With a dawn arrival on Wednesday, Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, avoided many of the bereaved families gathering outside the UK Covid-19 public inquiry venue in west London for his long-awaited appearance.
It did not go down well in the December chill.
“It’s another kick in the teeth,” said Charlotte Lynch, 32, from Kent who was among a crowd of families bearing hundreds of photos of their lost loved ones. “He has come before 7am because he doesn’t want to face us. That’s all I wanted – for him to see my mum’s photo.”
Lynch was clutching a framed picture of Sue Lynch, 67, who died from hospital-acquired Covid in the second wave in March 2021 – after Johnson had faced huge criticism for delaying action to restrict the spread of the new, more virulent variants.
She had not slept all night “because I don’t think we will get what we want – I think he’s going to lie again”.
Laminated photos of dead relatives were strung along the railings, and a van was parked outside the Paddington venue bearing a poster with the faces of 53 people and the words “the bodies did pile high” – a reference to a phrase Johnson is alleged to have used as he argued against further lockdowns in autumn 2020.
The former prime minister’s cross-examination comes 18 months after he announced the statutory public inquiry.
Many of the 7,000 members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group have been waiting for this moment since they worried the government’s response was faulty, in spring 2020. The inquiry is covering many aspects of the response, but the bereaved families were on Wednesday focused on what Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, has called “the stark metric which matters most”: deaths.
Few seemed to have much hope of either closure or revelation from Johnson’s two-day appearance.
“I don’t think Johnson should be taking an oath, I think he should be taking a polygraph,” said Alan Handley, 72, from Staffordshire who lost his wife, Susan, 69, in November 2020. He has been following the inquiry as if it were a full-time job.
His daughter, Victoria Morgan, said of the inquiry revelations so far: “It’s really painful – the constant rubbing of salt into our wounds, confirming what we already know, the lies.”
Louise Brown, who lost her 39-year-old sister, had travelled from Newcastle. She was holding a sign that read: “Johnson partied while people died.” She could not see her sister before her death in February 2021, because she was observing the social distancing restrictions that were being flouted in Downing Street.
“I am just so angry about him,” she said. “I feel like an idiot. Why did I not just go? I’m a healthcare worker so I was following the rules. I am hoping for a sincere apology, but with him, I doubt that’s going to happen.”
Kathryn Butcher, 59, from Wimbledon, had brought a laminated picture of her friend’s son Jake Corser, 15, who died in July 2020, and one of her sister-in-law Myrna Saunders, 56, who died in March 2020.
“There were children that died despite what Johnson says about it being a disease of the elderly,” she said.
To date, Covid-19 has claimed more than 233,000 lives in the UK, 58% of them people aged 80 and above, while fewer than 8% (about 18,000) were among people under 60.
“Today is probably the hardest [day] for me so far because of the [first] late lockdown,” Butcher said. “Had it come when it should have come there’s a chance [Myrna] would not have caught Covid. That was Johnson’s decision. I think today is going to be emotionally hard. I want to know the truth. I want to make sure my family is protected from this happening again.”
Lawyers representing the bereaved families said they had three main questions for Johnson, who resigned as an MP in June after an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament.
They would ask why, despite scientific advice, there was indecision and delay over lockdown which led to more deaths; whether he viewed older people as expendable; and whether he agreed with his former health secretary Matt Hancock that the first lockdown came too late.
Johnson’s team have widely briefed already that he will admit that his “basic confidence that things would turn out alright” was based on the “fallacious logic” that previous health threats such as BSE and Sars had not proved as bad as feared.
He is expected to admit he was too slow to react, and Hancock has already said that locking down sooner would have saved “many, many lives”, but Johnson is expected to argue, at least in his written statement, that the government succeeded in its central aim of preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed by making the “right decisions at the right times”.
Under cross-examination Johnson is likely to be pushed to explain his attitude towards older people. The inquiry has already heard the government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance made a contemporaneous note that Johnson seemed “obsessed with old people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life”.
Johnson has previously denied using the phrase “let the bodies pile high”. But his former chief of staff Dominic Cummings claimed he said it, while his former adviser Lord Udny-Lister told the inquiry Johnson said it in September 2020 in the context of opposing a third national lockdown. Vallance’s diary also recorded on 25 October: “PM meeting – begins to argue for letting it all rip. Saying yes, there will be more casualties, but so be it – ‘they have had a good innings’.”
Johnson’s cross-examination is due to conclude on Thursday afternoon. Charlotte Lynch said she would be back on Thursday at 6.30am to make sure that this time, Johnson would see the photo of her late mother.
