Boris Johnson says he regrets questioning existence of long Covid and admits No 10 culture could be argumentative – UK politics live

Key events

Johnson says it is ‘nonsense’ to claim he kept Hancock in post so he could be ‘sacrifice for inquiry’

Johnson defends Matt Hancock, the health secretary. He says he thought he was doing a good job. He was intellectually able and on top of his department.

And he says he did not see why it would be good to replace him with someone who might not be better.

He says control of the pandemic was centralised in No 10.

Q: Mark Sedwill said in July you should sack him, you knew he had a tendency to over-promise, you knew people did not trust him, but you stuck with him?

Johnson says it was not obvious that sacking him would help. And in politics someone is always urging you to sack someone, he says.

Q: Dominic Cummings says you wanted to keep Hancock “as the sacrifice for the inquiry”.

Johnson says he does not remember that at all.

He goes on to say it’s “nonsense”.

Hancock was a good communicator.

Q: Sedwill said he told you to sack Hancock “to save lives and protect the NHS”.

Johnson says he does not remember.

And that’s it.

Lady Hallett says Johnson has had a long day. And she says he will have a long day tomorrow, when he is back giving evidence for another whole day.

Updated at 11.35 EST

Johnson says he has called Helen MacNamara to apologise for c-word expletive about her in No 10 WhatsApp exchange

Keith shows an exchange of messages between Mark Sedwill, the former cabinet secretary, and Simon Case, his successor.

Exchanges between Sedwill and Case. Photograph: Covid inquiry

Johnson says he does not recall any conversations with Sedwill or Case about behaviour.

He repeats his point about it not being a bad thing having people there who could “challenge the consensus and get things done”.

Q: But lots of things were not done.

Johnson says, when it came to the management of the pandemic, he does not think any feuding between officials made “the slightest difference” to processes or decision making.

Q: The inquiry was shown a particularly offensive WhatsApp message about Helen MacNamara from Cummings to you and others. You never complained about that.

Johnson says he does not remember that, but he must have seen it. He was on the group. He says he has called MacNamara to apologise for that.

Updated at 11.25 EST

Keith says Johnson himself described the government as “an orgy of narcissism”.

Johnson says that was at the end of the process.

Updated at 11.17 EST

Johnson says he sometimes spoke bluntly in meetings ‘to give people cover to do the same’

Q: A lot of evidence has been given to the effect that No 10 was dysfunctional.

Johnson says no one put it to him like that.

He says the country needed “continuous, urgent action”. He wanted meetings where people could speak their minds without fear.

And he says he sometimes spoke bluntly in meetings “because I wanted to give people cover to do the same”.

Lady Hallett intervenes. She says she wants to know if Johnson might have had a better framework for decision-making if a different culture had been in place. She says eventually they settled on the Covid-O and Covid-S committees (cabinet committees that managed Covid).

Johnson says Hallett has “put your finger on it”.

He says he wanted meetings where people said their piece.

For future pandemics, there should be more clarity about the difference between decision-making meetings and discussion meetings.

He says the PM should go into some meetings knowing that they are decision-making meetings. That was not happening, he says.

Updated at 11.17 EST

Johnson says culture at No 10 was ‘occasionally argumentative’, but says that was ‘no bad thing’

Keith comes back to the departure of Mark Sedwill. He says it will be for Lady Hallett to decide whether he was sacked or whether, as Johnson claims (see 11.21am), he moved on.

And he asks about the report that Helen MacNamara, the deputy cabinet secretary, compiled about the operation of No 10.

Johnson says he would rather have a No 10 where people challenged, and brought new ideas, and felt free to say things, than one where people pretended all was well.

Q: If you were concerned about civil service unease about Dominic Cummings, your response was to sideline Sedwill, and keep Cummings.

Johnson says that is Keith’s way of putting it.

Sedwill told him he wanted to move on, Johnson claims.

As for the culture, “it was occasionally argumentative, but that was no bad thing”, he says.

Updated at 11.18 EST

Johnson says he regrets saying long Covid was ‘bollocks’ and ‘Gulf War syndrome stuff’

Q: For a long time you questioned if long Covid existed. And you compared it to Gulf War syndrome. Is that fair?

Not really, says Johnson.

But he says the words he scribbled in the margins of submissions about long Covid have been published. He accepts that they have caused offence, and he says: “I regret it very, very much.”

He was trying to get to the truth of the matter. And it took him a long time to get a proper paper on it.

Keith shows a note where Johnson described long Covid as “bollocks” and “Gulf war syndrome stuff”.

Johnson’s comments on government minute. Photograph: Covid inquiry

And he says the evidence shows that Johnson continued to take this view.

Even when he got a paper on it, Johnson said “it’s not exactly Gulf War syndrome”, Keith says.

Johnson says many people with Gulf War syndrome had terrible symptoms. But some people thought they were suffering from something related to the Gulf War, which was not related to it.

He says, with long Covid, he also wanted to find out what the Covid link was.

Updated at 11.05 EST

Q: Did you know the mayor of London was repeatedly excluded from Cobra meetings?

Johnson says Sadiq Khan, the mayor, was consulted a lot.

There was talk of locking down London first. But that idea was dropped, he says.

Q: The evidence from the metro mayors was that local leaders did not get enough information. That was a very significant failing, particular in regard to the tier system.

Johnson says he is grateful to all the mayors for the work they did.

Q: The inquiry has seen evidence that Manchester was punished for political reasons.

Johnson says he does not remember that. In Liverpool there was a real effort to get mass testing going, he says.

Johnson says with hindsight he thinks he should have spent more time during Covid working with devolved administrations

Johnson says, while taking account of the concerns of devolved administrations (DAs), he thinks the UK needs a better way of setting public health regulations for the UK in a pandemic.

(During Covid England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all set their own regulations, which often differed.)

Johnson says, with hindsight, he would have liked to have spend more time with the DAs.

Q: But in your witness statement you said it was wrong for the PM of the UK to hold meetings with the first ministers.

Johnson says he also thinks that.

Q: They can’t both be true.

Johnson says it can be worth doing things that are “constitutionally a bit weird” in the interests of fighting the pandemic.

He says they need “a better way of getting a unified message for the United Kingdom”.

Q: You said meeting with the DAs would look like a mini-EU. And you thought they leaked after Cobra meetings. And you accused them of taking decisions for political reasons.

Johnson says he is not sure he said that to them.

But he did think the coherence of the UK was being undermined.

He says:

Some form of integrated decision-making which does not leak is what you’re after.

Updated at 10.45 EST

Johnson says government may have pushed too hard in encouraging people back into office after lockdown

At the inquiry Hugo Keith KC is now asking about the end of the first lockdown.

He says Rishi Sunak was concerned about over-compliance with the stay-at-home instruction.

Q: In July 2021 did you say you had got the messaging wrong on this?

Boris Johnson says, as they came out of lockdown, he felt strongly that it was important to allow people some freedom. He wanted to see people back at work, he says.

But a lot of people were in a different place. They were still apprehensive. They did not want people lecturing them about what to do, he says.

Keith shows extracts from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary in which Vallance writes about Johnson wanting to “let it rip” in the summer of 2020.

But he shows another message implying Johnson was concerned. Keith quotes the words at the top of this message as if they were from Johnson.

Johnson said he thinks Keith has got this wrong. It was Matt Hancock talking about rising cases, he says. He says, like all good cabinet ministers, Hancock was lobbying for more money for his department.

Message from Johnson Photograph: Covid inquiry

Updated at 10.39 EST

Before the break, Boris Johnson was asked if he should have waited to see if other measures were working before ordering the full lockdown on 23 March 2020. He said at that point it was “right to throw everything at it”.

He went on:

And we didn’t have any other shot, we didn’t have the systems to control the virus that perhaps I believed earlier in the month that we did.

I didn’t know what other tools I had, as prime minister, to protect large numbers of people from this virus and I felt, fundamentally, that I was out of time.

And what I believed in the previous week was that we still had some wiggle room because that seemed to be what I was hearing.

I might have been wrong but I took the view on the Sunday and Monday that we were just out of time and the thing was too big and the curve was too aggressive.

Q: Do you think the full lockdown could have been avoided if the other measures introduced beforehand, like the instruction to people to stay at home, had started earlier?

Johnson says he thinks that is unlikely.

Updated at 10.40 EST

Keith shows a message from Johnson on 26 March 2020, the day he announced the full lockdown, in which he expressed doubt about the measure.

Message from Johnson on 26 March 2020 Photograph: Covid inquiry

Johnson says he thought that lockdown was necessary, and that it did work.

But he says more work is needed to show exactly what impact it had.

UPDATE: Johnson said:

But I’ve got to tell you, in all honesty, I find it difficult to quantify the impact that those measures had, and the more we can do to explain why NPI [non-pharmaceutical intervention] measures of any kind why they’re necessary to the satisfaction of everybody, the easier it will be for government next time and the more public buy-in there will be.

Updated at 10.40 EST

Lady Hallett intervenes.

Q: When you decided to lock down, did you consider if there was a clear argument against lockdown?

Johnson says he did. But he gave that argument “pretty short shift”. He says he thought the job of government was to protect life. If there had been no lockdown, what was happening in Italy would have happened here. He goes on:

I had no other tool – literally nothing else.

Many commentators have criticised the inquiry for assuming that the lockdown was a good thing, and for not considering the downsides. But Keith has regularly been asking government witnesses, as he has just been asking Johnson, why they did not delay lockdown so they could see if the voluntary “stay at home” order was working.

Updated at 10.41 EST

Johnson claims he can’t remember why he met Evgeny Lebedev at No 10 days before lockdown

Keith asks about Johnson’s meeting with Evgeny Lebedev, the Evening Standard owner, on 19 March 2020, in the week before the lockdown was formally announced. Why did it take place?

Johnson claims he cannot remember, but he says he thinks it was about Covid. As owner of a London paper, Lebedev had to know what was happening, he says.

Neither Keith nor Johnson name Lebedev.

Keith does not press Johnson about this.

It is widely assumed that this meeting took place to discuss Lebedev’s peerage, which at the time was being blocked by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Johnson did not have face-to-face meetings with other newspaper owners at this point, and indeed people were being advised to avoid any unnecessary face-to-face meetings.

UPDATE: Johnson said:

I can’t remember what happened at that meeting, it was a very brief meeting.

The newspaper proprietor in question doubtless wanted to know about what was happening to London … and indeed the whole country and wanted to be informed and I wanted to be supportive.

Asked whether the meeting had been Covid-related, Johnson said:

I can’t remember but I’m absolutely certain it must have been.

The journalist Russell Scott says, when he submitted a Freedom of Information request, he was told that this was a personal/social meeting.

Updated at 10.50 EST