Boris Johnson has quit parliament following an inquiry into Partygate. We take a closer look at how Britain is drawing lessons from the pandemic
Public inquiries into disasters and scandals have become a fixture of Britain’s uncodified constitution: 83 have been opened since 1990, eight of them since the covid inquiry was announced in May 2021. The west London office where it will be held last hosted hearings into the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people died in 2017.
Inquiries seek to do three things: establish the facts; bring a sense of resolution to victims; and help to prevent a repeat. With covid, all these look extraordinarily hard. In establishing a factual narrative, the inquiry should benefit from more contemporaneous material than any of its predecessors. Lord Saville pieced together the events of Bloody Sunday, a massacre by British troops in Northern Ireland in 1972, from grainy images and interviews conducted years later.
A further challenge is understanding the epidemiological data and modelling, which remain disputed. Because so many experts were either assisting the government or criticising it, says Oliver Johnson of the University of Bristol, finding truly independent authorities will be hard. It is not so simple as to ask whether the government “followed the science”, he says.
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