Rubbish!’ Boris Johnson dismisses claim he wanted UK to let Covid virus ‘rip’, let the old die and ‘let the bodies pile high’

Boris Johnson today furiously denied claims he wanted to let Covid ‘rip’ through the country at the height of the pandemic or let the old bear the brunt of the virus.

The former prime minister dismissed as ‘rubbish’ claims made in the diaries of Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser, that he advocated a laissez-faire attitude in autumn 2020.

In a fiery evidence session at the official Covid Inquiry Mr Johnson admitted using the words attributed to him in meetings, including that they should ‘let the bodies pile high’.

But he defiantly insisted that he had been presenting counter arguments to the scientists and acting as a devil’s advocate.

In clashes with inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC he said: ‘I think, frankly, it does not do justice to what we did – our thoughts, our feeling, my thoughts, my feelings, to say that we were remotely reconciled to fatalities across the country or that I believed that it was acceptable to let it rip.’

‘What I was asking and I had to do this. I had to challenge the consensus in the meeting. You have got to understand, these meetings, comprised an overwhelming number of very, very talented, brilliant public health officials, civil servants and so on, scientists.

‘And I was representing the only layperson in the meeting.’

He added: ‘If you look at what we actually did, never mind the accounts that you have culled from people’s jottings from meetings that I’ve been in, if you look what I actually said and what I actually did, there is an abundance of quotation from me, millions of words that I’ve spoken in Parliament or in press conferences or whatever, if you look at what we actually did, we went into lockdown as soon as we could for the first time round.

‘And we sensibly went for a regional approach when the disease picked up again, and then again went into lockdown on October 30/31.’

Pressed on whether he should have introduced a circuit-breaker lockdown after calls for one in September 2020, Boris Johnson said: ‘I wanted to keep going with a regional approach.

‘We had 10 million people in lockdown on September 22, it was not as though large parts of the country were not going through another lockdown.’

He said he was advised in October that a regional approach was still justified, adding: ‘I’m not going to pretend that this was an easy decision – it certainly wasn’t and it was one I agonised over – but I thought that a regional approach could still save us and could still help us.’

Mr Johnson added: ‘We’d learned a lot in that period, we’d seen the horrors of the first wave and the shock of what had happened, and it was appalling and we’d seen the suffering.

‘But we’d also seen the impact of the pandemic of the measures that we’ve taken. And our objective remain the same, which was to protect the NHS and save life.

‘But and our strategy was to use NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) but the it seemed to me, given the disparity in the in the prevalence across the country, that a local approach was worth pursuing.

‘And in justice and fairness a lot of people thought that the same because they thought ‘the disease is not prevalent here, it is not circulating in my community. Why am I being locked down?’ And we had to address that issue as well.’

Mr Johnson said that the tier system was working before the alpha variant or coronavirus, also known as the Kent variant, was identified.

‘I actually think that programme had a very good chance of working- if you look at where we were by November 22 the disease was starting to turn down, incidence was turning down, and the thing that really threw us off was of course, the Kent variant, the Alpha variant,’ he told the UK Covid-19 public inquiry.

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