If you were to watch the TV news, you might think Boris Johnson was making a good fist of it.

The BBC’s report, below, turns out to have been … charitable, at worst – although there is an appendix providing views of his critics:

But it seems quite a lot of information was missed out. That’s hardly surprising when he was in the chair for six hours during the first day, but perhaps it would have been better to use the limited broadcast time to cover the facts, rather than show clips of him waffling.

Today, Yr Obdt Srvt (that’s me) went to the social media. Here’s some of what I found:

So he read hardly any of the scientific information and advice on offer to him.

Then there’s this:

Why wasn’t that broadcast at the top of the news on December 6, 2023? It tells us everything we needed to know about Johnson’s leadership and attitude to people who were likely to become ill with Covid-19: let them die.

And how about this?

So, with Covid-19 cases rising, Johnson – and Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister, remember – decided to launch a scheme that was guaranteed to increase them still more. I believe research suggests a rise of up to 17 per cent was triggered this way.

And, despite protestations that they knew nothing about the scheme, Johnson insisted that his chief scientific and medical advisers were aware of it, and then said he thought in September 2020 that it was odd they hadn’t. Hugo Keith put him straight – at length:

That was all yesterday – and could have been highlighted in TV news reports. Why wasn’t it?

Moving on to today…

If anyone can make that make sense – in any way other than that Johnson was trying to cover his then-prime ministerial derriere against disasters – they are better than This Writer.

First he said one thing, then another, then he tried to blur the positions… This was not the behaviour of a man with a clear position and nothing to hide.

And now, some comedy. It’s kind of “gallows humour”, but in hard times you have to take what you can get, and Boris Johnson having a mental collapse trying to dissociate himself from using the phrase “let the virus rip”, seems likely to be the best for which we can hope:

The implication by Mr Keith – that Johnson’s belief that the people most likely to die were at the end of their lives anyway coloured his decisions on how to combat Covid-19 – seems fair. And nothing that Johnson said is remotely persuasive of the opposite.

In an attempt to regain some credibility, Johnson talked about his time in hospital, after contracting the virus, to show that he did care about what happened to those who caught it:

Are you persuaded?

From there, the inquiry turned to the extra-curricular activities enjoyed by Johnson’s advisers and staff while the rest of us were being kept in our homes.

Here’s his evidence on Dominic Cummings’s visit to Barnard Castle, over which he supported Cummings at the time:

And now let’s hear what he had to say about Partygate – the parties that took place in Downing Street on his watch:

His reference to civil servants “who thought they were following the rules” just makes it seem they must have been extremely dim-witted. The citizens of the UK expect a higher standard of intelligence from their public servants, alongside a higher standard of behaviour.

Now watch him get cornered with a question on whether he could have done more to stop the parties:

Johnson said in his evidence that “the public has the wrong impression of Partygate” – but it seems clear that much of the public has the right impression of what he has been saying over the last two days. Let’s have a smattering:

https://twitter.com/TheMendozaWoman/status/1732693242389389686

Here’s an opinion piece from The Guardian:

In it, Martin Kettle states:

Johnson suffers from a fatal combination of qualities in any leader. He combines indifference to principles and disregard for others with disorganisation of mind and behaviour, and indecisiveness and laziness in action.

It is the reckless incompetence and manifest unsuitability that stand out most.

But this is perhaps the most common question remaining in the public mind after the last two days:

Is there an avenue by which Johnson may be charged with criminal wrongdoing over the way he handled Covid-19?

If so, then yes – he should be prosecuted. Although I would leave it to the experts to determine the actual charge.

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