'Many more lives could have been saved had Covid inquiry been held sooner'
When the Covid Inquiry is finally done, it will all come down to five words written starkly on a whiteboard by Dominic Cummings. “Who do we not save?”
This week’s Inquiry evidence confirms it was the people we knew were expendable cannon-fodder all along – those who never mattered to the privileged elite running the country. The week’s horrifying revelations have been the equivalent of a political Partygate, secret sick up the walls suddenly visible to the world. The morning-after the “orgy of narcissism”.
If evidence was foul-mouthed, it was morally fouler – a repugnant morass of nastiness, arrogance, contempt, misogyny, back-stabbing and venal self-interest, set against the torn backdrop of an austerity-ravaged state. As the inquiry continues, it’s important to note so much of this would have remained hidden without the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group and their unstinting fight for transparency into what went on.
Hannah Brady with a photo of dad Shaun (Julian Hamilton/Daily Mirror)Yet for Hannah Brady, who has been among those fighting for the inquiry since losing her father and grandmother in agonising circumstances during the pandemic, the moment is bitter more than bittersweet. “We started fighting for this inquiry between the first and second lockdowns,” Hannah says.
“The families called for a rapid review like the one after Hillsborough that immediately made people safer at football matches. We were told they were too busy to listen. Now we can see how busy they were fighting each other. If we’d had a rapid inquiry then, how many lives could’ve been saved?”
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For the bereaved families, the last few days of evidence have been harrowing. “This week has actually been worse than anything we could have imagined,” Hannah says. “The idea that Covid is nature’s way of killing older people – it’s disgusting. The blatant disregard they had for people. It’s like the generals in the First World War. We were all just toy soldiers to move about.
“My nan was just a drain on the economy to someone like Boris Johnson. She was just a bed-blocker to him. She wasn’t even considered for hospital treatment and was given a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) notice.” When Hannah’s dad, Shaun, was dying in hospital, he didn’t know his mum had also contracted Covid-19. “If someone had told my dad she needed a bed, he’d have wanted to have given her his,” Hannah says. “If I’d told him that, he’d have got up.”
On Wednesday, Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, admitted that Number 10’s Covid response showed an “absence of humanity”. The families feel this absence keenly in the inquiry too. “There’s a danger it just becomes Johnson’s jibe against Cummings and Cummings against Rishi and the horrible language they have used,” Hannah says. “Our loved ones should be the headline.”
It is almost exactly two years since we invited members of Covid Bereaved Families for Justice to address our Real Britain fringe event at the Labour Party Conference so that they could publicly demand an inquiry. The families had been closed down in every other avenue of public life and forced to take on guerrilla tactics, including creating the Covid Memorial Wall with a handful of red felt-tip pens.
Dominic Cummings (PA)
Ian Fowler and his son Matt (Collect Unknown)Hannah Brady and Matt Fowler won a standing ovation at the conference in Brighton. Matt spoke about his “five-foot-nothing superhero” father, Ian, who fatally contracted Covid working as a key worker at Jaguar Land Rover. Hannah spoke about her dad Shaun who never had a day off sick until he caught Covid on the way to work at the Heinz factory, and her nan Margaret, 80, who died in a Wigan care home.
“We are here,” Hannah said, “because we are going into this fight completely ignored and completely alone, and we need your help”. Now, Hannah says, the families feel alone again. “Not enough of our stories are being heard,” she says. “There is not enough compassion in the inquiry.
“We have always wanted to get human stories back into this. That’s why when I met Boris Johnson I told him my dad’s story. We don’t feel we are at the inquiry’s heart.” Matt Fowler, meanwhile, says the bereaved families have often been criticised for being ‘unfair’ on the Government when they raised concerns. “It’s clear now we weren’t being anywhere near critical enough,” he says.
This week Helen MacNamara painted the “dystopian nightmare” inside Number 10 in a series of horrifying vignettes. oris Johnson – the man who claims he “got all the big calls right” – asking if Covid could be stopped by blowing a hair dryer up the nose. The emotional moment on March 13, 2020, when MacNamara says she told senior officials in Downing Street there was “no plan”.
“I think we are absolutely f***ed,” she told them. “I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people.” As of yesterday, Government figures show 231,332 deaths with Covid-19 recorded on the death certificate. At home in the Midlands, Matt Fowler is reflecting on MacNamara’s worry about the “lack of humanity” in Downing Street’s response. “Families like mine,” he says, “will have to live with the cost of that inhumanity for the rest of our lives.”
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