Why the Covid inquiry is unlikely to do much damage to Boris Johnson

On the face of it, the prime minister’s pledge to put the actions of his government, and the devolved administrations, “under the microscope” over its response to Covid is a bold one. Boris Johnson solemnly informed the Commons that there will indeed be “an independent public inquiry on a statutory basis, with full powers under the Inquiries Act of 2005, including the ability to compel the production of all relevant materials, and take oral evidence in public, under oath”.

However encouraging as this sounds, there is plenty of scope for bureaucratic obfuscation and political manoeuvrings before the inquiry begins, let alone concludes. The suspicion must be that, as with many such exercises in the past, it will be a classic establishment job, or, colloquially put, a whitewash.

First, there is the crucial matter of timing. Such inquiries naturally take time, and with such a major job as this it would take two to three years to complete. It would suit the government if it published its conclusions well after the next election. Hence the starting date of “spring” 2022, with some preparations before then (in answer to a query from an alert Keir Starmer). Thus, the report wouldn’t see the light of day before, say, the spring or summer of 2024 or 2025, long after an election now assumed to be held in the summer of 2023 (after the abolition of the Fixed Terms Parliament Act). The public hearings may no doubt be embarrassing, and ministers and advisers such as Dominic Cummings will have to undergo cross-examination by barristers, but they will not be the final “verdict”.

The terms of reference are also yet to be framed. The signs here are not so encouraging, for those looking to see who made the key errors of judgement during the crisis. The aim, according to Johnson, will be to “learn lessons” rather than to allocate responsibility and hold those responsible explicitly to account. Michael Gove and Johnson will draft the remit carefully so that it sounds like an exercise in open government, but in reality it will be designed to cause minimal intrusion into the more visceral debates that took place in official circles. By drawing in the devolved administrations, Whitehall may be seeking to “spread the blame” for mistakes and misjudgements.

Then there is the matter of chairmanship. An ideal figure would be a judge of what might be called a small-c-conservative outlook, such as Lord (James) Hutton, a figure from Northern Ireland suggested by Peter Mandelson to chair the inquiry into the death of David Kelly in 2003. Another qualification would be a tendency to take one's time, as Sir John Chilcot did over the Iraq inquiry, which lasted for some seven years, while the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday took 12 years to get through its work.

The membership of the inquiry is another area where things can be set up nicely. If figures from the opposition parties are needed to serve, to present a semblance of balance, they might as well be men and women of the world, former ministers probably on the Lords, and inclined to be sympathetic to the pressures of office. John McDonnell, say, would not be asked to represent the official opposition. The Tory, if there is one, will be the sort who wouldn’t mind acting as a conduit to No10. The independent experts might be less malleable, but the judge and the politicians, skilled in the arts of manipulation, could do their best to control them. Again, known troublemakers, such as some of those on independent Sage will be overlooked.

History is, sadly, littered with official independent reviews and inquiries of various sorts that lacked credibility and/or arrived too late to make any difference to anything – the Widgery Report, the first looking into Bloody Sunday, the Franks report into the Falklands war and the Hutton and Chilcot reports being prime examples. Other inconvenient reports are simply neutered or forgotten about, such as the recommendations on press regulation made by Lord Leveson after the phone-hacking scandals. More rarely do official inquiries cause much lasting damage to the reputation and prospects of a serving government – the Scott Inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq “super gun” affair (1995) being one that added to the troubles of John Major’s government.

By the time of the next election, the Covid Inquiry will have started taking public testimony, and generated plenty of media “moments” and memes, but the public will have consigned its bad memories of Covid to history, indeed, most of the possible scandals and disasters were actually played out fully in public “in real time”, and aren’t going to be very hotly contested – the shortages of equipment, allowing the elderly to be discharged from hospital into care homes, neglecting foreign travel and use of masks, inadequate sick pay during self-isolation, contracts for cronies, the failure of test and trace, locking down too late and relaxing lockdowns too early, Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle...the list is long and has already been subjected to intense parliamentary and press scrutiny. No doubt Johnson did and said embarrassing things – but quite a few are already known about. The inquiry is unlikely to add to the prime minister’s reputation for attention to detail, but it is also very unlikely to do him much harm. Like his brush with Covid itself, he’ll survive.