Shameful report leaves no way back for Johnson

"Too little, too late" is the summary offered by Heather Hallett herself of the Johnson government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Indeed, and in all fairness, that conclusion also applied to the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As a result of the various errors of judgement and incompetence displayed by all of the leaders concerned, many thousands of lives were needlessly lost - 23,000 in England alone. In addition – though the chair of the Covid inquiry doesn't highlight this – countless others have endured the prolonged suffering brought on by long Covid.

It is a damning report, as it was widely expected to be. Everyone who lived through those turbulent and terrifying times will recall the growing sense that the then prime minister, his chief adviser, his health secretary and others were not in control of events.

Yet the scale of the failures, that specific detail about lives being cut short because of a “toxic and chaotic culture” in Downing Street, still lends a shocking quality to Baroness Hallett's report. In particular, Mr Johnson seems to have been very much the wrong man for the job in 2020, and so unlike his hero, Winston Churchill, in 1940.

Mr Johnson is an unserious man, and was poorly suited to the most serious crisis that one can envisage - a potentially deadly disease, not fully understood, for which there was no cure, not much treatment, and, for a year, no vaccine.