Too little, too late: Tory response to Covid crisis damned in report

The UK's response to Covid was "too little, too late", a damning official report on the handling of the pandemic has concluded, saying imposing a lockdown even one week earlier could have saved more than 20,000 lives.

- Peter Walker Jessica Murray

The document also has stinging criticism of a "toxic and chaotic" culture inside Downing Street - which it said the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, embraced. It was an environment where the loudest voices held sway and women were sidelined, the report said. It also said there would have been loss of life "on a scale that was unconscionable and unacceptable" if the lockdowns had not been imposed at all.

Detailed in more than 750 pages across two volumes, the findings of the second part of the Covid inquiry's hearings on how the government handled the pandemic paint a consistent picture of delay, inaction and an apparent inability to learn lessons.

The account of the start of the pandemic in early 2020 is particularly brutal, describing February as "a lost month". It questions why Johnson did not chair a single meeting of the Cobra emergency committee, noting also that the response to Covid had essentially halted during the half-term holiday week.

If a lockdown had been imposed on 16 March, rather than 23 March, modelling suggests this could have cut the number of deaths in England in the first wave of the virus by almost half, equating to 23,000 lives saved, the inquiry authors say.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said the report showed Johnson had delayed, ignored advice and "put his political reputation ahead of public safety".

The group said: "While it is vindicating to see Boris Johnson blamed in black and white for the catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, it is devastating to think of the lives that could have been saved under a different prime minister."