that divided his government and sowed the seeds of his political downfall and almost killed him.

Mr Johnson, who left Parliament earlier this year after it emerged he had deliberately misled lawmakers over a series of drunken parties who broke lockdown rules will face tough questions: should he have acted faster in imposing a lockdown in March 2020? Has he taken the coronavirus seriously enough? Did he even understand the basic facts about its spread?

He can point to some real victories: Britain’s vaccine rollout in early 2021 was one of the fastest of any major country. His decision to reopen the British economy later that year – widely criticized in advance due to a spike in Covid cases – was vindicated when other countries followed suit.

But on balance, Mr. Johnson’s performance has been unstable, erratic and sometimes even irresponsible, according to several former ministers and aides who have testified in the inquiry since the public hearings began. in June. Some said his chaotic leadership style may even have contributed to the UK’s current Covid-19 death toll rising 230,193.

“We had a prime minister who didn’t know what to do and who was consumed by Brexit,” said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “For me, the lesson is: try to choose leaders who are competent.”

Mr Johnson is the latest political figure to come under scrutiny in the Covid-19 inquiry, an independent, public inquiry into Britain’s response to the pandemic, led by former judge Heather Hallett, which is expected to last until 2026.

One of the most charismatic communicators in British politics, Mr Johnson is known for his clever phrasing, humorous asides and sunny optimism. But none of these qualities are likely to help him during two days of forensic interrogation, while his command of details – never a strong point – and his response to potentially hostile interrogations could be crucial.

“Can he maintain a serious, contrite, and vaguely reflective attitude, or does he become irritated and irritated?” asked Jill Rutter, a former British civil servant and senior research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, a research institute in London. “Is he degenerating into making jokes?”

Mr Johnson has had time to prepare for the hearing, and his allies have leaked details of his prepared testimony to British newspapers. He may have learned lessons from his March appearance before a parliamentary committee investigating whether he lied to lawmakers about Downing Street’s lockdown-breaking parties. After a strong start he became irritable and defensive, and failed to impress the committee, whose damning report led to his leaving Parliament.

This time, Mr Johnson will have to deal with some people whose relatives have died during the pandemic (he himself was treated in an intensive care unit during a severe bout of Covid-19 in April 2020).

“For someone who loves playing the joker, being the center of attention and romping around, I think this is probably the least ideal setting you can imagine,” Ms. Rutter said.

Although Mr Johnson is the inquiry’s key witness to date, the hearings have generally been no shortage of drama, not least due to the release of a large number of text messages between government officials, which have left lawyers with a lot of dust. have delivered. for difficult questions.

Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former chief adviser, apologized at the inquiry into WhatsApp messages in which he described senior officials using a series of profanities, often scatological in nature. His contempt for a female colleague led to accusations that he had encouraged an atmosphere of misogyny in Downing Street, which Mr Cummings denied. He insisted that he had been ‘much ruder about men’.

To be sure, Mr Cummings has leveled a number of serious accusations against Mr Johnson, including that he was absent during the early days of the pandemic because he was working on a book about Shakespeare that he owed his publisher (Mr Johnson denies that).

He said the Prime Minister downplayed the seriousness of the virus by predicting it would be “like swine flu”, and his views changed direction like a faulty shopping cart.

And the government’s chief scientist, Patrick Vallance, wrote in his diary that Mr Johnson was influenced by the view of some in his Conservative Party that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”

Mr Cummings’ credibility as a witness was not helped by the fact that he traveled in breach of lockdown rules and subsequently had a major row with Mr Johnson, who sacked him. Still, his testimony that the government’s first instinct was to pursue a policy of “herd immunity” — allowing the virus to spread unchecked through the population so people could build up natural immunity — was powerful.

Other witnesses have portrayed Downing Street as an undisciplined workplace led by an obstinate prime minister who struggled to make and stick to decisions. According to a senior aide, Mr Johnson at one point suggested he should be injected with the virus on live television to demonstrate it was not a threat.

For all the attention the investigation has attracted, some experts say the focus on personalities and infighting has so far generated more heat than light. They wonder whether this will teach Britain the right lessons to respond more effectively to the next pandemic, or whether it will remain an exercise in blame-shifting and blame-shifting.

In part, that’s a function of timing. Although the pandemic is no longer the country’s top political issue, the hearings are taking place less than a year before the likely general election. Unlike in the United States, where Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democrat, defeated Republican incumbent President Donald J. Trump in 2020, in part because of his handling of Covid, in Britain the Conservative Party remains in power.

This means that some ministers yet to be questioned, notably Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will have to face the voters and therefore be less likely to admit any wrongdoing.

“Everyone is quite defensive about why it wasn’t their fault,” said Professor Sridhar. “But this was not an individual failure. It was a system error.”

Mr Sunak, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the pandemic, is expected to testify soon. He might be helped if Mr. Johnson shows up first. But the stakes are high because Mr Sunak’s hold on the Tory Party is tenuous, trailing badly behind the opposition Labor Party in the opinion polls.

One of Mr Sunak’s policies will almost certainly come up for debate: the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, an August 2020 initiative that lured Britons back to restaurants by subsidizing their meals. The policy may have exposed more people to infections, contributing to a second wave that winter. The inquiry was told that Britain’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, called it ‘Eat out to help the virus’ in his diary.

“You get to see the spectacle of a serving prime minister being subjected to interrogations,” Ms Rutter said. “It’s clearly something he would much rather not have.”