UK Ex-PM Boris Johnson Hits Back at ‘Incoherent’ Covid Inquiry Report

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Saturday dismissed a damning inquiry report on his government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic as “hopelessly incoherent”, hitting back in a social media post and an article for the Daily Mail.

“More than three years after the end of the pandemic, they are still wrangling about what went wrong,” Johnson, 61, wrote, days after the inquiry criticised his administration’s “chaotic” response that it said cost thousands of lives.

The inquiry, led by retired judge Heather Hallett, concluded that Johnson’s government “lacked urgency” in the early phase of the outbreak and imposed the first national lockdown “too late”. The UK, which shut down later than most of Europe, went on to record more than 128,500 Covid-19 deaths by mid-July 2021—one of the continent’s worst tolls.

Bereaved families renewed demands on Friday for Johnson to lose all privileges afforded to former prime ministers. Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK accused him of committing “one of the gravest betrayals of the British public in modern history.”

In his article, Johnson said he remained “full of regret” for the government’s mistakes and offered sympathy to those who suffered, insisting that everyone involved had done their “level best… to save lives” during extraordinary circumstances. Johnson himself set up the independent inquiry in 2021.

But he attacked the inquiry’s second report, published Thursday, as “muddled” and “incoherent”, including for describing lockdowns as both necessary and devastating. He said it had “failed” to answer key questions: “Where did the virus come from — and were the lockdowns worth the terrible price we paid?”

Johnson argued that imposing restrictions earlier than late March 2020 would have meant contradicting the scientific advice at the time, which warned against moving “too early” and risking the loss of public compliance.