Just blaming Boris is a cop-out – would a different PM have fared any better?

The past week may well have been the first time that those with a general – rather than personal, or specialist – interest really sat up and took notice of the Covid inquiry. One reason, of course, was the “star” quality of the witnesses, who included the mercurial Dominic Cummings, catapulted to infamy after fleeing to County Durham and being spotted taking his eye-test drive to Barnard Castle; Martin Reynolds, the smooth ex-diplomat known as “Party Marty”, who had invited his No 10 colleagues to a “bring your own booze” gathering in the Downing Street garden; and the straitlaced Helen MacNamara, the Cassandra who, as deputy cabinet secretary, had warned the PM that “we’re absolutely f*****” over the lack of preparations – only to be one of those fined for a party violation of her own. What with Cummings’s particular way of insulting his co-workers, which prompted solemn trigger-warnings practically every time one of his WhatsApps was read out; the self-righteous apology to “the families of all those who suffered during Covid” with which Reynolds prefaced his answers; and MacNamara’s blithe statement that “it’s hard to pick a day when we did not break lockdown rules”, there was plenty to infuriate those who tuned in to the live-stream. While it is understandable, however, that others involved in trying to manage the crisis from Downing Street should seek to deflect the responsibility on to Boris Johnson, and inevitable that the prime minister would be central to this second “module” of the inquiry, on “Core UK Decision-making and Political Governance”, the extent to which this is happening seems to me profoundly unhelpful – to use the adjective beloved of the civil service. And this would be a huge missed opportunity, given the myriad weaknesses in our system that the pandemic exposed – from the failure of government structures to the lack of realistic emergency planning, to the accountability of civil servants and the potential for building on services that already exist, such as local “track and trace” systems, rather than starting afresh with an expensive top-down version.