ncumbent PM made joke about Rishi Sunak’s department because of its focus on lifting restrictions, according to diary entries

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    Boris Johnson referred to Rishi Sunak’s Treasury as “the pro-death squad” as he sought to gain support for a gradual end to Covid restrictions, the official inquiry into the pandemic has been told.

    Johnson and others inside No 10 used language that “pejoratively termed as pro-death” the Treasury, then led by Sunak, because of its focus on lifting Covid measures, according to diary entries by Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser at the time.

    Glassborow, who spent more than a decade as a civil servant in the Treasury and returned there after leaving No 10, also professed no knowledge of Johnson’s reported view that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people”, another detail from Vallance’s diary that was revealed last week.

    Subsequent evidence on Monday heard that advisers inside No 10 were increasingly worried during early 2020 that ministers were too slow to consider a lockdown, and then became alarmed that autumn that a second wave was not being treated seriously.

    Ben Warner, a data scientist brought into No 10 by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s then-chief adviser, told the inquiry he was worried about “a lack of scientific capability within the different teams and groups that I was working with”.

    In evidence about decision-making at the start of the pandemic, the inquiry was shown pages from a report on Exercise Nimbus, a February 2020 theoretical planning operation about Covid, which was told that leaving the virus unchecked was “effectively rendering it a ‘survival of the fittest’ situation”.


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