There is something almost Shakespearean in the way Boris Johnson flinches whenever the UK Covid-19 Inquiry drifts near his name, as if the ghost of lockdowns past is rattling chains in the hallway of public memory. Officially, the Inquiry exists to examine Britain’s handling of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Unofficially as anyone paying the slightest attention has noticed, it has become a stage for a different drama: the collision of politics, corruption, and economics in a country that has never been very comfortable looking at its own reflection.
From the beginning, Covid was treated less like a public health crisis and more like an unplanned stress-test of Britain’s political machinery. It revealed the misalignments, the broken cogs, and the strange, squeaking priorities of a government that seemed to value optics over outcomes. And nowhere has that been more visible than in the Inquiry hearings, which have not so much illuminated what happened as exposed who was afraid of the illumination.
The deeper the Inquiry digs, the clearer it becomes that the real story of the pandemic is not the virus but the system it infiltrated. Pandemic response, after all, is not delivered by microbes or masks, it is delivered by people, often powerful people, whose decisions become invisible architecture for everyone else’s suffering. And so the country now finds itself revisiting the familiar scenes: the delayed lockdowns, the baffling communications, the science-by-WhatsApp, the contracts awarded over brandy and personal acquaintance. The virus spread fast, but political self-interest spread faster.
For Johnson, the Inquiry represents an intolerable inversion of his preferred narrative. He has always been most at ease when he can create his own myth: the raffish hero stumbling through chaos with charm as his compass. But a public inquiry is immune to charm. It deals in documents, not anecdotes; in testimony, not nostalgia. Its job is to sort through the rubble of decisions made at speed and in darkness, and identify whose fingerprints are on the structural failures. And Johnson knows perhaps better than anyone that the Inquiry has found prints.
One cannot help but appreciate the irony. Johnson, the man who once projected himself as the embodiment of British exceptionalism, now finds himself at the mercy of an Inquiry revealing a different kind of exceptionalism, Britain’s talent for turning national emergencies into political opportunities. Pandemic response became a theatre of insider economics, a showcase of how quickly the language of patriotism can be weaponized to justify lucrative shortcuts. A crisis that should have united the country instead magnified the fractures between public duty and private gain.
What unsettles Johnson most, one suspects, is that the Inquiry threatens the political alchemy on which his career has always relied: the transmutation of accountability into affability. In the court of public opinion, he has long survived by virtue of being entertaining. But an Inquiry is the one arena where entertainment offers no protection. There is no stagecraft to hide behind, no well-placed Latin quip to deflect a question. It is a process designed, however imperfectly, to extract truth from power.
And truth is rarely flattering to those who govern.
The deeper one reads into the transcripts, the more the pandemic resembles not a medical emergency but a vast, uncoordinated improvisation. Ministers struggled with basic technology. Advisors competed for influence like characters in an office satire. Vital decisions were delayed not because evidence was lacking but because political consequences were feared. And underpinning it all was the sense that Britain was being run less by strategy than by mood, particularly the moods of the man at the top.
The Inquiry is inconvenient for Johnson not because it misrepresents him, but because it represents him too faithfully. It captures the casual bravado, the disdain for detail, the reliance on instincts over information. It documents the machinery of government bending itself into shapes that suited his preferences rather than public needs. And it reveals a political ecosystem that enabled him, not because it believed in him, but because it benefited from him.
In many ways, the Inquiry has become the nation’s attempt at collective therapy: an effort to understand how a crisis spiralled into a catastrophe and why so many decisions seemed engineered to protect political careers rather than human lives. It asks the questions people muttered in real time but felt too exhausted to pursue. Why were warnings dismissed? Why were experts sidelined? Why were billions sprayed into the pockets of the well-connected while nurses wore garbage bags?
The answers, predictably, lie not in virology but in politics, a fact that explains Johnson’s hostility with clarity. The Inquiry does not threaten his pandemic legacy; it threatens his political mythology. If it concludes that mismanagement and misplaced priorities amplified the death toll, then Johnson cannot cast himself as the beleaguered leader battling an invisible enemy. Instead, he becomes something far less romantic: a prime minister outmatched by the moment, buoyed by opportunists, and betrayed by his own instincts.
And so he bristles. He complains. He deflects. Because he understands that once the Inquiry publishes its findings, the historical record will be harder to charm than the electorate ever was. The footnotes will not laugh at his jokes. Future scholars will not be swayed by his rumpled charisma. History, unlike politics, has no interest in his persona.
In the end, the Covid-19 Inquiry is not really about a virus at all. It is about the machinery of a nation and the leaders who claimed they could steer it. It is about how power responds under pressure, and how quickly political convenience can become national vulnerability. And it is about the uncomfortable truth that Britain’s greatest pandemic failure was not scientific, it was political.
That, more than anything, is why Boris Johnson hates it.
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