WE did not need a public inquiry to learn that Britain was miserably misgoverned during the Covid pandemic.
The delayed lockdowns, the failure to protect care-home residents, the shortages of protective equipment, the corrupt contracting process, the crony-managed test-and-trace fiasco and — above all — the mountainous death toll all tell their own story.
The only undoubted success in the whole crisis — the vaccination programme — owed little to the government and much more to scientific brilliance and the NHS’s integrated public-sector delivery structure, with Tory peers and donors out of the way for once.
Nevertheless, the probe being headed by Heather Hallett still manages to shock. Testimony from inside Downing Street has revealed just how badly the country was let down.
Boris Johnson was perhaps always going to come up short on scientific understanding and could plead that Covid was an unprecedented event for which no-one was fully prepared.
But he can never be forgiven his subsequent conduct. His callous discounting of the lives of the elderly, when allied to what we know of his reckless partying throughout, portrays a premier devoid of scruple or moral orientation.
Macho posturing replaced sober judgement at every stage — and Johnson paid far less heed to scientific and medical advice than to the opinions of the Daily Telegraph’s coven of Neanderthal pundits.
Johnson’s spin doctor Lee Cain told the inquiry that Covid was a crisis which did not match the former prime minister’s “skill set.” What sort of drama would dovetail with the attributes of a corrupt, mendacious and narcissistic buffoon, one might ask?
Unable to take decisions or to stick to them once made, Johnson’s unsuitability for the office he held, never exactly a secret, was a shortcoming for which thousands paid with their lives.
Matt Hancock, Johnson’s health secretary, has emerged no better. That he was more of a hit on I’m A Celebrity subsequent to his political disgrace than he ever was in cabinet speaks for itself.
According to top civil servants, Hancock’s special contribution was saying things that were not true. He repeatedly misled colleagues as to the state of the country’s preparedness while obsessing over his media performances.
The present Prime Minister’s reputation should take a battering too. Rishi Sunak was content to see people die in order to keep the economy open according to diary entries by top science adviser Patrick Vallance. And he sought no expert advice before rushing ahead with his reckless “eat out to help out” scheme in the summer of 2020.
As for Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s private political Svengali, his main work at the time and since appears to have been blaming everyone else for everything going wrong, using language that would secure immediate dismissal in many workplaces.
Cummings contributed mightily to a toxic environment which made clear thinking and efficient decision-making all but impossible. And as his dash to get his eyes tested in Barnard Castle proved, he was no more a respecter of the rules than his delinquent boss.
It will doubtless be years before the inquiry reaches any conclusions. The guilty are already moving on to greener pastures. Johnson may even finish the book on Shakespeare which so distracted him from governing at the start of the pandemic.
But the public need not wait to reach its verdict. The unfitness of the Conservative Party to rule has been savagely displayed through its conduct of the biggest health crisis in a century or more.
Bereaved families above all deserve an explanation, whenever it arrives. But for the mass of the electorate, the response to Johnson, Cummings and gang will come at the ballot box.
