Boris Johnson to face second day of questioning at COVID inquiry
Boris Johnson will face a second day of questioning at the COVID inquiry today following his five hour quizzing on Wednesday.
The former prime minister will return to the hearing having been booed by crowds of bereaved families as he left.
Partygate, a scandal over rule-breaching gatherings at No 10 during the pandemic that dogged Mr Johnson’s premiership, is expected to feature during today’s proceedings.
Victims’ families will also be given another chance to read out impact statements.
During yesterday’s evidence he admitted he should have “twigged much sooner” about the threat posed by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, as he apologised for “the pain and the loss and the suffering” of its victims.
He also told the inquiry that:
- The government “underestimated the scale and pace of challenge” from COVID – thinking the peak would come in May or June;
- The tone of private WhatsApp exchanges was a “reflection of the agony” the country was going through;
- A denial he was on holiday over the half-term break in February 2020 – as claimed by former aide Dominic Cummings
- Mr Johnson explaining that he “can’t say” whether he would have “gone earlier” in ordering the first lockdown, but that he took “full responsibility” for the decisions made;
- The former prime minister offering an apology to sufferers of long COVID, having described the condition as “b*****ks” in 2021;
- He stood by Matt Hancock, saying the then health secretary did “a good job” whatever his “defects”.
The first day of the former prime minister’s evidence, which was hit by protests, saw him defending the culture in No 10 after it was branded “toxic” by other witnesses.
He rejected accusations he had shown poor leadership by vacillating over whether to back tough restrictions in the early months of 2020.
Former aides have blamed his tendency to waiver on key decisions in March of that year for delaying the lockdown.
But he argued it was his job to “test” the “completely novel policy”, adding: “It matters to the livelihoods of people up and down the land. I had to go through the arguments and that is what I was doing.”
Challenged over the slow response to the crisis, Mr Johnson said Whitehall “underestimated” the need for action, adding that it was only when he saw the “horrors” of the outbreak in Italy that he realised the seriousness of the virus.
He suggested the experience of previous diseases such as SARS, MERS and swine flu clouded officials’ judgment while a coronavirus pandemic was “outside our living experience”.
The former Tory leader defended his eventual decision to order England’s first lockdown on 23 March 2020, saying by the middle of that month he was giving arguments against restrictions “pretty short shrift”.
“I no longer had the luxury of waiting. It was over,” he told Baroness Heather Hallett’s probe.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Johnson leaves to crowd of protesters
Mr Johnson appeared to become emotional as he discussed his “anxiety” about possible behavioural fatigue if he imposed a lockdown too early without a vaccination programme.
He looked on the verge of tears as he described 2020 as a “tragic, tragic” year.
Mr Johnson did not deny questioning why his government was “destroying everything for people who will die anyway soon”, but suggested the comment was not “designed to be publicly broadcast”.
“It’s an indication of the cruelty of the choice that we faced and the appalling balancing act that I had to do throughout the pandemic,” he said when asked about a note written by his former aide Imran Shafi which recorded that he had made the remark.
Read more:
Whatever Boris Johnson said, the evidence pointed to leadership failures
Key points from Boris Johnson’s evidence
Mr Johnson conceded, with hindsight, that mass gatherings should have been stopped earlier and he should not have shaken hands with patients at a hospital where there were coronavirus cases.
His appearance before the inquiry was interrupted by protesters as he began by issuing an apology to victims of the pandemic, with four people removed from the hearing room.
“Can I just say how glad I am to be at this inquiry and how sorry I am for the pain and the loss and the suffering of the COVID victims,” Mr Johnson said.
He went on to acknowledge that his government made “mistakes” and took “personal responsibility for all the decisions that we made”.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Boris Johnson heckled by protesters
Among those decisions were the speed of the government’s response to the pandemic in 2020, the lockdown decisions and their timeliness, the explosion of the virus in the residential care sector, the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, and the decision not to introduce a circuit-breaker later in 2020.
Mr Johnson said that, with hindsight, “it may be possible to see things that we could have done differently”, but at the time “I felt… we were doing our best in very difficult circumstances”.
He claimed he was “not sure” whether government decision-making had led to “materially” a larger number of excess deaths as a result of the pandemic.
UK
Paria Veisi: Police investigating disappearance of woman in South Wales find her body – as man charged with murder
UK
Thousands of trans rights activists gather in London after Supreme Court ruling on definition of a woman
Thousands of trans rights activists have been demonstrating in central London days after the Supreme Court ruled the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.
Trans rights groups, trade unions and community organisations came together for what was billed as an “emergency demonstration” in Parliament Square in Westminster.
Activists demanded “trans liberation” and “trans rights now”, with some waving flags and holding banners.
Campaigners in Westminster. Pic: PA
Graffiti was seen on the statues of suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett and South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts in Parliament Square.
The Metropolitan Police said it had launched an investigation after several statues were vandalised and it was investigating the incidents as criminal damage.
Chief Superintendent Stuart Bell said it was “very disappointing to see damage to seven statues and property in the vicinity of the protest”, adding: “We support the public’s right to protest but criminality like this is completely unacceptable.
“We are now investigating this criminal damage and urge anyone with any information to come forward.”
Meanwhile, a rally and march organised by Resisting Transphobia has been taking place in Edinburgh on Saturday afternoon.
Graffiti was daubed on the statue by trans activists. Pic: PA
Graffiti on the statue of South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts in Parliament Square. Pic: PA
In a long-awaited judgment delivered on Wednesday, the UK’s highest court ruled the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 “refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.
It essentially means trans women who hold gender recognition certificates are not women in the eyes of the law.
This means transgender women with one of the certificates can be excluded from single-sex spaces if “proportionate”.
Demonstrators in Westminster
Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said on Thursday that the ruling means trans women can no longer take part in women’s sport, while single-sex places, such as changing rooms, “must be based on biological sex”.
The UK government said the unanimous decision by five judges brought “clarity and confidence” for women and service providers.
A Labour Party source said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had brought the party to a “common sense position” on the subject from an “activist” stance.
Among the groups supporting the London protest were Trans Kids Deserve Better, Pride In Labour, Front For The Liberation Of Intersex Non-binary And Transgender people (Flint) and TransActual.
Pic: PA
Keyne Walker, strategy director at TransActual, told Sky News the government needed to put equality laws back on a “sound footing”.
Speaking from Parliament Square, they said: “The mood is jubilant and also angry and also people are anxious… Right now trans people are coming together to demonstrate to the country, and to everybody else, that we’re not going anywhere because we don’t have anywhere to go…
“Queer people have been through worse than this before, and… we’ll suffer through whatever is to come in the next few years.”
Read more:
How Supreme Court decision has immediate real-world consequences
The activist continued: “The government needs to immediately clarify how they are going to protect trans people and what this ruling actually means for spaces.
“It does not bring clarity… businesses and venues at the moment don’t know what they can and can’t do… the government needs to step in and put equalities law back on a sound footing.”
Protesters in Westminster in support of the transgender community. Pic: Daniel Bregman
It comes as Bridgerton actress Nicola Coughlan announced she has helped raise more than £100,000 for a trans rights charity following the Supreme Court decision.
Following the ruling, the Irish star said she was “completely horrified” and “disgusted” by the ruling and added she would match donations up to £10,000 to transgender charity Not A Phase.
The fundraiser has since raised £103,018, with a revised target of £110,000.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Gender ruling – How it happened
Why was the case heard in court?
The Supreme Court ruling followed a long-running legal challenge which centred around how sex-based rights are applied through the UK-wide Equality Act 2010.
The appeal case was brought against the Scottish government by campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) following unsuccessful challenges at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
FWS called on the court to find sex an “immutable biological state”, arguing sex-based protections should only apply to people born female.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Campaigners react to gender ruling
The Scottish government argued the protections should also include transgender people with a gender recognition certificate (GRC).
The Supreme Court judges were asked to rule on what the Equality Act 2010 means by “sex” – whether biological sex or “certificated” sex as legally defined by the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.
Delivering the ruling at the London court on Wednesday, Lord Hodge said: “We counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not.
“The Equality Act 2010 gives transgender people protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender.”
A teacher who was upskirted by a pupil says women are being “specifically targeted” by misogynistic attitudes being expressed in classrooms.
Sally Rees, now the president of teachers’ union NASUWT in Northern Ireland, was visited by police officers in 2016 and told they had found a USB stick containing images filmed up her skirt by a pupil.
“You just feel so violated,” she told North of England correspondent Shingi Mararike.
“As a teacher, you give so much of yourself in the classroom, you want the best for your pupils and then to know that somebody has done that to you, it just completely shatters your sense of trust.”
Ms Rees was filmed multiple times over 14 months and after a “long drawn-out legal process”, the pupil was found guilty of five counts of outraging public decency.
Ms Rees spoke to Sky News as a new survey by NASWUT suggested nearly three in five (59%) teachers believe social media use has contributed to a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour.
At the union’s annual conference this weekend, members will debate calls on the union’s executive to work with teachers “to assess the risk that far-right and populist movements pose to young people”.
“We’ve seen the impact that Andrew Tate and other figures are having on… young boys’ reactions in the classroom,” Ms Rees said.
“One of the things we have to remember is that the majority of our workforce is female and so they are being very specifically targeted by these attitudes, specifically things around; ‘You can’t tell me what to do’, that a man has a right to dominate a woman and has a right to a woman’s body.”
Andrew Tate.
File pic: AP
The drama teacher said schools were now expected to deal with behaviour like this without enough support.
“We need to bring parents and carers into this because it starts in the home and then trickles into our schools,” she added.
“We end up with a blame culture that education is at fault, teachers aren’t dealing with it and yet teachers are the ones that actually end up being the victims of this type of behaviour.”
Read more:
Parents of boy say Adolescence ‘touched a nerve’
Stephen Graham on how rise of incel culture influenced Netflix show
When asked about the NASWUT survey, a spokesperson for the Department for Education (DfE) said: “Education can be the antidote to hate, and the classroom should be a safe environment for sensitive topics to be discussed and where critical thinking is encouraged.
“That’s why we provide a range of resources to support teachers to navigate these challenging issues, and why our curriculum review will look at the skills children need to thrive in a fast-changing online world.”
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway