“No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands,” Boris Johnson is alleged to have said in the months leading up to Christmas 2020.
In December that year, healthcare professionals and scientists were incredulous at the scenario; rising Covid deaths, increased infection rates and the Johnson government’s commitment for England to have an unrestricted Christmas.
Johnson had reluctantly approved a further lockdown on 31 October 2020 when he allegedly uttered those words, and four weeks later it was lifted. But by then the Covid-19 genie was out of the bottle and pile high the bodies did. Among them, my father’s, Ahsan-ul-Haq Chaudry, a retired teacher, who gave his all for his six children to fulfil their ambitions to work in healthcare. Five of us are doctors who worked on the Covid-19 frontline. As it stands, the Covid-19 inquiry doesn’t want to hear from us.
Johnson has denied saying those words. His former adviser, Dominic Cummings, told a select committee he heard him say them. The families of the bereaved were reported to be furious as the story broke. I still am.
Knowing the truth helps us understand why we lost our loved ones during the UK government’s mismanaged pandemic response, in which, sadly, saving lives was as much in the hands of inept politicians and their civil servants as it was the doctors. This is why the Covid-19 inquiry has to get it right. It’s time for cold, hard facts. Here’s one. More than 127,000 deaths from Covid-19 happened on Johnson’s watch.
Johnson epitomises the excesses of the right: its values, its scruples, or lack of them. The Covid-19 inquiry hearings will begin in June and those who adhere to his ethos are rallying, just like they did to get Brexit over the line. Some of the same people are now trying to write an alternative narrative and defend the indefensible. They have the money, influence and connections to affect the course of events. And now they have their sights set on the inquiry.
Journalist Isobel Oakeshott was a core team Brexit member. Her opinion piece in the Telegraph earlier this month effectively targeted and blamed bereaved families for obstructing the Covid-19 inquiry – the same inquiry that these very families fought for. Relatives of those who died “present the greatest impediment to the public inquiry’s progress,” she wrote.
GB News has a lineup of Tory MPs and Brexit leaders recycled into anchors and hosts. There, they affirm their opposition to lockdowns, to masks, to vaccines, without which the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher.
On 2 December 2020 the second lockdown was lifted, and Johnson was encouraging the public to shop and plan for Christmas together without restrictions. I was making a Channel 4 Dispatches programme about the pandemic (Covid Critical: A Doctor’s Story) and the coming tsunami of deaths.
The senior healthcare professionals I filmed couldn’t fathom the government’s route. Then the death numbers began to climb and the moment to keep any sense of control had gone. My father caught Covid around 18 December 2020, and the next day, Johnson announced stricter rules on Christmas mixing.
I was working in a Covid intensive therapy unit at the time. The patients were flooding in. My father was admitted to hospital on 20 December and started continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) on 22 December, the day of the infamous press conference in which Allegra Stratton joked about a lockdown Christmas party happening at Downing Street. He passed away on 28 December.
It led me to want answers, and as part of my journey to understand I met others who were searching, too. I joined the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, who were pushing for an independent public inquiry. After numerous promises and deadlines, Johnson finally relented and appointed Heather Hallett as the chair. The first hearings have not even begun, but many already have doubts about what it is able to deliver.
The Listening Project, now renamed Every Story Matters, is an idea unique to this inquiry, where anyone and everyone who has anything to say about the pandemic can do so. And everyone should have an opportunity to be heard. But to ensure the bereaved are indeed central to the inquiry, as promised, they should be separated from other participants. Should people who were bereaved have to compete to be heard against someone who opposed lockdown? Should I be offering the account of my father’s painful death alongside anti-lockdown proponents? By not ringfencing those who were bereaved, Lady Hallet is opening the door to allow the right to shout loudest – and it suits some members of this particular brand of the right that the dead are not treated with the dignity they deserve, with consideration as a group core to this inquiry. The inquiry proposes to allow only one bereaved person from each country in the UK to speak at the first hearing.
That’s why I will not be participating in it. Instead, I am a year into making my next film, which starts with the death of my father. It charts the inquiry’s journey, which includes the unanticipated narrative of attacks against the bereaved.
The inquiry could ensure that my film is an uncommissionable, predictable documentary, if it just does what it is supposed to do: ensure a comprehensive, thorough and fair inquiry that delivers lessons to save lives in a future event and provides a path to accountability. As it stands, the route the inquiry is choosing to take is promising to make my film essential viewing.
Dr Saleyha Ahsan is a practising emergency medicine doctor and director of the documentary Covid Critical: A Doctor’s Story
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