The U.K.’s official inquiry into how Boris Johnson’s government handled the COVID pandemic heard shocking and wildly profane evidence on Tuesday as text messages and diary entries from the former prime minister’s colleagues were read out.
The independent panel, which was formally established last year, is currently hearing testimony about the decision-making and political governance of Britain in response to the crisis that began in early 2020. Johnson—who ordered the inquiry—has predictably been at the heart of some of the most damning revelations.
In Tuesday’s evidence, a lawyer for the inquiry showed passages from the 2020 diaries of Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s former chief scientific adviser. In one excerpt, Vallance wrote that Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going.”
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“[Johnson] says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people—and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them,’” Vallance quoted Johnson as saying in another entry. In a third, written in December 2020, Vallance wrote: “Chief whip [a senior political official charged with maintaining party discipline] says ‘I think we should let the old people get it and protect others.’ PM says ‘a lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them.’”
Later in the proceedings, the inquiry heard evidence from Dominic Cummings—Johnson’s former chief adviser who has relentlessly attacked Johnson and the U.K. government’s handling of the pandemic since he left his role in November 2020.
One WhatsApp message sent from Cummings to Johnson in August of that year said: “At the moment the [Westminster] bubble thinks youve taken your eye off ball, youre happy to have useless fuckpigs in charge, and they think that a vast amount of the chaotic news on the front pages is coming from no10 when in fact it’s coming from the Cabinet who are ferral.”
In the same message, Cummings also lashed out at Matt Hancock, Johnson’s health minister during the outbreak of COVID who ultimately resigned in June 2021 after he was filmed breaching his own department’s social-distancing rules by kissing a woman in his office (who wasn’t his wife). Cummings said it would be a “big mistake” for Johnson to keep Hancock in his job as “he is a proven liar who nobody believes or shd believe on anything, and we face going into autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of NHS still.”
In another message to Lee Cain, Johnson’s Downing Street communications chief in March 2020, Cummings complained that Johnson was “back to Jaws mode wank,” the latter word being a British profanity which in this context means “nonsense.” “I’ve literally said same thing ten fucking times and he still won’t absorb it,” Cummings added. Cain explained to the inquiry that the reference to Jaws was due to Johnson’s habit of speaking admirably of the mayor in the movie “who wanted to keep the beaches open” despite the threat to public health.
Cummings apologized to the inquiry for his “appalling” language, but maintained that his “judgment of a lot of senior people was widespread.”
Britain responded to the pandemic with multiple national and localized lockdowns which variously imposed different legal limits on social contact. Between February 2020 and September 2023, over 230,000 people died in the U.K. from COVID, according to official data.
