"Why are we destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon?" former UK prime minister Boris Johnson said to have asked at the start of the Covid pandemic

The claim, branded “horrific” by bereaved families, emerged from notebooks kept by Imran Shafi, Johnson’s private secretary for public service, during the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, an investigation that has been set up to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the pandemic.

The inquiry heard that Johnson had earlier said the “biggest damage [from Covid will be] done by overreaction” during a meeting on 28 February 2020 where lockdown restrictions were discussed.

Shafi said under questioning that Johnson “definitely did not want a lockdown” in March 2020, despite being aware that the worst case scenario of hundreds of thousands of deaths was becoming increasingly likely. But he agreed by 2 March 2020 that “control had been lost” and that “nothing short of a lockdown would suffice”.

It would be another three weeks before a UK-wide lockdown would be announced.