As Michael Gove attends the Covid-19 inquiry, he has issued an apology to Covid victims and their families for ‘mistakes made by government’.
The Covid-19 inquiry
The Covid-19 inquiry looks at preparedness, the public health response, the response in the health and care sector and the economic response.
Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove was Cabinet Office minister during the pandemic and in charge of the department responsible for the smooth running of government. Gove, like other witnesses, says “we were too slow to lock down” in March 2020, and should have taken stricter measures sooner ahead of the second lockdown at the end of 2020. WhatsApp messages Gove sent to the PM’s adviser Dominic Cummings in early March 2020 show him warning “golden opportunities” were being missed. Gove wrote: “The whole situation is even worse than you think and action needs to be taken or we’ll regret it for a long time”.
Gove defended former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who has come in for sharp criticism by some other witnesses. He says he has a “high opinion” of his ex-colleague, and “too much was asked” of his department at the beginning of the pandemic. Gove also said introducing restrictions in March 2020 went against Boris Johnson’s “instincts” and “political outlook”. Elsewhere, he defended his former boss, saying: “I don’t think one can single out the prime minister at the time for criticism. We all deserve our share – retrospectively – of criticism.”
Gove said the idea of “shielding the elderly and allow young people free reign […] would not have been effective in mitigating the virus”, and said while many advocated an approach similar to Sweden’s, the country relied on “wide societal acceptance” of restrictions.
Regarding the NHS, Gove said its constraints were not around “just equipment, but trained individuals – doctors, nurses, others”. The capacity constraints were driven by “the number of specialists, and by the equipment, as well as by physical capacity”, he stated and called the Nightingale hospitals an “amazing feat”, but adds that people got the wrong impression that we could “magic up” significant capacity in the NHS at rapid speed. He indicated that the “final step of lockdown” was required to bring the R rate down to prevent the NHS from being completely overwhelmed.
Gove then broke away from the line of questioning to issue an apology stating “I want to take this opportunity, if I may, to apologise to the victims who endured so much pain, the families who’ve endured so much loss, as a result of the mistakes that were made by government in response to the pandemic. And as a minister, responsible for the Cabinet Office, and who was also close to many of the decisions that were made, I must take my share of responsibility for that. Politicians are human beings, we’re fallible, we make mistakes and we make errors. And I’m sure that the inquiry will have an opportunity to look in detail at many of the errors I and others made”.
Gove also contends that he and his colleagues were trying to take the best decisions “in circumstances where every decision was difficult and every course was bad”.
Final thought
As the Covid-19 inquiry continues, the Government’s failings during the pandemic are being brought to light. Some may value Gove’s honesty, however, many people and families who lost loved ones will ultimately feel let down by the Government’s mistakes.
