"We already knew about this Downing Street, they had over a hundred fixed penalty notices for not following the rules when everybody else tried their best to follow the rules."
A Shadow Minister has brutally taken apart former Prime Minister Boris Johnson for his mismanagement of Covid in just 90 seconds during BBC Question Time.
Nick Thomas-Symonds’ scathing takedown of Johnson came after a week in which the Covid inquiry heard damning testimony from senior civil servants and key aides close to the former Prime Minister, as they gave evidence which showed how dysfunctional and out of touch Downing Street was during the height of the pandemic.
Helen MacNamara, the second most senior civil servant in the country at the time, told the inquiry this week that she ‘would find it hard to pick one day when the regulations were followed properly inside that building’, while Johnson’s former communications director Lee Cain said that the former Prime Minister was more interested in avoiding a backlash from right-wing papers like the Daily Telegraph, than being guided by the scientific evidence.
Appearing on BBC Question Time, Thomas-Symonds said that the Covid inquiry had revived this “shameful episode” for our country – and he was not afraid to name names, either.
He went on to add: “We already knew about this Downing Street, they had over a hundred fixed penalty notices for not following the rules when everybody else tried their best to follow the rules.
“Nonetheless, the level of this is absolutely shocking.
“And yes, Boris Johnson was the prime minister at the time, but the current prime minister Rishi Sunak was the second most powerful person at the time, because he was chancellor of the exchequer.
“What we saw here really is this completely dysfunctional operation in charge of our country. They were not prepared for the pandemic.
“When we were all seeing those scenes from northern Italy of hospitals under pressure – because, remember, that they had warning about what was happening on the continent of Europe already – what was the prime minister of the time doing?
“He was going on holiday for a week and not taking it seriously.”
Thomas-Symonds also slammed Johnson for making reckless comments about the lives of older people. He said: “This is, in my view, a quite shameful episode in our history.
″An insult to the sacrifices people made during the pandemic and an insult, frankly, to all those who lost loved ones. They should be held to account for it.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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