The public inquiry has already started and it is going badly for Boris Johnson

In a similar vein to the Iraq inquiry, the problem seems to be the initial response from the government's scientific advisers, says John Rentoul

There will be an independent inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

We know that there will be an independent inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus, because the prime minister said so in parliament last month: “I do not believe that now, in the middle of combating the pandemic as we are, is the right moment ​to devote huge amounts of official time to an inquiry, but of course we will seek to learn the lessons of the pandemic in the future, and certainly we will have an independent inquiry into what happened.”

Several attempts have already been made to sketch out what the findings of such an inquiry would be. One of the least edifying was a news story about the health secretary from an anonymous source to The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, which said: “Matt Hancock is being blamed in Whitehall for a series of poorly focused Cobra meetings at the start of the pandemic which hampered early attempts to fight the virus.”

More impressive, in my view, was an article in June by Professor Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London, who identified the tentative initial response of the government’s scientific advisers as a potential problem.

Last week he published another study which compared the role of experts before the invasion of Iraq and as the coronavirus infection spread. In both cases, he said, the problem was that when the advice was “welcome”, it was “left unchallenged”. As a member of the Chilcot inquiry, Prof Freedman knows about the problem of expert analysis of intelligence that appeared to confirm what the government already believed, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, Prof Freedman argues, the scientific advisers told the government what it wanted to hear about coronavirus – that closing down the economy too early would only make the problem worse later. He is very much on the “Dominic Cummings was right to sit in on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies meetings” wing of the argument, and contends that one of the government’s failings was that Cummings didn’t do more of it: “Governments need to interrogate advice and make sure that they understand its underlying assumptions and implications. It remains vital to protect the independence of the experts, but to get the best out of their advice early and active political engagement is required rather than an arms‐length relationship.”

Another attempt at a first draft of an inquiry comes in the form of an article today in The Atlantic by Tom McTague, a former colleague of ours at The Independent. This takes as its starting point the UK having the highest rate in Europe of “excess” deaths from all causes – that is, the number of deaths compared with the average of previous years, taking population size and age into account.

This was the measure cited by Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, when the government was under attack for having the highest death toll from coronavirus. He said it wasn’t fair to compare the UK on that crude statistic because different countries have different policies on whether deaths are linked to coronavirus. But now the UK has the worst record on the measure he cited, and people are entitled to demand answers.

McTague considers the possibility that it was just bad luck that the UK was hit so hard, as a densely populated country with a world city as its capital, but then takes it for granted that it was the fault of the government, its advisers, the NHS and the uselessness of Britain generally that, “if almost all countries failed, then Britain failed more than most”. This strikes me as something that feels true to a lot of people, but is just too blanket-negative to be an explanation for the wide variation in death rates between countries and regions.

Most people assume the UK locked down too late (and opened up too early), for example, yet Sweden didn’t lock down at all and had a lower death rate.

Public opinion in Britain – at least, the half that voted Remain, which includes most journalists – has already gravitated to the assumption that the prime minister has handled coronavirus badly, but it is striking that both Freedman and McTague criticise him mainly for failing to challenge the scientific advice on which he relied.

Nor is McTague’s criticism of the NHS – “an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians” – likely to strike much of a chord with a country that heaped praise on health service “heroes”. After all, it was our sentimental attachment to the NHS that contributed to its being “protected” in the early stages of the epidemic, while the care sector was neglected.

The coronavirus deaths in care homes do seem to me to be one part of the response that definitely went wrong, although responsibility for that error is likely to have been diffuse.

When we do eventually get the public inquiry, it is unlikely to come up with a simple account of Boris Johnson’s, or even Britain’s, failure – partly because Boris Johnson will appoint its chair, but more importantly because the truth may be more complex than that. The shadow public inquiry, which is already under way, seems keener to allocate blame than to establish whether or not there is indeed blame to allocate.