11 months ago
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Richard Holden, transport minister, defends government’s handling of Covid, claiming Churchill was criticised in private too
Good morning. The Covid inquiry started taking evidence from witnesses in person in June, but only this week is it starting to interrogate members of Boris Johnson’s inner circle who were in the room with him as key decisions were taken at the start of the pandemic. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, who were in WhatsApp groups with him as key decisions were dodged, fudged or overturned. Yesterday’s hearing provided fresh evidence of the extent to which No 10 was in chaos at the time and today we’ve got two witnesses who potentially could be even more interesting.
In 2020 Dominic Cummings was Johnson’s chief adviser at No 10, and Lee Cain was his director of communications. They were involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and at the time Cummings was arguably the most powerful unelected person in the country. Ultimately he decided Johnson was a disastrous liability, and in 2021 he spent seven hours telling a Commons committee why. (For a reminder of what he said, skim the individual blog post headlines at the top of our blog covering the hearing.) It is hard to believe he has anything more to say, but his capacity for destructive criticism is inexhaustible, and the inquiry hearing will provide us with some of his WhatsApp messages, which did not happen two years ago.)
If there was conversations between people and they were recorded throughout history, as they are on WhatsApp, then would it be similarly embarrassing? Would Churchill and Chamberlain have faced a similar, what their colleagues said about them on X or Y day? I’m absolutely positive they would have done. I think that’s tittle tattle. I don’t think that’s the important issue here. The important issue at stake is what we can learn as a country from our response.
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