Whitehall on trial: how the government is preparing for the Covid inquiry

During the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon has developed a reputation for announcing things just before the UK government does. But there has been no Downing Street follow-up yet to her announcement last week at First Minister’s Questions that there will be a full public inquiry into Scotland’s handling of the crisis.

This silence should not, however, be taken as a sign that there won’t be a UK-wide inquiry as well as a Scottish one. Staff inside No. 10 accept that there will have to be one: when 50,000 people are confirmed or suspected to have died from a new virus, a private ‘lessons learned’ exercise won’t be enough. They are also confident that an inquiry will support their claim that throughout the first half of the year they followed the scientific advice they were given, although they know that they will not entirely escape blame.

No. 10 is adamant that a public inquiry isn’t being considered yet, however, and that the focus is on the here and now. But there are plenty of people in Whitehall who are already preparing for it. There is more than one senior figure who has drawn up a timeline of their actions going back to January.

Perhaps the most important question about any inquiry is what kind of person would chair it. Leveson was a judge, Chilcot a former civil servant. There is a view in government that, in the words of one secretary of state, ‘a lawyer would be the worst person to chair it as they will take it down the blame route’. The government’s belief, predictably, is that the focus of an inquiry should be on learning lessons, not apportioning blame.

In many ways, the government is already conducting a rolling inquiry into what has gone wrong. As one source at the heart of government admits: ‘Some things have so manifestly not worked that reversing them has been an admission of failure.