Why destroy economy for people who will die anyway, Johnson said to have asked
Explosive claim about former prime minister based on notebooks from his one-time aide, Imran Shafi
Boris Johnson asked “why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon” in a March 2020 meeting with Rishi Sunak, the Covid inquiry was told today.
The claim, branded “horrific” by bereaved families, emerged from notebooks kept by Imran Shafi, Johnson’s private secretary for public service.
Shafi was quizzed this afternoon by Hugo Keith KC. His notes from the same “Cx [chancellor] bilat” meeting record someone, also believed to be Johnson, as having said: “We are killing the patient to tackle the tumour.”
The inquiry, chaired by Heather Hallett and now into its second module, heard that Johnson had earlier said the “biggest damage [from Covid will be] done by overreaction” during a meeting on 28 February 2020 where lockdown restrictions were discussed.
Shafi said under questioning that Johnson “definitely did not want a lockdown” in March 2020, despite being aware that the worst case scenario of hundreds of thousands of deaths was becoming increasingly likely. But he agreed by 2 March 2020 that “control had been lost” and that “nothing short of a lockdown would suffice”.
It would be another three weeks before a UK-wide lockdown would be announced.
The inquiry also heard that former chief medical officer Chris Whitty had referred to Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme as ‘Eat Out to Help Out the Virus’. Shafi had recorded Whitty’s alleged words in his diary.
Charlie Williams, spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “It was hard to keep up with the number of horrific revelations that came out of the Covid inquiry today.
“As we’ve always suspected, instead of preparing as cases spread across the globe and within the UK, the government wasted time debating ‘herd immunity’ even when it was clear this would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
He added: “Like so many others, we’re left having to live with the devastation caused by their failures and chaos for the rest of our lives.”
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