News boris johnson covid inquiry Rachel Johnson

Both Boris and Rachel Johnson are trying to defend his handling of Covid, but people are really not in the mood to listen to them

Michael White. Updated November 23rd, 2025

This week, Baroness Hallett published her devastating UK Covid-19 Inquiry report on the then-government’s response to the pandemic.

One of the startling conclusions from the report was that if then-prime minister Boris Johnson had locked down the country a week earlier, around 23,000 lives could have been saved.

Well, Boris has finally responded to the report, not in a press conference or something most of the public could access, but in his paywalled Daily Mail column. (Suppose the Mail has to get its £1m money’s worth.)

In the column, Boris says “I remain full of regret for the things the government I led got wrong”, before going on to say his government, for the most part, didn’t do anything wrong. He also spends a lot of the column criticising the inquiry, mostly for not investigating the origins of the virus.

Meanwhile, Boris’ journalist sister, Rachel Johnson, was out defending her brother’s response to Covid on her LBC call-in radio show.

Fair to say, lots of people are not in the mood to listen to either of the Johnsons on this matter.

Especially, with the extra news emerging this morning that Boris Johnson took four days off in the critical period of February 2020, where, according to The Guardian, he “appears to have spent time walking his jack russell dog, Dilyn, in Chevening’s 1,416 hectare (3,500 acre) grounds, riding a motorbike given to him by his now wife, Carrie, and hosting friends and family for lunches, dinners and overnight stays.”

Here’s some of the reaction to the Johnsons from the past few days.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Twitter/X/@BorisJohnson