Families of the Covid bereaved have lashed out at Boris Johnson for being “beyond contempt” after he used his column in a national newspaper to lampoon those “still wrangling on” about the deaths in the pandemic.
The disgraced former prime minister has refused to apologise for extra Covid deaths he has been accused of causing by delaying taking action, but instead launched a blistering attack on the pandemic inquiry itself.
Mr Johnson and other senior Tory ministers at the time were damned in the Covid inquiry report chaired by former Appeal Court judge Baroness Heather Hallett for the “toxic and chaotic” culture in Downing Street during the pandemic.
She concluded that unnecessary delays in locking down caused an extra 23,000 deaths, and families of those who died have said they are considering taking legal action against Mr Johnson.
But after initially remaining silent, the former prime minister used a footnote in his column in the Daily Mail to attack Baroness Hallett and the inquiry which he himself set up.
“Have these people lost their minds?” he wrote. He accused the former judge of “breathtaking inconsistency” and being “hopelessly incoherent”.
“More than three years after the end of the pandemic, they are still wrangling about what went wrong,” he said.
The comment has infuriated campaigners seeking justice for those who died unnecessarily during the pandemic.
A spokesperson for the Covid bereaved families group said: “It is beyond contempt that Boris Johnson has chosen to respond to the Covid inquiry by attacking the Covid bereaved for ‘wrangling on’ about the deaths of our loved ones.
“Instead of showing regret, contrition or even apologising, Johnson is using a newspaper column to do what he couldn’t do under oath at the Covid Inquiry – twist the truth, promote debunked myths and ignore the facts.
“But the truth, which Mr Johnson has never had a close relationship with, is now clear: he was responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths. The one promise he delivered on was to ‘let the bodies pile high’.
“He has no place in public life and we are calling again for Boris Johnson to lose all of his ex-PM privileges following the inquiry report.”
Their response came after an astonishing rant by the former PM in his weekly column.
Mr Johnson blasted: “Some judge has just spent the thick end of £200m on an inquiry, and what is the upshot?
“She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough – just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone.”
He went on: “Bozhe moi, you say, wiping away tears of laughter. My goodness, these Britskis!”
Instead, he made it clear that his biggest regret was locking down the country at all.
“An idea occurs to you, fleetingly, that in future you could easily plunge the whole of the UK into state-enforced paralysis just by convincing them that they had to take precautions against a new Russian-originated virus.
“That is the logic of the report by Baroness Hallett, and I am afraid it’s not just in Moscow that people are tapping their heads, but around the world.
“To the best of my knowledge all other countries have long since concluded their official investigations into Covid.”
He said: “There are and remain only two big questions that need a proper answer if we are to prevent a disaster like Covid from happening again, and they are: how did it really emerge?
“And to what extent did the non-pharmaceutical interventions – the lockdowns, social distancing etc – make enough of a difference to the epicurve to justify the huge social, economic, educational and psychological damage that these measures inflicted?
“On the first question, the origins of Covid, the report is silent. On the second great question – which is of real strategic importance for this country – Lady Hallett is hopelessly incoherent.”
He claimed that the 23,000 extra deaths figure, originally made by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, was “speculative and unsubstantiated”, arguing that his “hysterical predictions were largely discredited at the time”.
He claimed that the charge of causing extra deaths was “totally muddled”.
In his defence he noted that while the country went into full lockdown on 23 March 2020, he had begun bringing in measures from 12 March.
He suggested: “I think it’s pretty obvious. Lady Hallett has been unable or unwilling to address the really important questions.
“So, faced with the agony of the Covid victims and their families – and their entirely understandable desire for catharsis of some kind – she has decided that the neatest thing is to administer a judicious kicking to the Tory administration, who no one much has an interest in defending except me, and to move on.”
