Carla Carniel/Reuters
The U.K.’s official inquiry into how Boris Johnson’s government handled the COVID pandemic heard shocking and wildly profane evidence on Tuesday as text messages and diary entries from the former prime minister’s colleagues were read out.
The independent panel, which was formally established last year, is currently hearing testimony about the decision-making and political governance of Britain in response to the crisis which began in early 2020. Johnson—who ordered the inquiry—has predictably been at the heart of some of the most damning revelations.
In Tuesday’s evidence, a lawyer for the inquiry showed passages from the 2020 diaries of Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s former chief scientific adviser. In one excerpt, Vallance wrote that Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going.”