BRITAIN’S top civil servant gave a damning verdict today on former PM Boris Johnson and his government’s “brutal and useless” handling of the Covid pandemic.

Mark Sedwill, who was cabinet secretary at the start of the pandemic, also told the Covid inquiry that then-health secretary Matt Hancock could not be trusted.

He said that Mr Johnson “would have been under no illusions” that his view was that Mr Hancock, who repeatedly “overpromised,” should be sacked.

Mr Sedwill further agreed with previous evidence that Mr Johnson had been highly inconsistent in his opinions, switching sides in arguments regularly.

He did not argue with a diary entry made by chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance in August 2020, claiming that he had said “this administration is brutal and useless.”

“I don’t doubt Sir Patrick’s memory,” Mr Sedwill told the inquiry when questioned.

He also confirmed that he had “the bite marks” when read extracts from messages by Simon Case, then the head civil servant at No 10, who wrote: “It is like taming wild animals.

“Nothing in my past experience has prepared me for this madness. The PM and the people he chooses to surround himself with are basically feral.”

Mr Sedwill told Mr Case, in another message revealed to the inquiry, that “Hancock is so far up BJ’s [Boris Johnson’s] arse his ankles are brown.”

The former cabinet secretary also had to apologise for having called for “chicken pox” parties to speed up immunity to the virus early in the pandemic.

Claiming he wanted to reach herd immunity, he said: “I do understand the distress that must have caused and I apologise for that.”

The inquiry also learned today that, ironically, Boris Johnson had urged “tougher enforcement and bigger fines” for Covid rule breaches in August 2020, some time before he was himself fined for breaking restrictions while partying in Downing Street.

The inquiry is shining an unflattering light not just on Mr Johnson’s No 10 but on then-chancellor Rishi Sunak.

It has been told that he repeatedly joined the then-prime minister in pushing against a second lockdown in autumn 2020, after his disastrous “Eat Out to Help Out” subsidised restaurant meals scheme.

Chief medical officer Chris Whitty called Mr Sunak’s scheme “eat out to help out the virus.”

Mr Sunak used “spurious” arguments driven by Treasury concerns to argue against a lockdown, and was dubbed “Dr Death, the Chancellor” by another leading government scientific adviser.