Government accused of ‘rewriting history’ after No 10 claim Sunday Times report on failings full of ‘falsehoods and errors’

The editor of the eminent medical journal The Lancet has accused the government of “rewriting history” after Downing Street issued a furious and detailed rebuttal of a newspaper article accusing Boris Johnson and his administration of dragging their feet in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

The explosive article by the Sunday Times Insight team dominated debate on the virus crisis over the weekend with a claim that the Johnson administration “just watched” as the death toll mounted in China in January and February and “missed the boat” on securing sufficient supplies of tests and personal protective equipment (PPE).

But in a 2,127-word blogpost, No 10 accused the paper of “falsehoods and errors” and claimed that its article “actively misrepresents the enormous amount of work which was going on in government at the earliest stages of the coronavirus outbreak”.

The government’s pugnacious response came just hours after the Cabinet Office published a detailed denial of what it said were “multiple inaccurate and misleading claims” in a Financial Times article about problems with the procurement of ventilators.

The move suggests deep concern at the centre of government over the danger of losing control of the narrative about its handling of the crisis.

The government statement quoted a tweet from Lancet editor Richard Horton on 23 January urging “caution” on suggestions that a killer virus was coming as proof that there was no scientific consensus at that point that coronavirus was a threat.

But Mr Horton accused the government of “deliberately rewriting history in its ongoing Covid-19 disinformation campaign”.

He said his message related to the need for caution in media reporting and was “followed by a series of tweets drawing attention to the dangers of this new disease”.

Mr Horton said he had drawn attention to Lancet publications on the severity and “pandemic potential” of Covid-19, the danger of human-to-human transmission and the need for intensive care treatment, and the next day had asked why there was no discussion underway of the “urgent clinical challenge” of responding.

By 26 January, he said he was tweeting that the “needle is moving towards the affirmative” on the need for declaring an international public health emergency.

“The fact is that ministers and scientific advisers failed to understand what was happening in China, despite evidence,” said Mr Horton.

Entitled “Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster”, the Sunday Times article said the prime minister had “skipped” five meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee to discuss the outbreak, instead concentrating on Brexit and the cabinet reshuffle and spending a fortnight with fiancee Carrie Symonds at countryside retreat Chevening.

And it claimed that No 10 “played down the looming threat” from coronavirus and displayed an “almost nonchalant attitude” for more than a month.

An unnamed “senior adviser to Downing Street” was quoted as singling out Mr Johnson for criticism, saying: “There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there. And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends... There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

The government rebuttal, credited to an unnamed spokesman, insisted that Mr Johnson had been “at the helm of the response to this, providing leadership during this hugely challenging period for the whole nation”.

The tone of the statement was much more aggressive than that used by the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove in TV appearances on Sunday, when he described the article as “off beam”.

It said: “The government has been working day and night to battle against coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed at all times to protect our NHS and save lives.

“Our response has ensured that the NHS has been given all the support it needs to ensure everyone requiring treatment has received it, as well as providing protection to businesses and reassurance to workers.”

The government statement was shared widely on social media by Conservative MPs including health secretary Matt Hancock, who said: “We’ve been working day and night to battle against coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed at all times to protect our NHS and save lives.” Former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson tweeted: “I don’t think I can remember such a detailed, point by point rebuttal from HMG on a news story, ever.

The statement insisted it was “entirely normal and proper” for meetings of the Cobra committee to be chaired by a secretary of state rather than the prime minister.

It said the Sunday Times was wrong to suggest the threat was “brushed aside” at the committee’s first meeting on the outbreak in January, insisting Mr Hancock had already raised the issue with the PM and instituted daily coronavirus meetings by this point.

The official risk level was set at “low” in January in line with medical advice, said the statement. And it added: “The World Health Organisation did not formally declare that coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) until 30 January, and only characterised it as a global pandemic more than a month later, on 11 March. The UK was taking action and working to improve its preparedness from early January.”

In reference to the report that the UK sent 279,000 items of protective equipment to China earlier this year, the government spokesman said: “The equipment was not from the pandemic stockpile.

“We provided this equipment to China at the height of their need and China has since reciprocated our donation many times over. Between 2 April and 15 April we have received over 12 million pieces of PPE in the UK from China.”

Rejecting the suggestion that Downing Street had taken a nonchalant approach in February, it said that “extensive and detailed work” was going on in government at this time. It insisted that the government had been “extremely proactive” in implementing lessons learnt from a 2016 planning exercise, codenamed Cygnus, which highlighted the need for stockpiles of PPE and intensive care ventilators.

Speaking ahead of the government’s rebuttal, shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said there were “serious questions” for the prime minister to answer.

“We know that serious mistakes have been made, we know that our frontline NHS staff don’t have the PPE, that they’ve been told this weekend that they won’t necessarily have the gowns which are vital to keep them safe,” said Mr Ashworth. “We know that our testing capacity is not at the level that is needed.

“We know that the ventilators that many hospitals have received are the wrong types of ventilators and there are big questions as to whether we went into this lockdown too slowly, and now we hear the prime minister missed five meetings at the start of this outbreak. It suggests that early on he was missing in action.”