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00:00 Hello, my name is Raph Blackburn. I'm National World Politics Editor and myself and David George,
00:07 our Health Editor, have been spending the last day watching Boris Johnson give evidence at the
00:14 COVID inquiry so that you don't have to put yourself through that. Now, David, you watched
00:22 his evidence for most of the morning yesterday. What were your main takeaways?
00:28 I think the main takeaway for me, Raph, was just how defensive Boris Johnson came across.
00:32 We've seen from the likes of Matt Hancock, from Rishi Sunak, even David Cameron, who's made an
00:38 appearance at this inquiry, they were very quick to apologise and in fairness to them,
00:43 whether it was sincere or not, they were very open about some of the mistakes that were being made.
00:47 With Boris Johnson, he chose every single point that was brought up as a hill to die on.
00:53 I know that we've got a clip ready about what he said about the COVID statistics, so we'll just run
00:58 that for you very quickly. The evidence before Milady is that the United Kingdom had one of the
01:04 highest rates of excess death in Europe. Almost all other Western European countries had a lower
01:14 level of excess death. Italy was tragically in a worse position than the United Kingdom.
01:23 I don't wish to contradict you, Mr Keith, but the evidence, the LNS data I saw put us, I think,
01:30 about 16th or 19th in a table of 33. In Western Europe, we were one of the worst off,
01:37 if not the second worst off. So what we saw there was Ugo Keith Casey putting Boris Johnson under
01:44 the microscope about the number of excess deaths. And even though there are statistics, you know,
01:50 the case he is arguing statistics that have been widespread throughout Europe,
01:54 Boris Johnson is claiming different statistics. I've actually seen the statistics he's arguing
01:59 about. And he's looking at total deaths from the Office of National Statistics. So he's just
02:03 trying to completely skew things. Rayfords, you sat in on both sessions as well. Did you find that
02:10 Boris was sort of arguing the toss over every single point as well? I feel like he apologised
02:18 quite quickly at the start. He arrived at the inquiry, he got there very early, 7am, probably
02:25 to try and avoid going past the bereaved families who were waiting outside. And then as soon as
02:31 you're about to start, he was interrupted by some protesters, and he very quickly apologised
02:37 for people who'd lost loved ones. However, when they got into the kind of meat of the evidence,
02:45 you know, like you, David, I kind of found he was, he was kind of a bit agitated. It struck me,
02:53 looking on from a kind of politics view, that this was a kind of like a Boris we don't really
03:01 see very much, you know, we kind of remember Boris as this kind of like quite vigorous,
03:06 quite positive, quite punchy campaigner. Whereas, you know, at the Covid inquiry, under the lights,
03:16 I guess, in the bright lights in Paddington, he's kind of hunched over, he looks quite pale,
03:21 he just kind of seemed quite tired. Yeah, it was kind of quite a remarkable change from the man who
03:30 so convincingly won an election four years ago. And yeah, that that that kind of continued into
03:38 the afternoon session. So yeah, we've got a clip here of Boris being confronted by
03:44 some of the most controversial statements that have come out in the inquiry so far.
03:49 We needed constantly to challenge ourselves and constantly to try to do better.
03:56 Your own chief advisor, Mr. Cummings, described on the 4th of May, something the government had
04:01 done as being the best success of the whole criminally incompetent government performance.
04:06 How could that be a good thing? Because what he is trying to do is to he's he's not for me to
04:16 explain his his quotation, you can you can ask him yourself. But what we were generally trying to
04:22 to do was to make sure that we delivered the best possible service for the people of the UK,
04:29 who were going through an absolutely terrible, terrible time. And it would not have been right
04:36 to have a load of if we'd had a load of WhatsApp saying, aren't we doing brilliantly, folks?
04:41 Isn't this going well? I think your criticisms might have been frankly, even more pungent.
04:48 On the 27th of March, after Mr. Cummings had asserted that Whitehall had nearly killed huge
04:55 numbers of people and cost millions of jobs, and that Mr. Hancock had failed to get on top
05:00 of the testing problems, you yourself said these three words, totally fucking hopeless.
05:06 That was a reference to the performance of an important part of government.
05:10 I'd stress the word nearly in that.
05:13 Your response, Mr. Johnson.
05:15 And I would say that my job was not to, not uncritically to accept that everything we were
05:26 doing was good, though I, as it happens, as I said to you, I do think that the one the country
05:34 as a whole had notable achievements during the crisis. My job was to try to get a load of quite
05:44 disparate, quite challenging characters to keep going and through a long period and to
05:52 keep doing their level best to protect the country. That was my job.
05:57 So there we had Boris kind of tacitly admitting, saying two things which had come up in notes from
06:06 his aid previously. So he said, why are we destroying everything for people who will die
06:12 anyway? This is talking about whether they should bring in the Covid lockdown. And it's obviously,
06:18 you know, quite an awful comment, which he was he was trying to defend there.
06:23 But it goes, it also shows us a bit about the chaos in number 10 at the start of the pandemic.
06:33 And, you know, the main issue there was that Johnson, who was obviously the prime minister,
06:39 he just couldn't make a mind up his mind up whether to lock down or not, so much so that
06:44 his aides described him as this trolley, he's kind of careering down the aisle from one decision to
06:48 the other. So these comments he made here, or four days before the actual Covid lockdown came in,
06:55 on the 23rd of March 2020. By then, I think most other people had kind of decided that,
07:01 you know, the UK had to lock down, otherwise, there were going to be serious excess deaths
07:07 and the NHS would be overwhelmed. But he was still obviously, arguing that we shouldn't then
07:12 then obviously, four days later, he gives the speech, which I'm sure most people remember,
07:16 urging people to lock down. And then further evidence came out just after that, only three
07:21 days later, where he's basically arguing against locking down again. So it kind of showed the chaos
07:28 inside inside number 10. You know, what else did you make the afternoon evidence, David?
07:35 Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing is, because of how everything went down, the things that were
07:40 said during the pandemic by Boris Johnson himself, there was no outcome, there was no scenario where
07:47 he comes out on top from this Covid inquiry. To me and to a lot of others, sort of
07:54 giving evidence are the days to essentially fall on your sword. It's every single failing,
08:02 because at this point, it's not about him. I don't know if he fears he's going to be prosecuted for
08:06 what happened or anything like that. But it screams of a man who's desperate to save his own face.
08:11 And this is the time or the place for that. Now, this is the time to be completely honest about
08:16 every mistake that was made. And then he could probably come out and say, look, I can I admitted
08:21 to everything so that when the next pandemic comes around, Britain will be ready. Look how patriotic
08:26 I am. But instead, like I say, he's arguing the toss over the smallest things. Now even stuff,
08:31 such as the WhatsApp messages, which was brought up in the morning and in the afternoon.
08:36 And there's one where he described Matt Hancock as useless and said, you know, at some point,
08:42 yes, we thought about getting rid of him, but he was the best man for the job. Meanwhile,
08:47 Dominic Cummings is submitting evidence suggesting that they kept him around as a sacrificial lamb.
08:51 It's it reeks of hypocrisy. And I'm so curious to see what happens today
08:57 and how he's actually going to sort of present himself.
09:00 Yes. Speaking of the WhatsApp messages, obviously, there's a huge chunk of WhatsApp messages,
09:08 which Boris Johnson has not been able to provide to the inquiry from the 31st of January. So I think
09:15 June, because of an issue with his old phone. This is a phone that he was using while prime minister
09:20 before the security services noticed that the number had been readily available online
09:25 for 15 years. And they basically cannot get these WhatsApp messages off this phone. So that's a big
09:32 chunk of evidence they haven't been able to hear. And yeah, I think there's a clip now of Boris
09:38 trying to explain why he doesn't have the WhatsApp messages. Do you know why your phone was missing
09:46 those 5000 odd WhatsApps? I don't know the exact reason, but it looks as though it's something to
09:53 do with the app going down, and then coming up again. But somehow, not automatically erasing all
10:09 the things between that date when when it went down, and the moment when it was last backed up.
10:18 So I can't give you the technical explanation, but that's the best I'm able to give.
10:24 So yeah, believe him if you like, I'm slightly sceptical of that answer. And yeah,
10:33 Boris has got another day of evidence today, where I believe they're more likely to kind of get into
10:39 some of the partygate stuff, some of that controversy. So yeah, there'll certainly be
10:44 no let up for him. So yeah, if you want to follow that, we'll have a live blog on nationalworld.com.
10:52 But yeah, in the meantime, thanks very much for watching,
10:55 and make sure you follow the rest of our coverage on our website or app. Thank you, David.
11:00 [BLANK_AUDIO]