Devendra Kumar
The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has heard a scathing critique of Boris Johnson’s handling of key Covid meetings during the pandemic. Vaughan Gething, the Welsh Health Minister at the time, described Johnson’s approach as “scatty, incoherent, and rambling”. Gething, who is now the Minister for the Economy and running to be the next First Minister of Wales, stated that COBR meetings, where the Covid response was discussed, were better handled by former UK Health Minister Matt Hancock. Gething critiqued Johnson’s approach, stating that “the identity really does matter” when it comes to chairing meetings. He also expressed frustration that papers for some meetings were shared with the devolved administrations only 15 to 20 minutes before they started, leaving little time to prepare.
Gething acknowledged that the Welsh government was not as prepared for a pandemic as it thought it was ahead of Covid-19. He stated that “the preparation we thought we had didn’t stand up as well as we thought it would in those early weeks” and that “we weren’t as prepared as we could have been, but also we weren’t as prepared as we thought we were”. He suggested that if the Welsh government had known it would be in charge of its own pandemic response earlier, it would have started planning sooner.
During the first Welsh government cabinet meeting where Covid was discussed, Gething made a mistake, stating that there were no imported cases of Covid to the UK on February 25th, 2020, when in fact there had already been cases in the UK by that time. He accepted that this was an error and that what he meant to say was that there were no cases in Wales.
The inquiry also heard about the deletion of Vaughan Gething’s WhatsApp messages from the pandemic period, which he described as a “real embarrassment”. He claimed that the messages were lost during a “security rebuild” and that he had spoken with the IT team at the Senedd on multiple occasions to attempt to get them back.
The hearing saw members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru group speak outside the hearing, criticizing Vaughan Gething’s responses and questioning his qualifications to be the Health Minister for Wales.