A public inquiry released on Thursday slammed the former UK government’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic as “too little, too late”, and said the failure to lock down the country earlier “led to an unacceptable loss of life”.
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The inquiry, chaired by Heather Hallett, found that chaos at the heart of government and a failure to take Covid-19 seriously potentially cost 23,000 lives in the first wave of the pandemic.
Hallett’s report on the government response to Covid-19 found that the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, presided over a “toxic” culture in Downing Street and regularly changed his mind, while cabinet members as well as key scientists all failed to act with the urgency needed to tackle the virus.
The report accused Johnson of being too “optimistic” in his outlook in the early months of 2020. And she said his special adviser, Dominic Cummings, used “offensive, sexualised and misogynistic” language as he “poisoned” the atmosphere at the heart of the government.
Hallett said Johnson had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the virus after it emerged at the start of 2020, believing it would amount to nothing and was distracted by other government business, with Britain at the time bogged down in talks over its departure from the European Union.
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“Mr Johnson should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response,” the report said.
When he appeared before the committee in 2023, Johnson said his government had been too complacent and had “vastly underestimated” the risks, saying he understood the public’s anger.