Boris Johnson should get the preliminaries under way and advance the start date
The good news is that Boris Johnson has finally announced a public inquiry into the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 pandemic. Public inquiries remain pivotal in our public life, even today, and it was inconceivable that there would not be one on what the prime minister this week called “a trauma like no other”. For many months though, Mr Johnson has prevaricated on the timing and the details. It always seemed to be never quite the right moment. Now, amid expectations that the worst of the pandemic may possibly be ending at least in this country, that excuse is running out of road.
The bad news is that Mr Johnson is still playing for time. The public inquiry will not start until spring 2022. This is a ludicrous delay. When it gets under way, it will be lengthy and extensive. Although the terms of reference have not been set, Mr Johnson acknowledges that they are likely to be wide. That means the inquiry will probably have to cover, among other things, Britain’s pandemic preparedness, the state’s lockdown and economic responses, the record of the NHS, the problems in social care, the impact on ethnic minorities and other at-risk groups, test-and-trace efforts, medical treatments and vaccines, modelling, statistics, public messaging and international comparisons. It is a huge agenda.
