The five key questions Boris Johnson must answer when he takes the stand at the Covid inquiry

The overwhelming feeling I got from attending the Covid inquiry in a bleak government building in Paddington was that I was in the wrong place. The real lessons of the pandemic are being learned in government labs at Porton Down, and in universities and drug companies around the country.

What was happening in the long, low-ceilinged hearings room, on the other hand, was a low-rent drama of score-settling. It has been a media feast of insult and abuse, as many of the people working at the heart of government during the crisis have tried to claim that they would have handled it better if they hadn’t been frustrated by the follies of those around them.

Very little of the “who swore at whom” has helped the nation to prepare for the next unknown virus.

As my former colleague Jane Merrick commented in June, “the Covid inquiry has so far been a trial in search of a defendant”. Well, the defendant is increasingly being identified as Boris Johnson, and when he finally takes the witness stand, probably in the second week of December, he needs to try to rise above the blame game and focus on the lessons for the future.

There will be many who think he is not capable of such a thing, and many more who have already decided that he is guilty – that as prime minister he was ultimately responsible for negligence in the management of coronavirus. But if he is to have any chance of acquittal at the bar of history, he needs to start by answering five important questions.

First, what was he doing during February half-term in 2020? He seems to have disappeared to Chevening, the foreign secretary’s country house, because his own place at Chequers was being renovated, and put up a “do not disturb” sign – just as the news of the spread of the virus around the world was becoming ominous.

His spokesperson has denied that he was working on his book about Shakespeare, and it is true that the government’s scientific advisers were not suggesting that the situation required his urgent attention. But I think that any other prime minister would have been asking questions, and I suspect that almost any other prime minister would have been dissatisfied with the answers.

If Johnson had been briefed earlier, it might not have made much difference, but it might have reduced the panic and confusion later.

Second, why did he switch from expressing incredulity that the police should enforce rules against social mixing on 22 March – he said, “Bring in the police?” in answer to a question at a No 10 briefing – only to announce a full lockdown the next day, saying: “If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them, including through fines and dispersing gatherings”?

That was a significant moment, the point at which Johnson, instinctively a liberal Tory, decreed an authoritarian response to the virus in which citizens were deprived of their liberties – including for a time the right to protest. It was the point at which we diverged from Sweden, which pursued a largely voluntary approach, and where outcomes were no worse than they were in the UK. There were no doubt many reasons that Sweden’s excess death figures were better than ours, although the insular nature of the Covid inquiry is striking, with its lack of international comparisons, but Johnson’s abrupt change of mind on 23 March 2020 would be a good place to start.

Nor was it a one-off. Dominic Cummings’s nickname for Johnson, the Trolley, was, as he testified this week, “what everyone called him”. Indeed, it was originally what Johnson called himself, saying in private in February 2016 that he was like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, “veering all over the place” between Leave and Remain.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, wrote in his diary on 13 July 2020: “The ridiculous flip flopping is getting worse.” On 28 July, he said: “The chief medical officer [Chris Whitty] and I are both worried about the extreme inconsistencies in the prime minister, lurching from ‘open everything’ to panic.”

How does Johnson plead to this charge?

Third, Johnson has to answer the question about his responsibility for the “culture” in 10 Downing Street. This is not just about the “toxic” and “macho” attitudes of which Helen MacNamara, his deputy cabinet secretary, spoke so eloquently on Wednesday, or the absence of social diversity at the centre of government of which Lee Cain, his communications director, spoke on Tuesday.

It is also about the assumptions shared at the centre of government, as documented unforgivingly by Sue Gray in her report on breaches of lockdown law in Downing Street. That was an aspect of the culture that included MacNamara, the provider of the karaoke machine for a leaving party in No 10 that went on until 3am. Gray said some of the parties “represent a serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of government but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time”, and made it clear – without being explicit – that the buck stopped with the prime minister.

Fourth, Johnson should address the question of whether it was right to close schools. This is an issue that has been hardly addressed by the inquiry, but which seems to me to be potentially significant in dealing with future viral diseases, given the harm done to an entire cohort of children. Sweden kept its schools open. What were Johnson’s grounds for making different decisions, and does he think in retrospect they were the right ones?

Finally, Johnson should try to turn whatever questions he is asked to the issue of preparedness for the future. This is a subject that was touched on in the first module of the inquiry’s hearings, “Resilience and Preparedness”, but that was mainly backward-looking, about the country’s readiness at the end of 2019 to deal with an unknown new virus.

Johnson is hardly the best person to make the point, but the inquiry should not be about putting him in the dock. Assigning blame may make good copy, and it may make some of the people sitting in the front row of the public seats at the inquiry, holding photos of their dead relatives, feel that they have obtained justice. But it won’t do what the inquiry is supposed to do, which is to learn lessons for the next public health emergency.

On that, despite the vilification that Johnson has endured, he has some important things to say. The race for the vaccines was an astonishing success story. To have produced a working vaccine within 11 months of the virus arriving in the UK was something that most scientists thought impossible at the time. If Johnson is to be held ultimately responsible for all the decisions that went wrong, he should be given credit for the decisions that made that possible, above all for the appointment of Kate Bingham as head of the vaccine taskforce.

How the vaccines happened is something that ought to be one of the big lessons for the kind of thing that we need to be ready for next time.

Let us hope that Johnson, and Lady Hallett’s inquiry, can finally rise to the task when the former prime minister eventually slouches to the witness stand.