The Daily Mail's Boris Johnson Covid conundrum

‘BETRAYAL OF OUR CHILDREN’, screams the headline across the front page of the Daily Mail this morning as the paper reports on the long-awaited independent report into how the government handled the Covid pandemic.

‘Mistake after mistake: The full damning verdict of the Covid inquiry’, runs a headline inside as it details a report on how the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, presided over a “toxic and chaotic culture” in No 10, and suffered a “failure to appreciate the urgency of the situation” in the early days of Covid because of his “optimism that it would amount to nothing”.

Other failings bullet-pointed in the paper’s coverage include that “Britain could have escaped the Covid devastation, but ministers did ‘too little, too late’”, “No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings was a ‘toxic’ and ‘destabilising influence’ as Downing Street grappled with the crisis” and “Johnson ‘should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership’”.

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It’s a damning verdict alright – and a potentially tricky one for the Mail, which continues to pay Johnson a rumoured seven-figure salary for his dreary weekly column. Recent musings from the former PM for his whopping pay packet have included his views on the celebrity edition of TV show The Traitors, on Labour’s failure in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election (with a failure to mention his own party getting two per cent and losing its deposit) and how his friend Donald Trump was putting “the hard word on Putin” over Ukraine, a column which has not dated well.

Now the damning independent report has said Johnson’s “inexcusable” delays in dealing with the pandemic may well have cost 23,000 lives, can the Mail really pay him to churn out such rubbish? Will even Mail readers want to read his pricey pontifications after this?

Or, more likely, will the paper continue to employ its hero and point the finger of blame elsewhere? Its website published six articles about the report yesterday, and not one featured Johnson or Cummings in the headline. Rather, it chose to focus on how “[Nicola] Sturgeon’s government failed to plan for killer Covid pandemic and showed no urgency in responding, says damning inquiry report”.