‘Toxic and chaotic’: UK’s deadly Covid-19 response
Former British PM Boris Johnson oversaw a toxic, chaotic and dithering response to Covid-19, with delays in locking the country down costing about 23,000 more lives, a public inquiry has found.
Britain had more than 230,000 deaths from Covid-19, a similar death rate to the US and Italy but higher than elsewhere in western Europe.
It is still recovering from the economic consequences.
On Thursday (local time), an inquiry ordered by Johnson in May 2021 delivered a blistering assessment of his government’s response to the pandemic. It criticised his indecisive leadership, lambasted his Downing Street office for breaking its own rules and castigated his top adviser Dominic Cummings.
“There was a toxic and chaotic culture at the centre of the UK government during the pandemic,” inquiry chair, former judge Heather Hallett, said in her report.
“I can summarise my findings of the response as too little too late.
“All four governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat or the urgency of response it demanded in the early part of 2020, relying in part on misleading assurances that the UK was properly prepared for a pandemic.”
Hallett said Johnson had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the virus after it emerged, believing it would amount to nothing. He was also distracted by other government business, with Britain bogged down at the time in talks over its departure from the European Union.
“Mr Johnson should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response,” Hallett said.
When he appeared before the committee in 2023, Johnson said his government had been too complacent and had “vastly underestimated” the risks, saying he understood the public’s anger.
Hallett said by the time Johnson announced a lockdown on March 23, 2020, it was too little, too late. That was a repeated criticism she levelled at the UK government and the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Had the UK locked down just a week earlier on March 16, as the consensus of evidence said it should, deaths in the first wave up to July there would have been 23,000 fewer deaths – or about 48 per cent – the report found.
A failure to act sooner again as cases rose later in the year also led to further lockdowns, it said.
But Hallett said the “inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns – far from it”.
“Restricting people’s liberty in such a draconian fashion with all the devastating consequences should be avoided, if at all possible,” she said.
“To avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not.”
The inquiry found that government cabinet members, including then-health secretary Matt Hancock, and key scientists all failed to act with the urgency needed to tackle the virus.
And she said Johnson’s special adviser Cummings used “offensive, sexualised and misogynistic” language as he “poisoned” the atmosphere in Downing Street.
Hallett said the inquiry recognised Johnson had to wrestle with profound decisions but said he repeatedly changed his mind, failing to make timely decisions despite a clearer understanding of the virus.
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/uk-news/2025/11/21/covid-19-uk-inquiry
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