‘Keep your apology!’ The day Boris got a mauling… from the public

By arriving three hours early, and under the cover of darkness, the former prime minister had hoped to avoid confrontation at the Covid inquiry. But it was as soon as he tried to say he was sorry that things slipped out of his control, writes Joe Murphy

As Boris Johnson started giving evidence to the Covid inquiry, four protesters – Kirsten Hackman, Michelle Rumball, Kathryn Butcher and Fran Hall – seized their moment (Jordan Pettitt/PA) (PA Wire)

Boris Johnson looked tired. The blond mop had been teased into place, but it was thinner, with pink gaps at the crown where the follicles were threadbare. His face red blotches on a dry canvas of dull grey.

At a guess, the ex-prime minister didn’t get much sleep before his dawn run to the hearing rooms in Westbourne Terrace. He slipped past a handful of hacks and protesters at 7am, in near darkness, and spent three hours hiding in a witness room no bigger than one of the No 10 loos. Inquiries are great levellers.

It didn’t start well. Lady Hallett, the chair, delivered a grumpy statement about advance leaks of Boris’s evidence. A waste of breath. A PM who routinely leaked announcements and tried to unlawfully suspend parliament was not going to start feeling guilty about a couple of Sunday briefings. Johnson stared blankly. Not bothered.

Hugo Keith, the inquiry KC, looked as if he had been up for an early run before slipping into his immaculate blue suit, Glowhite shirt and a dandyish pink tie. “State your name,” he ordered.

Johnson began with ever-so-’umble gratitude for this chance to explain that little matter of 220,000 excess deaths. Four people in the public area silently rose, holding signs reading: “Apologise”. Lady Hallett chucked them out. The ex-PM, still thinking he could control events, started jawing about how “I do understand the feelings of the victims and their families”, but one of the ejectees yelled from the doorway: “Keep your apology!”

Even so, Johnson was still ebullient enough to try a little tease of Mr Keith. “May I say, as the person who set up the inquiry, how grateful I am for what you’re doing.” The KC gazed coldly from under his widow’s peak: attack dog squaring up to Big Dog.

Did Johnson accept that saving lives was his “preeminent duty”? “It’s what we were trying to prevent.” Did he accept “full and rigorous scrutiny”? “Of course!” This balletic exchange was warm-up to the curious disappearance of some 5,000 WhatsApp messages from Johnson’s old phone.

Johnson insisted he hadn’t dared touch the handset in case he erased everything, and sent the device to experts to analyse. Yet someone, said Keith curiously, appeared to have carried out a factory reset – was it him? Johnson’s eyes bulged: “I don’t remember any such thing.”

So what mistakes had he made? Johnson muttered about different messages from Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish executive. Keith was incredulous. “I didn’t say it was the primary mistake,” Johnson skittered, getting rattled. Keith asked mildly what he was actually apologising for then? Despite 6,000 pages of crib sheets reportedly handed to Johnson by his legal team, he had no answer and instead threw up a thick, oily cloud of bluster to hide behind. “I would struggle to itemise them all for you in a hierarchy,” he mumbled.

The lead counsel’s skill was to draw Johnson out of his comfort zone with the most delicate threads of questioning, never tugging too hard. When he wanted Johnson to talk himself into trouble, he locked eyes hypnotically and made tiny nods of encouragement. If Johnson sidestepped a trapdoor, Keith turned back to his papers, already devising the next snare.

Slowly, the tension ratcheted up. On the UK death toll, Keith demolished Johnson’s claim that it was way down the league table. “In western Europe,” the KC recalled icily, the UK was second worst. “The statistics vary,” insisted Johnson, who was showing signs of being bewildered, rattled, and not a little incoherent. When he tried to boast about his success in rolling out a vaccine, there was such a loud groan from the public gallery that Lady Hallett had to tell them off.

Keith fell foul of the chair briefly. “I think you need to make the questions a bit more specific, Mr Keith,” she chided. Her KC paused briefly from the blow. But he soon forced Johnson to confirm he didn’t bother reading minutes of Sage, the independent scientists' group that was getting alarmed in February 2020, when the Cobra emergency committee met five times without the PM turning up.

The lead counsel repeatedly referred to events at Cobras “that you did not attend”, buttering the words with a layer of disgust. It was time for a break. “You’re a murderer,” a woman yelled on her way out. Later, Johnson rashly tried to bite back when Keith remarked “nobody is suggesting you had your feet up”. “Apart from you,” snapped Johnson, quickly adding: “I take it back, unreservedly.”

As questions focused on the government’s failure to call lockdown earlier, Johnson started to tire. His defence was that “the Whitehall mind” was slow to wake up, while he was “agnostic”. A key report said it might just be like “a mild flu pandemic”, or maybe 550,000 deaths. If only he had known, “the panic level would have been higher”.

A personal aside: in January 2020, at least one senior cabinet minister from the Cameron era was saying privately that, based on past Whitehall prepping, any epidemic was likely to be catastrophic. Yet Johnson’s evidence is that, two months later, scientists were divided, advisers uncertain, so how could it be his fault? It was all down, he argued, to “a fallacious inductive logic”.

Keith, upping the pressure, claimed Johnson, when facing “a near-existential crisis”, had “warned of the dangers of overreaction”. “No, no, no, no,” yelped Johnson, “that’s…” He stopped himself just in time to avoid a Cummingsism. Keith pressed again about No 10’s inaction in the face of “a wall of death”.

Finally, Johnson cracked: his voice caught, he took a big, noisy gulp of air. “We have to be realistic about 2020,” he appealed, “that tragic, tragic year.” From my seat, he appeared to be welling up.

No smoking guns yet, but it’s going to be a long couple of days for Boris Johnson.