Johnson 'beyond contempt' for attack on Covid inquiry

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.

- DAVID MADDOX POLITICAL EDITOR

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 into 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.