DEVASTATING NEW BOOK DAMNS BOJO
ASK not for whom the plague bell tolls, Boris Johnson. It tolls for thee.
A devastating new account of Year Covid exposes the Prime Minister’s utter failure to meet the nation’s greatest health crisis for a century.
His deadly delay in imposing lockdowns caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, bringing heartbreak to families across the land.
Driven by Tory ideological obsession about the economy, he made the same mistake not once but three times – largely ignoring the scientific advice he pretended to follow.
His lethal trail of laziness, incompetence and over-confidence is laid bare in new book Failures of State, by investigative journalists Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott.
They interviewed hundreds of key scientists, Cabinet members, doctors, nurses, care-home managers, academics and bereaved families. All agree: “The Prime Minister let us down.”
They claim to have had inside info from a secret Downing Street political adviser, who allegedly disclosed the PM didn’t seem to “give a s***”.
Pressure is mounting for an early public inquiry into the Government’s “war on Covid”. Boris Johnson claims “the time isn’t right”.
But we may be nearing the endgame and, as restrictions ease, it will become harder to delay naming a retired High Court judge to open an inquiry.
The question then may be: can he spin it out beyond the next election – which could be called early to avoid fatal political fallout?
And who should chair it? I nominate Lady Hale, former Supreme Court judge who brought BoJo to book over his unlawful shutdown of Parliament.
The tribunal charge sheet is longer than the floppy-haired philanderer’s sex novel, Seventy Two Virgins, which stars himself.
Failures of State is the first witness for the prosecution. When Johnson does take the stand, the authors foresee “grave questions” for a Prime Minister apparently so fixated by Brexit he only appreciated the extreme danger posed by the virus when it was too late.
They quote lawyers for bereaved families, who say his actions leave the Government vulnerable to civil claims for negligence and violation of human rights. They say lawyers also believe his conduct may amount to “the criminal offence of gross negligence manslaughter,” as he was aware of the right strategy for preventing a second wave and sacrificed lives by not following it.
The stakes are that high. Yet it began with typical Bojo theatricals in January 2020, with a speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich.
With Churchillian flourish, he warned of “a risk new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and desire for market segregation… beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary damage”.
At that moment, humanity would need a country “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles, leap into the