Boris Johnson will this week reject claims that he did not concentrate on the emerging Covid threat during the February 2020 half-term because he was writing a book about William Shakespeare.
Flaws in decision making and governance resulted in a chaotic response
The covid-19 inquiry is currently focusing on core UK decision making and governance. Recent witnesses have described how decision making was centred on Boris Johnson as prime minister who was slow to understand the significance of covid-19, dismissive of its likely impact, and largely absent from discussion of its implications in the first weeks of 2020. Johnson’s vacillating stance on how best to respond to covid-19 was a source of immense frustration for the advisers and civil servants working with him and had measurable consequences for the public’s health.1 The civil service through the Cabinet Office and Department of Health and Social Care was also ill-prepared for the biggest crisis facing the British state in decades.
So far so familiar in validating the findings of inquiries by parliamentary committees and accounts by scientists and journalists who have reported on these issues.234 The picture of hig
As climate change begins to intensify, the government has a lot to do to make our society more resilient to its consequences. We find out what governm.