I’m willing to bet large that Boris Johnson has never looked at it. At the moment, he’s far too busy trying to bring down Rishi Sunak’s government to bother himself with trivialities like the number of people in the UK who died as a result of Covid. He’s far more interested in shoring up support amongst his deluded acolytes in a pre-emptive move towards his return to front line politics at some point in the future. Trying to show them that he’s some kind of strong man who will be asked to don his cape and fly back to lead the country, when in reality, as a result of his lies, cowardice, incompetence and downright selfishness, the country is on its knees.

As I write, the House of Commons Privileges Committee has just published its report into the Partygate scandal and has found that Johnson lied to Parliament, to the House of Commons and to the Committee itself. The report states that the convict deliberately misled the House of Commons and perhaps most damningly, that Johnson’s attack on the Committee and its work amounted to “an attack on our democratic institutions.” In other words, he is nothing more than a Poundland Donald Trump.

Before the Committee published its report, it was required to let Johnson see a draft to allow him to prepare a response to its findings. In typical fashion, and in a scenario which has played out his entire life, seeing that he had been found out, and that the Committee was recommending that he be suspended from the House of Commons for a period of 90 days for repeated contempts of Parliament, Johnson chose to resign rather than face the music. A conscious objector to the truth.

So, although any person with a shred of knowledge about Johnson’s congenital lying throughout his entire life knew what the outcome would be, we now know for sure that when he stood up at the dispatch box in the House of Commons and told the entire country that all the Covid rules and guidance had been followed at all times in 10 Downing Street, he was, once again, lying through his teeth.

That would be bad enough, but when you consider that he was doing so in the full knowledge that people who were following the rules were denied their final moments with loved ones who were dying as a result of Covid, it absolutely beggars belief. Not for one moment did Johnson stop and think about the agony that the citizens of this country were going through when he was up to his knees in empty wine bottles and cake crumbs.

One of those citizens was Jean Adamson who watched through the window of a care home her father singing a hymn as he succumbed to the virus on Easter Sunday in 2020. Locked out of the care home and prevented from holding her father, Jean thinks that her father Aldrick singing was his way of saying “I’m on my way.” The following day, Aldrick, along with another 1,232 people, died of Covid. And now, the number is 227,000. Jean, like millions of other people in the country, will be watching the Covid inquiry which has just begun, with a broken heart, but with the hope that it will provide answers as to what went wrong, and why so many people died needlessly.

Over the coming weeks, a coterie of current and former politicians will be asked just why the UK wasn’t prepared to deal with a pandemic which many had predicted was inevitable. The names don’t provide us with any hope that the truth will out. The architects of austerity, which ran the health service and social care into the ground, David Cameron, and George Osborne, will be there. As will their successor, Jeremy Hunt. Matt Hancock, who oversaw the transfer of thousands of untested hospital patients into care homes who subsequently died, will be asked to tell the truth. He’s as much of a stranger to that as Johnson is.

Who won’t be there to provide evidence will be the 227,000 people who died as a result of Covid. There is no doubt that the enquiry will find that many of those deaths were avoidable. Not a reason to celebrate, but will that stop Johnson popping corks, stuffing his face and lying to his supine acolytes? I doubt it. ■

Protempore