The true cost of Boris Johnson’s Covid incompetence is now clear for all to see

Now we know. We knew all along, of course, but now it’s confirmed. That Boris Johnson was unfit to lead the country. He should never have been prime minister.

Even today, there are some Tories who still crave the blond wonder’s return. He delivered an emphatic general election victory; maybe he can do the same again. Better than Kemi or Robert. He would see off Nigel Farage, you bet he would.

The man himself is also believed to harbour thoughts of some spiffing, splendiferous comeback, akin to that of his great hero, Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, he is paid a fortune to tour the world lecturing and to pour forth his views in the media. To which the rejoinder should be shouted and writ large: 23,000.

That is how many lives could have been saved but for his incompetence; if the government he led had imposed the Covid-19 lockdown earlier. He will splutter, and squeal, and reach for convoluted language, as he always does when cornered – but in her damning report, Heather Hallett, the chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, is plain and direct, brooking no opposition, leaving nowhere for him to turn.

His administration’s response to the pandemic was “too little, too late”. Johnson “should have appreciated sooner” that this was a crisis that required prime-ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response. A “toxic and chaotic culture” in government affected decision-making. Johnson failed to tackle that breakdown, and sometimes “actively [encouraged] it”. The failure to learn from mistakes during later waves of the outbreak was “inexcusable”. On it goes, this litany of horror and shame.

We were aware that something was terribly wrong. Other countries were making their citizens wear masks, and testing, and taking temperatures at airports. Not Britain. Stories abounded of travellers leaving one nation in purdah and returning to a place where life was continuing as normal. In the UK, crowds were attending football matches and pop concerts, while elsewhere, darkness had taken hold.

Hallett says that if the UK shutdown had been enforced a week earlier, the number of people who died in that first wave would have been reduced by 48 per cent. That is approximately 23,000 deaths.

To which you want to weep, for the unnecessary suffering, the lives needlessly cut short, the families and loved ones shattered. And by what? By the inadequacy and braggadocio (a word you’re familiar with, Boris) of someone who did not do detail; who presided over a regime that, by the way in which some of its members behaved, showed that it did not understand and did not care.

A fish rots from the head, and from Boris the bounder, the busker, the ultimate booster, the government took its cue. Not only in England, but across the remaining three home nations. When the mandatory closure came, it was “implemented in the genuine and reasonable belief it was required”. But then this: “They had no choice by then. But it was through their own acts and omissions that they had no choice.”

Johnson, then, made a bad situation far worse than it ought to have been. When it came, the lockdown was longer than it otherwise might have been, leaving mental scars in its wake. Why? Because those in charge did not take “timely and decisive action”.

That’s you, Boris. Yes, you: the boss of the adviser who flouted the rules, driving the length of the land when he was infected and should have been at home, and the Downing Street carousers who partied, as you did yourself, while everyone else hunkered down. Leaders lead by example, and that is the one you set.

Meanwhile, finer brains were applying themselves to finding a vaccine – and in that, the UK succeeded. But please, don’t cling to that. More telling is that it took time for the treatment to be effective in the UK, and a new variant was spreading. Failing to “take swift and decisive action, yet again”, prompted another devastating closure of schools.

It’s a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching read, and utterly damning. But we knew; of course we did.