Johnson getting bitten by his own decisions

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Given Boris Johnson’s long-standing propensity neither to pay much attention to detail nor to think through the consequences of any decision he takes, it was probably inevitable that the remit he himself gave to the Covid inquiry, and the decision on who should lead it would come back to bite him on his backside. ‘Seat-of-the-pants’ government is rarely going to be consequence free, but a man who has talked, or rather lied, his way out of every scrape he’s ever been in was hardly going to start giving careful thought to the remit, the role, or the personnel involved in the inquiry. The fact that he believed – and appears still to believe – that his handling of Covid was an unqualified success would hardly have encouraged him to do so either. It is a lack of care and attention which is now threatening a situation where the government ends up taking its own inquiry to court to avoid releasing documents. Or facing fines and a jail term for refusing to hand over the documents which the inquiry says it needs. Comic opera would be an overly kind description. It would make for an interesting court case, although publicly-expressed legal opinion to date seems to be near-unanimous that it’s a case which the government is destined to lose.

In principle, the demand that documents which are ‘unambiguously irrelevant’ to the inquiry should not need to be handed over is not entirely unreasonable, but the question which that raises is about who decides what is relevant or not, and on what basis, especially given the current government’s record of hiding anything which might be embarrassing to them. It’s doubtful that anyone would expect that all other aspects of government should have come to a complete stop so that ministers would concentrate 100% of their time and effort on dealing with the pandemic. However, although discussions on policy in areas unrelated to Covid might appear to be irrelevant in themselves, if a substantial proportion of ministerial time was being diverted from dealing with the pandemic to trivial issues of detail in other fields, for example, that could well have impeded the proper handling of the pandemic, and the apparently irrelevant becomes relevant. It would also give an insight into how seriously the government was taking the threat. It’s a judgement which only the inquiry itself is in a position to make – and one which, indeed, the inquiry must make. The extent to which government paid the appropriate amount of attention to the pandemic goes to the heart of what the inquiry was set up to determine. The fact that documentation is handed over to the inquiry chair doesn’t necessarily mean that all of that documentation must therefore become public; it’s perfectly possible for the two sides to agree, after reviewing the evidence, which parts should be redacted or omitted from any public reports, but allowing those who are being investigated to determine what is or is not relevant would be a severe restriction on the ability of the inquiry to reach a considered opinion. The government’s unwillingness to engage in such a process raises the obvious question – what have they got to hide?