What’s the point of Boris attending the Covid show trial? Nosy lawyers just want to read his WhatsApps and trip him up
FOR Boris Johnson’s enemies, today is the day they have been looking forward to for years. It is his turn to appear before the Covid show trial.
It’s not officially a show trial, of course. We are supposed to call it the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. But sorry, a show trial is what it has become.
When Johnson sits down this morning, we know what questions are going to be flung at him by the puffed-up lawyers leading the whole charade.
They will be trawling through his WhatsApp messages, trying to pick up on occasions when he might have dared question the opinion of a scientist or when he suggested that, actually, people’s liberty might sometimes have to be balanced against the needs of biosecurity.
They will be grilling him on occasions when he changed his mind and fixating on what Dominic Cummings and others in Downing Street said about him.
Great theatre
How the KCs in their stiff suits love it when they get to a rude bit.
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The existence of WhatsApp has gifted a whole mine of material for this inquiry.
Conversations which previously would have taken place between two people in a quiet place, without anyone there to listen and record them, are now available to be examined by the entire world.
It will all be great theatre, of course — a courtroom drama which would have defied the imagination even of John Grisham. But that is not what the Covid inquiry is supposed to be about.
The whole point was to learn something: Where the virus came from, how it was first identified, which interventions worked and which didn’t — and, above all, what can we do in a future pandemic to reduce the death toll and keep society functioning as best we can?
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Instead, the inquiry seems to have started with the narrow, preconceived idea that many people died as a result of Britain’s failure to lock down early enough — and is now concerned with identifying the guilty men. Boris Johnson, needless to say, is prime suspect.
But Rishi Sunak is not far behind. Once Boris is finished in the hot seat it will be the current Prime Minister’s turn.
It will almost certainly turn into a political hit-job, with Sunak grilled over his Eat Out To Help Out scheme, which seems to obsess some of his critics.
For goodness sake, eating out was only one of the many ways that we all sought to meet up once released from the first lockdown in the summer of 2020.
In fact, Eat Out To Help Out — which offered discounts only from Monday to Wednesday — helped promote social distancing by spreading custom throughout the week.
Meanwhile, the rather vital question of where the virus came from seems to have been ruled out of consideration at all.
When Michael Gove tried to raise the matter, he was immediately interrupted by Sir Hugo Keith KC and told that it was a “somewhat divisive issue” which was beyond the terms of reference of the inquiry.
How utterly bizarre. It was as if the public inquiry into the Novichok poisonings had refused to consider whether the Russians had done it.
Moreover, surely everything in this inquiry is divisive, so why is it pulling back from this particular matter?
Did the Covid pandemic really begin with a laboratory escape of a virus engineered through “gain of function” research — enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents?
There is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest this is quite likely, in spite of the seeming efforts by a group of scientists at the beginning of the pandemic to suppress the idea. If it did, it would have severe implications for such research in future.
The inquiry should be considering, too, the catastrophic fallout from lockdowns.
Yesterday came yet more evidence of the harm wrought on children by closing schools for months on end.
Britain, which had been doing well on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develo ment’s Programme For International Student Assessment, slumped severely between 2018 and 2022, with our scores in maths falling outside the top ten countries.
Countries which managed to get through the pandemic with less stringent lockdowns or other restrictions, such as Japan and Singapore, have soared even further ahead.
Rude words
If Boris Johnson was reluctant to impose lockdown because he was worried about the fallout, he was quite right to be.
His only failure was not to take that further and demand a proper cost-benefit analysis before sending the country into a full lockdown.
But the inquiry has hardly considered such questions — at least not yet.
Last week there was a fleeting sign that Baroness Hallett, who is leading the inquiry, may have started to appreciate that proceedings are veering off in the wrong direction.
“When we look into the toxic atmosphere, it’s not some lurid interest that we want to hear rude words or anything, it’s to see whether there was anything wrong with the decision-making process,” she told Dominic Raab.
Maybe we will eventually get round to the more substantial issues.
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The inquiry is, after all, expected to last for years, and will certainly steal the title of Britain’s most expensive public inquiry from the 12- year, £195million Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
But I fear that by then everyone will have lost interest, and we will end up going into the next pandemic no better prepared than we were last time.
