By Ben Kerrigan-
Bereaved family members of covid 19 victims are seeking to hold Boris Johnson accountable over the failures during the pandemic that led to 23,000 excess deaths – as families who lost loved ones to Covid call for him to be barred from public life.
After the Covid inquiry found that thousands of lives could have been spared if the country had locked down a week earlier and that the culture at the heart of No 10 contributed to the government’s pandemic failings, the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said the former prime minister “must be held accountable”.
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The group plan to take the former prime minister to court, but did not say exactly want form any such proceedings would take. Boris Johnson was prime minister of the Uk during the pandemic that saw three lockdowns and disrupted the education of millions of students who were forced to stay home as part of social distancing measures. The cohort of GCSE students that year were marked on teacher assessment.
Johnson, who was generally taking advice from leaders in the medical profession himself contracted the virus, but survived it after a short admission to hospital.
Michael Gove who was a cabinet minister throughout the pandemic – warning against “oversimplifying” the conclusions while former health minister Nadine Dorries described it as “sensationalist”.
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Mr Johnson, his former health secretary Matt Hancock and ex-chancellor Rishi Sunak have so far refused to comment on the report since it was published on Thursday, despite strong criticism of his leadership during the pandemic. Hancock made headlines when he abandoned his marriage by breaking social distancing rules to pursue a new lover he was meant to be working with.
Bereaved families described the former prime minister’s silence as “deafening”, adding: “We are not asking for an apology; we are asking for consequences. Boris Johnson should have no role in public life and no further entitlement to public funds.
“His actions during the pandemic amount to one of the gravest betrayals of the British public in modern history.
“We will therefore now be pursuing all legal options to hold Boris Johnson personally responsible for his actions during the pandemic. Justice for those we lost means real consequences for those who failed them, and we will not stop until that justice is delivered.”
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the public accounts committee criticised the report’s author, Heather Hallett, a former Court of Appeal judge, accusing her of trying to “rewrite history”.
He said: “I think it’s frightfully easy to come up with an inquiry after the event, looking back with hindsight. After all, we MPs were given a briefing a week before the lockdown, and at that point people were confidently predicting that over 2 million people were going to be hospitalised, of which 450,000 were going to die. So you know, people really didn’t know what was going to happen.
“I think it’s just rewriting history, and it’s with hindsight, and I’m not sure the evidence is there to back up some of those claims that 23,000 people died because of that week’s delay. I think that just sounds to me not right.”
The inquiry found that a total lockdown could have been avoided in 2020 if restrictions had been introduced sooner and painted a picture of chaotic decision making at the heart of government.
Asked whether he accepts that a toxic culture in Downing Street led to deaths, Lord Gove told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “No, I don’t accept that either.
“I do certainly think that there were moments when voices were raised, words were used, attitudes were struck that were far from ideal, but the business of government during a crisis can’t be carried on in the manner of a Jane Austen novel.
“It is the case that we were dealing with, as everyone across the world was, an unprecedented crisis with a novel virus that most intelligence agencies now believe was a lab leak rather than a naturally occurring virus, and of course under pressure with imperfect information, mistakes are made, voices are raised.”
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