Boris Johnson told a meeting that Tory MPs thought “Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people” in Sir Patrick Vallance’s notebooks

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Boris Johnson told a meeting that Tory MPs thought “Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people” in Sir Patrick Vallance’s notebooks.

When asked about X-rated language he used to describe senior politicians in cabinet he said a lot of senior people were “dealing with the crisis extremely badly”.

“My appalling language [to describe them] was obviously my own, but my judgement of a lot of senior people was widespread.”

Another entry, from December 2020, reads: “Chief whip 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’.” Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former chief adviser, has also begun his evidence to the Covid Inquiry. He said everyone in Downing Street called Mr Johnson a “trolley” due to his propensity to change direction. He said an “overall dysfunctional system” was in place during the pandemic.

In his evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s communications director during the first phase of Covid, said that he found it hard to support the “eat out to help out” subsidy scheme for restaurants in the summer of 2020, and the government’s attempt to get people back in the office at the same time. Cain said:

I, and particularly the other communicators as well, were just finding it very, very difficult because a huge part of what our role and responsibility is at that point is ‘what are we signalling to the public?’

At this point of developing policy, we are indicating to people that Covid is over – go back out, get back to work, crowd yourself onto trains, go into restaurants and enjoy pizzas with friends and family – really build up that social mixing.

Now, that is fine if you are intent on never having to do suppression measures again – but from all the evidence we are receiving, from all the advice we are receiving, it was incredibly clear that we were going to have to do suppression measures again.

We knew that all the way through, that was the strategy from the start.

So to then move forward and say ‘hey we’re going to get back into work’ when business wasn’t even asking for people to come back into work – in fact they were encouraging their employees to stay at home still.

It was government that seemed to be on its own demanding people go to work when the research we had was still quite cautious, businesses were feeding back they didn’t want to do it, the scientific opinion was we were going to have to have another lockdown.

So to me it made absolutely no sense whatsoever why we were talking about getting everybody back to work and they were the stories that ended up being on the front pages.