Boris Johnson did not receive any updates about the escalating Covid crisis during a school half-term break just weeks before he announced the first lockdown.
The Covid inquiry today heard that over ten days between 14 February and 24 February 2020, the prime minister received no information from his staff, including from the two COBRA meetings that took place.
Johnson spent the break – during which parliament was in recess – at Chevening House, a grace-and-favour Kent mansion. He was labelled a “part-time prime minister” by then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and accused of “sulking in a mansion” while coronavirus unfolded and large parts of the UK were devastated by flooding. Johnson insisted the government had been working “flat out”.
When asked today why he did not update the PM with any information on Covid, Johnson’s former parliamentary private secretary (PPS) Martin Reynolds said he “could not recall”.
Hugo Keith, chief counsel to the inquiry, told him: “There were no emails. There were no notes put in his red box. You don’t appear to have been in touch with him about coronavirus, or anybody else.”
“To what extent did you think to yourself we’ve got…emails about a viral pandemic coming our way? Why was nothing done in terms of keeping the prime minister in the loop in those ten days?” he asked.
Reynolds responded: “I cannot recall why and whether there was any urgent business to transact over that period with the PM.”
When asked whether it was because it was half-term, Reynolds said he was “happy to accept it was half-term”.
The day before the PM’s ten-day information blackout, a cabinet reshuffle had taken place that saw the resignation of chancellor Sajid Javid, who was replaced by Rishi Sunak.
By 27 February, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies had discussed the “reasonable worst case scenario” in which 80% of the UK population became infected, with a 1% fatality rate – which would mean up to 500,000 deaths.
The PM’s top aide added he “probably should have done more” to keep the prime minister updated on the biggest crisis since the Second World War.
Reynolds agreed that “little had been done” between the middle of February and early March.
He also agreed that the ten-day gap in pandemic planning was an “untoward delay” which contributed to the virus being “out of control” by 13 March.
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A Cabinet Office scientist who raised concerns over ‘stay alert’ was told it was ‘too late’. SAGE was not even asked
The government’s scientific advisers said they were cut out of decisions on pandemic messaging and compared Boris Johnson to Donald Trump after he tweeted out new guidance before they could flag concerns.
The Covid inquiry today heard the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was not given the chance to advise on the ‘stay alert’ slogan before it was announced by the PM on social media in May 2020. The new messaging, which replaced the ‘stay home’ slogan as the first wave of the virus began to ease off, was heavily criticised at the time for being confusing.
An email was shown from Theresa Marteau, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), in which she told fellow members that the ‘stay alert’ messaging had “the potential to do much damage” and said “our advice has not been sought”.
Marteau said the proposed new guidance could increase the R number – the average number of secondary infections produced by a single infected person – bringing “all the expected negative health and economic consequences”.
She told colleagues that government officials should be urgently made aware of their “concerns” and they needed to “intervene” before the message went out to the public that evening.
But further emails showed the scientists’ responding to Johnson tweeting out the message before they were able to advise on it. They expressed concern about his decision and one wrote: “We have learnt so much from Donald Trump…”
Another email shown to the inquiry revealed that a behavioural scientist in the Cabinet Office who worked on government communications did raise concerns about the guidance after finding out about it, “only to be told it was too late”.
The official said, in another email shown to the inquiry, that their team had not been consulted. In the email to SAGE members, they wrote: “The messages are kept so elusive by a small group of mainly number 10 advisers”.
They added: “I am so sorry that despite being the behavioural scientists inside the government communications service we don’t have a handle on this either. It’s so often partially political and in this case I was also told they wanted to keep it deliberately small so that there’s not too many cooks, which is also a cultural issue.”
In another email, the head of the SPI-B group of behavioural scientists said chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had issued a warning that members of SAGE and SPI-B should avoid “getting drawn into a govt operational move and losing reputation as a response”.
The email also suggested those inside No.10 were “concerned about our correspondence”.
Lucy Yardley, co-chair of the SPI-B group and a behavioural science expert, said following this incident: “Things didn’t improve in terms of being consulted…on the whole the communications tended to go ahead with very little input from SPI-B.”
Days after the new messaging was announced, Johnson was accused of misleading Parliament by suggesting Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty had signed off on it.
James Rubin, who chaired the group alongside Yardley, earlier told the inquiry that their advice was not heeded and that it “seemed to disappear into a black hole”.
Rubin gave the example of explicitly advising the government against using fear in their messaging when a new variant of Covid arose in December 2020.
“We argued against [using fear] on multiple occasions,” he said.
The inquiry was then shown WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock, then health secretary, and Simon Case, cabinet secretary.
In the exchanges, Hancock and Case said they intended to “frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain” and that “ramping up..the fear/guilt factor [is] vital”.
Yardley also expressed her concern about the government’s Eat Out to Help Out campaign.
“The ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ slogan… that came at a really crucially problematic time, because it was during the summer and that was when there was a really missed opportunity. That was when the infections were low and we could have all hopefully kept them low”, she said.
RISHI SUNAK will come under pressure on Friday to explain why he ignored expert warnings during the pandemic, after the Covid inquiry heard politics drove government’s public messaging about the virus.
TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell is giving evidence to the hearing this morning and has said the Prime Minister has “serious questions to answer” after the Treasury “massively undermined” Britain’s public health effort.
“It pushed up infection rates, put a huge strain on our public services and ballooned the cost of Test and Trace,” she said.
“The Prime Minister must come clean about why these decisions were taken, especially when senior government advisers were warning that people couldn’t afford to stay home when sick.
“And he must explain why he saw fit to spend more on Eat Out to Help Out than on helping people to self-isolate.
“The failure to provide proper financial support was an act of self-sabotage that left millions brutally exposed to the pandemic.”
This week the inquiry heard that Mr Sunak blocked chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s calls in May of 2020 for “an accessible offer of financial support” to help reduce the risk of “no adherence” to Covid rules.
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The TUC will urge Mr Sunak on Friday to answer why he didn’t provide better statutory sick pay (SSP) than just £94 a week, which left the average worker facing a £418 drop in earnings if they had to self-isolate.
The government had been warned at the start of the pandemic that two million workers had no sick pay protection at all, it added, noting that 23 per cent of the country’s workforce had to rely on SSP if they needed to self-isolate during the pandemic, rising to three in 10 for the lowest paid.
Meanwhile freedom of information requests showed the then-chancellor spent more than £800 million on Eat Out to Help Out than the £385m on funding the self-isolation scheme.
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The Committee recommended that had Boris still been a sitting MP that he would have been suspended for 90 days.
The Privileges Committee has found that Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over lockdown parties in Downing Street on numerous occasions.
The 30,000-word report also revealed that the Committee recommended that had Boris still been a sitting MP that he would have been suspended for 90 days. It wrote: “We conclude that when he told the House and this Committee that the rules and guidance were being complied with, his own knowledge was such that he deliberately misled the House and this committee.”
The committee also recommended that Johnson should have his access to Parliament as a former MP revoked.
The scathing report, which was made up of a majority of Conservatives and was unanimous in its verdict, also found that Johnson’s contempt has no precedent. It stated:
“The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the prime minister, the most senior member of the government.
“There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House.”
A former ‘playboy’-turned-businessman made a fortune supplying PPE during the pandemic, even though the NHS may be unable to use millions of the gowns his company delivered, openDemocracy can reveal.
Chemical Intelligence Limited was awarded a £126m contract to supply 21 million medical gowns that were desperately needed to protect NHS workers treating Covid patients in May 2020. But data released to openDemocracy through freedom of information law shows the Department of Health and Social Care later deemed 4.5 million of them – worth an estimated total of £27m – “not fit for use” in the NHS.
Lawyers acting on behalf of Robert Gros, the sole owner and CEO of Chemical Intelligence, said Gros could not comment because he “did not recognise these figures or amounts”.
The bumper PPE contract allowed Gros, 51, to turn around his business, which had made losses two years running prior. Chemical Intelligence declared profits of £33m for the year up to September 2020 according to accounts filed on Companies House. It had just two employees, including Gros, when it landed the multi-million pound government contract.
Gros personally splashed out on a £4m country pile just four months after he clinched the PPE deal. In 2021, after his company reported a further £31m in profits, he bought a second £2m country home and asked for planning permission to fit a basement bowling alley in the first.
The businessman then paid himself £7m in dividends in January 2022 – after having already loaned himself £6m the year before. Two months later, he transferred £40m in dividends to a holding company that he entirely owns.
Gros would only answer our questions through his lawyers, who told us that he has paid all the necessary corporation tax and that the £4om would “continue to be reinvested” in his business.
The £126m contract was one of many for which the government apparently paid over the odds as demand for PPE skyrocketed during the pandemic and it did not have enough stockpiled. Gowns cost the government 1,260% more than they did before the pandemic, according to the National Audit Office.
A fifth of gowns supplied by Chemical Intelligence were labelled “not fit for use” because they “failed the technical, clinical or regulatory compliance assessment”, openDemocracy understands. The department would not elaborate on why the gowns failed checks, but according to the data released under FOI their value has been written down to £0.
“The department has processes in place to review the quality of PPE and determine whether products are suitable to be released to the frontline,” said a spokesperson. “Upon receipt, a sample of each product is reviewed by DHSC’s Technical and Regulatory Assurance team.
“A proportion of this stock was classified as ‘do not supply’. Stock in this category has not necessarily fallen short of standards and in many cases these products can be used in other settings.”
Gros’s lawyers insisted that all the PPE the company had supplied was “fit for purpose and use”, suggesting the DHSC may have been mistaken in its record-keeping. The department confirmed that Chemical Intelligence also supplied £35m worth of face masks and disposable surgical aprons under separate contracts also awarded in 2020, none of which was deemed unusable.
Of the £12bn the government spent in total on PPE, £4bn worth cannot be used by the NHS because it doesn’t meet the right standards, according to a 2022 report by the Public Accounts CCommittee of MPs.
Gros’s lawyers said that the sharp rise in profits for Chemical Intelligence was not all down to PPE deals he struck during the pandemic, and threatened openDemocracy with an injunction if we revealed details about his mansions.
The businessman, who had a reputation as a “playboy” in the late 1990s after dating a string of soap stars, appears to have made the most of his new fortune. The Cambridgeshire house he bought a few months after the contract was signed had six bedrooms, four reception rooms, a swimming pool and a gym, all heated by three boilers.
Three months later, he lodged a planning application with Cambridge City Council to more than double the size of the property. The proposed plan included the addition of a basement housing a dance floor, a two-lane bowling alley, a golf simulator, a room for arcade machines and a cinema.
Gros was forced to withdraw the application after it was rejected by planners for being too “modern” in style; neighbours had also raised concerns about the potential noise from the proposed bowling alley and dance floor. He resubmitted a new application in November, which was approved in April.
In June 2021, through another company of which he was the sole owner, Gros bought a second mansion with six bedrooms, three garages and an outdoor pool for £2m in a neighbouring village.
Chemical Intelligence, which Gros founded in 2012, develops medical examination gloves, which have been licensed to and manufactured by Malaysian firm Hartalega since 2017.
Hartalega is one of several Malaysian glove manufacturers that have been accused of using modern slavery. A leaked report by the Home Office in 2019 found there was “strong evidence” to suggest that the majority of Malaysian glove manufacturers that supply the NHS, which include Hartalega, “exhibit forced labour indicators”.
Lawyers acting for Chemical Intelligence said that the company “takes the issue of modern slavery extremely seriously and carried out its own due diligence to seek to satisfy itself that throughout the manufacturing process all of the correct procedures and safeguards are in place”.
Chemical Intelligence was one of 58 suppliers awarded a contract to supply medical gloves to the NHS in January 2022, but no information has been published on whether it has yet done so.
