 ac amser yn ymweld i'ch bobl ar y gyflawn. Rydyn ni'n fawr datblygu, ac mae wir yn dda, rwy'n ei wneud i'r rhamwg o ddweud y dyfodol, y fawr yn ddweud i'r ddweud y ddechrau, mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, a'r bod yn grwypo sy'n oed yn gweithio'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n ddweud i'r ddweud, mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r reisgopeth will place the state's actions under the microscope and the government would be required to disclose all relevant information. In light of those words, could I just ask you please to confirm what your approach has been to the disclosure of your own COVID-related emails, WhatsApps and notes? I've done my best to give everything of any conceivable relevance. Has that always been your position, Mr Johnson? Yes. Can we have 265-619, please, page 68? This is a WhatsApp between your former permanent secretary and number 10 and then latterly cabinet secretary and your principal private secretary, Simon Cazan, respectively Martin Reynolds. And the cabinet secretary said the prime minister is mad if he doesn't think his WhatsApps will become public via the COVID inquiry. He was clearly not in the mood for that discussion tonight. That date, the 20th of December 2021, was just five days after you had in fact appointed my lady as the chair of this inquiry. Was there a debate at that time within government as to whether or not your WhatsApps should be disclosed and if so, whether or not they would become public by virtue of their disclosure in this process? I don't remember that, the conversation to which the cabinet secretary is referring and I've handed over all the relevant WhatsApps. The inquiry has indeed requested all the key COVID-related texts, WhatsApps and so on from January 22, February 22, and it must be made absolutely clear that throughout the course of the litigation in the summer and throughout these proceedings, you have made available, it would seem everything in your possession. You made clear, I think, through your solicitors, however, that you had a phone which you used from May 2021 and you've made available the WhatsApps and the emails from that phone, therefore, between May 21 and February 22, the end of the period that the inquiry was requesting about, but following a well-publicised security breach, you had not been able to access the previous phone because you'd stopped using it and you were fearful that if you tried to access it, you'd delete its data. Is that right? That's right. Were you able to get access, ultimately, to the contents of that first phone, the old phone? Yes, we've sent it off to some technical people and they activated it. Was there a time gap, as your solicitors have described it, on that phone a period between the 30th of January 2020 and June 2020, during which time the WhatsApps have not been capable of being reinstalled and disclosed? That's right. Do you know why your phone was missing those 5000-odd WhatsApps? I don't know the exact reason, but it looks as though it's something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow, automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up. So, I can't give you the technical explanation, but that's the best I'm able to give. The technical report that your solicitors kindly provided demonstrates that there may have been a factory reset of the phone at the end of January 2020 and then an attempt to reinstall the contents later in June 2020. May I just ask you this? Was it you, if that was a factory reset that was done, was it you that tried to reset the phone or not? The factory reset. There is a device or a capability on the phone which allows its contents to be entirely reset. I don't remember. During the course of the litigation this summer between the inquiry and the Cabinet Office, did you of course make plain your stated wish that the WhatsApps, which were the subject of that litigation, should be disclosed if they've been your own WhatsApps? All right. I, for the avoidance of doubt, make it absolutely clear I haven't removed any WhatsApps from my phone and I've given you everything that I think you need. I ask Mr Johnson because this issue has been trailed in the press and it's important that you have an opportunity of explaining why those WhatsApps are not available. In your witness statement at paragraph 10 you say, Mr Johnson, that unquestionably mistakes were made and for those you say you unreservedly apologise. We have the statement there. I'd like you please to set out in broad terms, of course we'll be looking at the detail a bit later, but in broad terms what mistakes you refer to there bearing in mind that we are only concerned in this module Mr Johnson with the core decision making, with the lockdown decisions, the NPIs, the non-form school interventions and so on, not vaccines, therapeutics, antivirals. Again, what mistakes do you unquestionably accept were made? Well I think if you look at my statement I point out that we rely so much on messaging to help contain the virus and we needed a the public to understand the messaging as straightforward away as possible and they really did by and large. One problem we had that I mentioned is that because of the very natural and proper right of the devolved administrations to have their own approach sometimes there was a bit of so the BBC news would have one message from number 10, then a slightly different one from Scotland or wherever and that I think we need to sort that out in the future and I'm sure there are plenty of other things that we could have done differently but I've no doubt it will come to them in the course of the examination. So your position today is and you appear to refer to it as the first issue that the primary mistake made rests in the context of the messaging and the all communications with the devolved administrations? You asked me to cite a mistake that we made, I didn't say that was the primary mistake. What primary mistakes Mr Johnson are you referring to in paragraph 10 when you say there was terrible suffering but in relation to which where we failed I apologise again for what are you apologising in that statement? I think just to go back to your main point which is that so many people suffered, so many people lost their lives. Inevitably in the course of trying to handle a very very difficult pandemic in which we had to balance appalling harms on either side of the of the decision we may have made mistakes. I think it I don't want to try to anticipate the discussion which I'm sure we will get into about the timings of MPIs, lockdowns. Inevitably we got some things wrong. I think we were doing our best at the time given what we knew given the information available to me at the time I think we did our level best. Were there things that we should have done differently unquestionably but you know I would I would struggle to to itemise them all before you now in a hierarchy. I'm afraid I think it would be I tried it easier to try and explain what happened as we went through. You say in your witness statement we are unquestionably made mistakes. Can you draw a distinction for us please between yourself personally and the government to what extent do you accept? I take personal responsibility as opposed to accepting it on behalf of your administration. So I take personal responsibility for all the decisions that we made? It's obvious Mr Johnson that many of the most difficult and momentous decisions rested upon your own shoulders as Prime Minister. Do you take responsibility for whatever my lady makes of the speed of the government's response in January, February, March of 2020? Of course. And the way in which the various moving parts of the government, the advisory committees, the departments, the agencies and so on responded. Do you take responsibility for the lockdown decisions whichever way they went and their timeliness whatever my lady makes of them? The manner in which patients were discharged from hospitals into the care sector? Of course. The explosion of the virus within the residential care sector? The general speed at which the restrictions were eased? Yes. The eat out to help out scheme. And then laterally in 2020 the decision not to introduce a circuit breaker in September or October or to introduce a tear system earlier when the prevalence of the virus was lower for good or ill. Yes, but we did have local restrictions from a very early date. May I just ask you please this question? Also you refer to mistakes. It's very important that the inquiry understands to what extent it's accepted that there were mistakes as opposed to an acceptance that with hindsight the government could have done better. Do you mean there were failings, things or decisions that you got avoidably wrong? Whether because they were the wrong decisions or because your management and leadership meant that the right decisions were less likely to be taken or do you mean with hindsight you just could have done better? That's a sort of deterministic question, isn't it? Well, it's important. I think the answer is that with hindsight it may be easy to see things that we could have done differently or it may be possible to see things that we could have done differently. At the time I felt, I know that everybody else felt that we were doing our best in very difficult circumstances to protect life and protect the NHS. It is impossible and arguably improper to attribute any individual death causally to any particular governmental decision and as I know you know and a no possible purpose would be served in such an exercise. But do you accept that overall the government decision making, not the pandemic, but the government decision making in response led materially to there being a greater number of excess deaths in the United Kingdom than might otherwise have been the case? I can't give you the answer to that question. I'm not sure. I noticed that in your opening preamble a few months ago you produced a slide saying that the UK was I think second only to Italy for excess deaths, correct? That's not to the best of my knowledge the case and I think that many other, all I would say is that many other countries suffered terrible losses from Covid. They did. The evidence that I've seen suggests that we were well down the European table and well down the world table. That is of course no comforts to the bereaved and their families. That seems to be the statistical reality. The evidence before Malady is that the United Kingdom had one of the highest rates of excess death in Europe. Almost all other Western European countries had a lower level of excess death. Italy was tragically in a worse position than the United Kingdom. I don't wish to contradict you Mr Keith, but the evidence, the LNS data I saw put us I think about 16th or 19th in a table of 33. In Western Europe we were one of the worst off, if not the second worst off. You must have long reflected since that time why that was so. Why do you think that we had the rate of excess death in this country that we did ultimately have? As I say, I think that the statistics vary and I think that every country struggled with a new pandemic and I think the UK from the evidence that I have seen was well down the European table and obviously even further down the world table. If I had to answer why I think we faced particular headwinds, I would say it was irrespective of government action. We have an elderly population, extremely elderly population. We do suffer sadly from lots of COVID related comorbidities and we are a very densely populated country, the second most densely populated country in Europe and that did not help. Do you accept that government actions materially contributed to that outcome? It wasn't just a matter of the state of the healthcare system density age of population and in fact the geographical location of the United Kingdom. Given that other countries have excellent healthcare systems and face similar problems and ended up statistically with more excess deaths per 100,000, the answer is Adena. You are obviously extremely well aware of the argument that the lockdown decisions themselves cumulatively and individually contributed to the number of excess deaths. What do you say to that? I say that I don't know but I'm aware of the arguments that are made. What I would say respectfully to people is that they were very, very difficult decisions and the issue of the timeliness of lockdowns was clearly one that we considered very hard at the time and you will have seen from the evidence that there were strong arguments against going too early into lockdowns especially when it came to that first series of March NPIs and you will remember the arguments that were made, two arguments against early action and they were the risk of behavioural fatigue and then the risk of a bounce back or what you've called uncoining of the spring and they were made partly and they certainly had a big effect on me. Could you assist the inquiry please with something about the nature of the heavy responsibility which rested on your shoulders? It is perhaps self-evident that only the most difficult and momentous decisions come for the Prime Minister. That's correct. Were there any good or easy decisions to be made in this context? I can't think it was single. I suppose it was an easy decision to say that we should go ahead with the rollout of both Pfizer and AstraZeneca as soon as they've been approved by the MHRA but when it came to the balancing of the need to protect the public and protect the NHS and the damage done by lockdowns it was incredibly difficult. Pause there please. I do understand emotions are running very high. I do and I think it's most unfortunate when I have to ask people to leave but we have to ensure that this hearing is effective and it's got to be effective not just for people in this hearing room but for people watching on the online streaming. So please make sure your behaviour is appropriate to a public hearing of a statutory inquiry. Thank you. So I was into it. No it's fine. We'll look at the nature of the particular decisions in greater detail later but broadly speaking so that we know the life of the land and we know how you approach these issues. Were the majority of the most momentous decisions, the decisions for example to impose the lockdowns and social distancing measures and so on, were they decisions that were in practice made by you even if they were affirmed or endorsed by the cabinet later or were they decisions that were entirely open-endedly made by cabinet? That's a very good question because I think it was it was both. A huge number of decisions because they had to be taken so fast or followed up directly to me but there were also a large number of decisions. I do think this maybe hasn't come out as much as it should but were the subject of exhaustive cabinet discussion. In his witness statement Michael Gove has said that the wider cabinet was brought into decisions at times too late and too little. Mr Javid has said in his witness statement that the cabinet was designed in his view to place Dominic Cummings and the Prime Minister as the decision makers to centralise power in number 10 and in his own witness statement Mr Cummings has said that the cabinet was largely irrelevant to policy or execution on account of the leaks, your inability to chair it and because it was seen by number 10 as not being a serious place for serious discussion. I don't think that's true. I think there were some really excellent cabinet discussions about the trade-offs in fact to make a comment about cabinet as a whole in terms of the speed of lockdowns which was what we're talking about. I think it probably would be fair to say that the cabinet was on the whole more reluctant to impose MPIs than necessarily than I was. That was true for every member of the cabinet but that would be a general comment. The lockdown decision of the 23rd of March 2020 was debated as you rightly say at a great length on the Sunday, on the Monday by the various bodies but in particular Cobra but it was debated in Cobra on Monday the 23rd. A public announcement of the law record was made that day that evening in fact and then it went to cabinet on the Tuesday so in relation to the first lockdown decision it's obvious that cabinet debated it after the event. In relation to the second lockdown that of November 2020 Mr Johnson do you recall whether or not that decision was made by a COVID ministerial committee or by cabinet? I'm afraid I can't remember the sequence there but just picking you up on the first lockdown which was actually a sort of crescendo of measures I'm fairly certain we had a long cabinet call at least to discuss it. Well we'll look at that in detail later. The enquiries heard a great deal of evidence Mr Johnson about the way in which your secretaries of state would naturally and permissively come at the same issue whether to have a lockdown, whether to ease, whether to have a tier system and the like from different angles. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care understandably would promote the public health consequences and the need to act in the public health. The Chancellor would frequently promote the economic considerations but all its obvious were aware to greater or lesser degree of the societal and economic harm that would result from the decisions that you were having to contemplate making. Who ultimately had to weigh up and determine the competing public interest considerations, public health, societal harm, economic damage and so on on whose shoulders rested that debate. That's the job of the Prime Minister. There's only the Prime Minister that can can do that but I think that that wasn't actually a bad way of doing it to have different interests represented by different secretaries of state in different departments. Presumably you needed the advice of your close advisers, cabinet secretary and those in the civil service in addition to the advice that you were receiving from or secretaries of state. Could you give please the inquire an indication as to the identity of the persons upon whom you were most reliant in that debate in that weighing up exercise? Well I don't wish to embarrass distinguished public officials by naming them but I don't know what they are. I'm quite happy to remain anonymous but I can certainly tell you that I had this brilliant and understanding healthcare issues and an absolutely brilliant private secretary for healthcare. The inquire is obviously heard from a number of advisers. I think you've heard from both of those individuals. So there's no debate about their identity Mr Johnson and no risk. The evidence is Mr Johnson that you received advice from advisers in number 10. Yes. Obviously your chief adviser Mr Cummings. Yes. You received advice from the cabinet secretary. Firstly, yes. Mark Saddwell and then latterly Simon Case. You received advice from the CMO and then general chief scientific adviser. Yes, I'm sorry I should have cited them first, yes. It's apparent that on top of the formal advisory structures, the meetings of the CMO and the GCSA, the meetings of the cabinet secretary, the meetings of your ministers, you had a profusion of meetings with your chief adviser Mr Cummings, with your cabinet secretary, with your principal private secretary and so on. There were a huge number of rolling meetings with your innermost group of advisers and I want to know to what extent therefore you came to rely upon them in the ultimate decision making process. I of course relied on the advice I was given but the way it works is advisers advise and ministers decide and that's what happened. You received a great deal of advice from the chief medical officer and the government's scientific chief adviser. They were a vital source of advice, that's obvious. You were aware that SAGE met hundreds of times, that's to say the scientific advisory group for emergencies. Did you ever read their minutes or were you wholly reliant on the CMO and the GCSA to relay to you what SAGE had said? I think I did once or twice look at the, maybe more or not, I looked at what SAGE had actually said and SAGE certainly produced a lot of documentation but I think that the CSA and the CMO did a nice standing job of leading SAGE and of distilling their views and conveying to me. The SAGE minutes were described as consensus minutes because they were designed to be read at speed, to be able to get to the heart of the issue immediately on reading them and to ensure that the advice that was being given would be readily and speedily understood. Did you ever think of calling as a general practice for those minutes so that you could yourself read them? Many of them were only eight or nine pages long. As I say, I think I did from time to time look at the consensus minutes. I think in retrospect it might have been valuable to try to hear the SAGE conversation unpasturised itself but I was more than content with the very clear summaries that I was getting from the CSA and the CMO. There were hundreds of consensus minutes which you read only or were given only a fraction of them. That sounds right to me, yes. We'll look in detail at some of the scientific debates that engage government, particularly in the middle of March, behavioural fatigue, herd immunity, the debate about the reasonable worst-case scenario and so on. Yes. Did you not think of looking at the scientific horse in the mouth and seeing what was actually being said by the government's primary scientific advisory committee on these issues when you, as now appears to be the case, you became engaged, particularly in the debate of behavioural fatigue. Why didn't you call for the primary material? I think that's a good question. I was very, very much impressed and by and dependent upon the CMO and the CSA, both of whom are outstanding experts in their field and it felt to me that I couldn't do better than that. The CMO and the CSA were of course concerned with medicine and science and SAGE was concerned, as it says on the tin, with science. CMO is a professor of public health. I mean, he knows an awful lot about epidemiology and public behaviour in an epidemic. He does. You had no advisory structure around you, however, and by contrast, that dealt with matters such as the economic damage that would be done by the lockdown decisions. There was no pandemic or civil emergency or societal advisory body, which might be thought to be analogous to SAGE. In hindsight, and with the passage of time, do you suggest that there was an absence of a proper advisory structure to deal with the other issues and the other considerations which weighed in the balance when you came to make those final decisions? I've thought about that a great deal and I think in the end that there is such a body and it's called HM Treasury and that is what they do. You referred earlier on, Ms Geith, to the competing perspectives of the Whitehall Departments and the Secretaries of State. For all its difficulties, I think it did work well in allowing me to get a balance of the argument. The evidence appears already to suggest that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Her Majesty's Treasury had considerable influence over the ultimate decision-making process because the Chancellor would come and see you in bilateral meetings. There were bilateral meetings in the week of the 16th of March before the first lockdown decision in late October, before the second in the summer of 21, and then again in December of 21 in relation to Omicron, and also eat out to help out. But that advice was given to you by the Chancellor and Her Majesty's Treasury in a way that wasn't openly transparent in the way that the sage advice was provided to you. There were no minutes disclosed of the advice that you have been given to the public. There was no regular production of material or any kind of published transparent economic analysis provided to you. Do you think in hindsight that that was an error? I think that there was certainly transparent economic analysis of the cost of some of the measures that we were obliged to enact, and the fall in GDP, the cost of the CJRS, and the other schemes was plain for all to see. That was all public. Of course what was not public and is not traditionally public is ministerial conversations that have earned discussion between ministers, but again I think the perspective that I was being offered by the Treasury was a very useful one, just as a perspective of the devolved of health was a very useful one. The material, so that's to say diary entries and readouts of minutes and so on, Mr Johnson, show that the Chancellor and Shecker would, in this difficult context of making the ultimate decisions about lockdowns and easing in tears and so on, often get the last word by way of a bilateral meeting that would take place just before you made a final decision. Also the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care was occasionally excluded from meetings when public health matters were being discussed. Were you aware of that? I reject that characterization of what took place. The overwhelming priority of the government was protect the NHS, save lives, that was our objective, and that was where my officials were coming from, that was what we wanted to do, and I think it was important in that context that there were lots of things we had to do that were very difficult, very costly, and it was right to have endless conversations with the treasers. It was what we did. You know of course that a great deal of evidence had been given to Melody about the operation and the competence of your administration. It needs to be stated absolutely plainly that the inquiry has absolutely no interest in the salaciousness or the nature of Mr Cummings' linguistic style or the WhatsApps, but it does have an interest of course in whether or not his communications revealed an abusive and misogynistic impact. The WhatsApps and the texts shed a direct light on the competence of the government, how well or not the government machinery operated, what you all thought about each other, and what some of you thought privately about the decisions that were being taken. We're going to look in detail at them later, but it's fair to say that in the round that material paints a appalling picture, not all the time, but at times of incompetence and disarray. Can I comment on that? I think there's two things need to be separated out there. I think it is certainly true that this inquiry has, and I'm glad of it, has dredged up a phenomenal quantity of the type of material that would never have been available to any previous inquiry into doings in number 10 because it's WhatsApp communications of a kind that would not have been possible. That's a good thing because you can get a texture of the feeling for the relationships and the human beings. I would make a couple of points. First of all, a lot of the language, the style that you refer to is completely unknown to me, or indeed to anybody else not on that group. I've apologised to one particular person who suffered abuse in that, in one of those publicised WhatsApp exchanges, but I would make a distinction between the type of language used and the decision-making processes of the government and what we got done. I would submit that any path on an effective government, and I think of the Satric government or the Blair government, has a lot of challenging and competing characters whose views about each other might not be fit to print, but to get an awful lot done, and that's what we did. Your own Cabinet Secretary, Mark, said well. He was, of course, asked to move on and will come to that later in May 2020, described according to Sir Patrick Vallance, your administration is brutal and useless and observed that it was hard to motivate people in number 10 in such terrible times if they were being shot in the back. That would appear to be a reference to the doings, as you say, of number 10, to the process and the operation of government as opposed to the atmospherics. Would you not agree? Again, I think that actually what you're looking at in all this stuff is a lot of highly talented and highly motivated people who are stricken with anxiety about what is happening, about the pandemic, who are doing their best, and who, like all human beings, under great stress and great anxiety about themselves and their own performance will be inclined to be critical of others. And I think that that would have been the same of any administration facing the same sort of challenges on that scale. Do you accept that there is a considerable body of material which addresses not just their private thoughts of the other individuals in government, of them personally, but relates to the performance of government, to the way in which your administration actually operated? Do you accept that as a general proposition? I do, and I think that that was a good and a healthy thing because given the scale of what we were facing, we needed constantly to challenge ourselves and constantly to try to do better. Your own chief advisor, Mr Cummings, described on the fourth of May something the government had done as being the best success of the whole criminally incompetent government performance. How could that be a good thing? Because what he is trying to do is to, he's not for me to explain his quotation, you can ask him yourself, but what we were generally trying to do was to make sure that we delivered the best possible service for the people of the UK who were going through an absolutely terrible, terrible time. And it would not have been right to have a logo, if we'd had a logo of WhatsApp saying, aren't we doing brilliantly, folks? Isn't this going well? I think your criticisms might have been frankly even more pungent. On the 27th of March, after Mr Cummings had asserted that Whitehall had nearly killed huge numbers of people and cost millions of jobs, and that Mr Hancock had failed to get on top of the testing problems, you yourself said these three words, totally fucking hopeless. That was a reference to the performance of an important part of government. I'd stress the word nearly in that, in all response, Mr Johnson, and I would say that my job was not uncritically to accept that everything we were doing was good, though as it happens, as I said to you, I do think that the country as a whole had notable achievements during the crisis. My job was to try to get a load of quite disparate, quite challenging characters to keep going and through a long period and to keep doing their level best to protect the country. That was my job. Do you accept the evidence from Helen McNamara, by which you will be aware, and also from former Cabinet Secretaries that Mr Cummings himself contributed to such a toxic atmosphere that civil servants simply didn't want to work in the heart of government? Helen McNamara said the relationships in number 10 and the Cabinet Office had a real and damaging impact. You were told directly by Simon Case on the 2 July lots of top draw people had refused to come to work because of the toxic reputation of your, I emphasise your operation, were you aware that there were individual civil servants and advisers who were not prepared to work in your administration because of the atmosphere and the working relationships which were in play? First of all, no. Second, I was not aware of that. Secondly, I didn't see any sign of that. I saw brilliantly talented people when we wanted, when we advertised for a post, when we wanted to recruit for a position in my private office, we had, as far as I could see, no difficulty getting wonderful people to step forward. I think if I might make one, I think one self-criticism or another self-criticism, I think that the gender balance of my team should have been better. To your earlier question, looking back at it, when I was running London, it was great, and it was 50-50, and it was a very harmonious team. I think sometimes during the pandemic, too many meetings were too male dominated, if I'm absolutely honest with you, and I think that was a, I tried sometimes to rectify it, I tried to recruit a former colleague from City Hall, but I think that was something we should have done better. Simon Case, who was then the Permanent Secretary in number 10, what sapped you, yourself on the 2nd of July, to say that lots of people, lots of talk draw, people had refused to come because of the toxic reputation of your operation? I don't remember. What did you do? I don't remember that, and my impression was that we had no difficulty recruiting the best possible people. Could we have please 48313 page 16 on the screen? These are communications between Mr Cummings and yourself in May 2020, we're concerned with the bottom half of the page. So can you expand it because I can't? Yes, 7th of May, Hancock is unfit for this job, the incompetence that constant lies, the obsession with media bullshit, reference to testing, you must ask him where we'll get to 500,000 per day, and where's your plan for testing, and if you can scroll back out. Just pause a second Mr Johnson, if you then scroll in please to the bottom half of the page, the last part, Mr Cummings says it'll certainly be a cock up like everything else, but it'll be far from the worst of our cock ups over the next eight weeks, you need to think of any Hancock, and so on and so forth. You cannot suggest that you are unaware of the opinion taken by your chief advisor over your secretary's estate for health, you cannot suggest you are unaware of the concerns expressed by your cabinet secretary about the toxic reputation of your operation, because he wants to do you directly, you cannot suggest that there weren't grave concerns being expressed in Downing Street, that there were people who simply would not come and work for you because of the atmosphere you were allowed to develop. So first of all in politics there's never a time when you're not, if you're prime minister you are constantly being lobbied by somebody to sack somebody else, it's just what I'm afraid happens and it's part of life, everybody's constantly militating against some other individual for some reason of their right, it's just not, I'm afraid that's the nature of it. It is perfectly true that this advisor in particular thought, had an opinion of the health secretary, I thought he was wrong, I stuck by the health secretary, I thought the health secretary worked very hard and whatever, he may have had defects, but I thought that he was doing his best in very difficult circumstances and I thought he was a good communicator. Can we have 303245, your first and then your second cabinet secretary communicate by WhatsApp page 9, Mr Case refers at the top of the page to how you have told Mr Cummings outright to stop talking to the media in his presence, this place is just insane, zero discipline and then the bottom half of the page, these people are so mad, madly self-defeating, it's hard to ask people to march, they should be to the sound of gunfire and then the cabinet secretary, the cabinet secretary is the head of the civil service, is he or she not, I've never seen a bunch of people less well equipped to run a country, that's not a matter of atmospherics or lobbying or part of the general day in day out friction within government, is it? Yes, I think it is and I think that if, as I say, if you'd had the views of the mandarinate about the Thatcher government in unexplagated WhatsApps, I think you would have found that they were pretty fritty. WhatsApp conversation is intended to be, though clearly it isn't, a femoral, it tends to the pejorative and the hypothetical and I think that the worst vice in my view would have been to have had an operation where everybody was so deferential and so reluctant to make waves that they never expressed their opinion, they never challenged and they never doubted. It was much more important to have a group of people who were willing to doubt themselves and to doubt each other and I think that that was creatively useful rather than the reverse. Some of these senior advisers didn't just lack deference to use your word, Mr Johnson, they doubted you and they doubted your ability and your confidence, as you now know from having seen the material. Could we have, please, 273901, page 188, that's from the 19th of September, page 229, there is a reference to leadership position. Would you like me to put? Yes, I'm just going to put because it's right and proper and fair that you're asking of your response to some of the material which has been produced to this inquiry and then page 245, the prime minister begins to argue for letting it all rip. They've had a good innings and there is a reference there to lack of leadership, the last line. This all feels like a complete lack of leadership. Let me put the question, whether or not these significant number of advice has correctly stated the position, whether or not this was genuine, whether or not there were significant feelings in your own and your government's competence. Would you accept that it is extraordinary that the government's chief scientific adviser, its chief adviser, its cabinet secretaries, its deputy cabinet secretary should all be commenting in these terms about competence and about performance about you? I think this is wholly to be expected and this is a period in which the country is going through a resurgence of the virus, you're looking at the October period and Patrick, the CSA, talks about inconsistency and I've got to face the reality as prime minister that the virus seems to be refusing to be suppressed by the measures we have used so far. We are going to need different measures. We have come out of lockdown and we are going into the tiering system. Of course we are changing but so did the collective understanding of the science and if you look back at what happened during Covid we had radically different views over the period, over the efficacy of masks, over whether asymptomatic transmission could take place. We had a totally different view within months about whether ventilators would be needed. I was told to begin with we needed 25% of patients would need ventilators that turned out not to be true. Then on this particular issue you've got the scientists calling for us to go early and go hard and this takes us back to your initial line of questioning. Well earlier on they had been saying expressly that if you go hard too soon then you have two problems, behavioural fatigue and bounce back and the problem that I was facing and it was an appalling problem in October was that we didn't have therapeutics or we didn't have what we had, some therapeutics but we didn't have a vaccine, we didn't have a way out, a medical solution. We were being forced to use NPIs and at this particular moment I'm sure we'll come to the October, November lockdowns. My anxiety was that we were going to have to do the same thing over and over again and I think what those notebooks reflect and what all those comments reflect is the deep anxiety of a group of people doing their level best cannot see an easy solution and are naturally self-critical of others. All right. It's obvious that these things were said at the time you say not to you although I've put to you a WhatsApp which was sent directly to you and there are obviously others. So a WhatsApp that claims to have said something directly to me? Well the WhatsApp has been taken of course from the material which you've provided and from obviously the phones from other people who were interlocutors. It's from a correction to Keith. What that WhatsApp was was a WhatsApp from the Cabinet Secretary saying that he told me directly something. I didn't think I saw a WhatsApp directly to me. Mark said well on the 2nd of July WhatsApp to you directly to say lots of top drawer people had refused to come because the toxic reputation of your operation. Whether this material indicates a significant failing at the heart of government and in failures of competence they undoubtedly will these opinions were expressed at the time and you no doubt accept you're responsible for that state of affairs. You must have reflected Mr Johnson long and hard both whilst in office in your dealings with Mr Cummings and afterwards on what lessons can be learned from the way in which power is exercised and the way in which government performs at the highest level. Have you reflected upon whether or not the system of spads the system by which you receive advice from your political advisers needs to be reformed. Have you reflected on the function and powers and the extent of powers of spads or on the competence of the ministers whose advice you accepted. Well I think with hindsight there's all sorts of things that you could do differently I think at the time I decided that it was best to have an atmosphere of challenge with some strong characters giving me advice and I value that advice. With hindsight you can now see what was going on and you've had this material for some time. Have you reflected on whether or not the inquiry could, if my lady sees fit, make recommendations about the way in which the character such as Mr Cummings about whom some extremely strong views have been expressed should be in the position that he was. Views on whether or not the Prime Minister had access to the correct and proper forms of advice. Are these not issues that you've thought about? Yes but I think overwhelmingly that I did have access to the correct and proper forms of advice and if you ask upon whom I relied for that advice it was the CMO and the CSA together with the experts, the officials in my private office. You lost confidence in your cabinet secretary in May 2020 did you not? Well he asked a step aside. Did you lose confidence in your cabinet secretary in May 2020? Yes he asked a step aside. Did you lose confidence in your chief advisor whom you described as engaging in an orgy of narcissism at the heart of your administration? Well I think he also stepped aside. Did you lose confidence in those senior advisors Mr Johnson and effectively dispose of them both? Well they both stepped aside from government but it was a very difficult, very challenging period. People were getting as you can see from the WhatsApps they were getting very frazzled because they were frustrated COVID kept coming at us in waves after waves and it was very very hard to fight it and people were doing their level best and I don't you know when people are critical of the guy at the top or they're critical of each other that's a reflection of the difficulty of the circumstances. When it became easier in the spring after the during the vaccine rollout people's term changed of course it did but it was a reflection of the agony that the country was going through and that the government was going through. Lady is that a convenient moment I'm about to turn to a completely separate topic. Right I shall return at 20 past.