VAUGHAN GETHING’S contribution to the Cardiff hearing of the UK Covid Inquiry was condemned as “a word salad of waffle” by a bereaved campaigner today.

The inquiry opened with questions relating to Mr Gething’s WhatsApp messages from the pandemic period, when he was Wales’s health minister, which have been deleted.

He described their deletion as a “real embarrassment” and said he had spoken with the IT team at the Senedd on multiple occasions to attempt to get them back.

Now Labour’s Minister for the Economy of Wales and running to be the country’s next first minister, Mr Gething was critical of Boris Johnson’s handling of briefings. The former prime minister had been “scatty, incoherent and rambling” at Cobra meetings and Mr Gething expressed frustration that papers for some meetings were shared with the devolved administrations only 15 to 20 minutes before they started.

Mr Gething accepted that the Welsh government was not as prepared for a pandemic as it had thought.

“The preparation we thought we had didn’t stand up as well as we thought it would in those early weeks,” he said.

Previous hearings heard that the Welsh government had found out it would be in charge of its own pandemic response just days before the first lockdown.

Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees, of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru, said: “We all have to keep remembering that we are here today because thousands of people died in Wales because of these decisions.

“Today [Mr Gething’s] responses were a word salad of waffle. In my opinion, he was not qualified to be health minister for Wales.

“He was meant to be in charge of protecting our loved ones and he just didn’t, and my dad did not stand a chance, along with all of our other loved ones.”