Boris argues that Covid mistakes were inevitable. Is he right?

Boris Johnson had clearly come to the Covid Inquiry intending to be magnanimous about everyone, even advisers like Dominic Cummings who had ended up causing him so much grief – and who had not been at all complimentary about him in their evidence to the inquiry. He largely stuck to that persona in the first of his two lengthy evidence sessions today, with another to come tomorrow. He repeatedly praised Matt Hancock as doing a good job in difficult circumstances and who ‘was a good public communicator’. He even tried to politely explain away the more vicious behaviour of aides within government as variously being just the sort of thing bright people do in the heat of a crisis – though he also said he had rung Helen MacNamara to apologise for the language used about her by Cummings in one of his WhatsApp groups (of which Johnson was a member).