Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak Got the Big Calls Wrong on Covid, Say Voters

As more damning revelations emerge from the Covid Inquiry, an exclusive poll finds voters think the Government took a 'negligent' and 'irresponsible' approach to the pandemic

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak got the big calls wrong during the Covid pandemic, according to an exclusive new poll for the Byline Supplement, which finds most voters believe the Government took a “negligent” and “irresponsible” approach to preserving life.

As yet more damning revelations about Johnson’s handling of the pandemic continue to emerge from the Covid Inquiry, the poll conducted by pollsters We Think found that:

• 60% say the Government handled the pandemic badly

• 61% believe Johnson locked the country down too late

• 56% say his approach to the pandemic was “negligent”

• 52% say the Government handled the pandemic worse than other comparable nations

Although most of the focus at this week’s Inquiry hearings was on the former Prime Minister, our poll also found voters have a negative view of Sunak’s own role too.

According to our poll most voters now believe that Sunak’s decision as Chancellor to subsidise meals out during the summer of 2020, and prior to the creation of a vaccine, was “irresponsible”.

56% said the policy was irresponsible, compared to 44% who disagreed.

The Covid Inquiry this week heard that the policy led to the former Chancellor being branded “Doctor Death” by one leading Government scientist.

Professor Dame Angela McLean made the comment in a WhatsApp exchange with her colleague Professor John Edmunds, who later told the Inquiry that he was still “angry” about the policy.

"It was one thing to take your foot off the brake - but another to put your foot on the accelerator”, he said.

Revelations from the hearings may have added to a broader lack of trust in the competence of the Government, our poll suggests.

According to We Think’s survey, 65% of voters say they are not confident that the Government would be properly prepared for another global pandemic.

---

Johnson’s Covid Catastrophe

The Covid Inquiry this week heard from multiple officials about the apparently negligent approach taken by Johnson’s Government.

Over the course of multiple days we heard how Johnson initially dismissed the coming pandemic and refused even to leave his study in order to chair emergency meetings about it. So unfazed was Johnson by the potential for mass deaths among his citizens, that in early February he decided to take a ten-day holiday, during which there are no records of him communicating with his officials about the catastrophic wave of infections heading for our shores.

In fact, although this was denied at the time, newly released messages show that Johnson was content to allow the virus to do its worst, saying that it should simply be allowed to “let rip” through the population, even if it resulted in large numbers of deaths.

In records released by the Inquiry, officials recalled that Johnson believed that the country was being “pathetic” about Covid and should just have “a cold shower” and get over it. In one exchange he is recorded as sympathising with the idea that the virus was simply “nature’s way of dealing with old people”.

Apparently relaxed about the idea of hundreds of thousands of potential deaths, Johnson attempted to retro-fit the theory of ‘herd immunity’ in order to justify it. Under this theory, the virus would be allowed to rip through communities before eventually reaching such a level that a natural immunity would arise that would protect the population from a second wave.

There were three obvious problems with this theory. The first was that nobody knew at that time how much immunity would actually be created by the virus and how long it would last. The second was that even if it did create lasting immunity, the number of infections required for that to happen would be so large that there would also be a truly unprecedented number of deaths. The third and related problem was that a wave that large would also totally overwhelm the NHS and cause even more deaths through people being unable to receive treatment for other conditions.

Yet far from seeing this as a criminally negligent plan, Johnson instead viewed it as heroic.

In a speech in February 2020 he compared his plan to that of Clark Kent ripping off his spectacles and emerging as a superhero to save the world from the shackles of lockdowns.

“Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other,” Johnson boasted.

At this time Johnson openly mocked the responses of other nations to the crisis. According to the former Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara, Johnson took an “unbelievably bullish, we’re great at everything” attitude to the pandemic, which involved “laughing at the Italians” for locking down their country. Meanwhile, basic scientific concepts such as infection rates had to be repeatedly explained to he Prime Minister, who failed to grasp them, MacNamara confirmed.

Yet despite the obviously disastrous impact of his plan, and his inability to grasp the basic science, almost nobody inside Government appears to have stopped to work out whether it was in any way feasible. As one of Johnson’s senior aides told the Inquiry this week: “One of the things we were missing in early March [2020] was a simple ‘here’s the path of the infection and here is NHS capacity’ and putting those two lines together.”

So to put that into context, the UK Government had a deliberate plan of allowing mass infections of a deadly virus and nobody inside Downing Street thought to construct a simple chart to work out whether the country’s health service could actually cope.

Although led by Johnson, this culture of negligence extended well beyond him. In one record released by the Inquiry, the former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill is recorded as advising the Prime Minister to instruct the public to hold “chicken pox parties” in which they actively sought to catch Covid from each other. In other records the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is referred to as “Dr Death” due to his plan to encourage people to attend restaurants during the pandemic, despite the evidence of the increase in infections it would cause. Far from seeking to stop this deadly virus in its tracks, the entire machinery of the British state appeared focused on ensuring its survival and spread.

Throughout, these newly-released records also demonstrate that Johnson’s main concern was not the citizens he was elected to protect, but his former employers in the newspaper industry. In evidence submitted by his former communications chief Lee Cain, he records how Johnson was dissuaded from taking tougher measures against the virus, including a so-called ‘circuit-breaker lockdown’ due to opposition from his former employers at the Daily Telegraph.

In one excerpt Cain recalls how “[Johnson] expressed significant concern, stating our policies were causing us to lose the backing of generally supportive elements of the media,” noting that this was triggered by the Telegraph featuring a favourable interview with the leader of the opposition. According to some estimates, these delays resulted in tens of thousands of additional deaths from the virus.

Johnson’s close relationship with the media also caused “specific concerns” in Downing Street about possible illegal motivations, according to his close adviser Dominic Cummings. Cummings told the Inquiry that he feared there was a “corrupt” relationship between the Prime Minister, the Evening Standard newspaper and its then editor George Osborne. The owner of that paper, Evgeny Lebedev, was famously handed a peerage by Johnson despite concerns from the security services about his relationship with his father Alexander, who is a former KGB agent.

In the days before the first Covid lockdown, Johnson met twice with Lebedev in meetings for which no minutes were recorded. Cummings told the Inquiry that officials feared money had been corruptly “funnelled” to Lebedev’s paper by the Prime Minister. Although not questioned about this further, this appears to reference a Government scheme first reported on by Byline Times, in which unspecified amounts of subsidies were handed to leading newspapers during the pandemic.

The Inquiry has also revealed details of what is described as a “toxic” and “misogynistic” culture inside Downing Street. Pushed on his own role in this culture, Cummings strongly denied it, before being shown messages in which he referred to a senior woman as a Stiletto-wielding “c***” who he wished to stick in handcuffs and drag from the building.