Michael Gove has conceded that Boris Johnson missed five consecutive emergency meetings in the buildup to the coronavirus crisis, and that the UK shipped protective equipment to China in February.
The government faced intense pressure on Sunday over its initial response to the pandemic, as Labour accused Johnson of having been “missing in action” during the crucial weeks when the virus first arrived in the UK.
Gove initially insisted a Sunday Times story detailing failures during this period had numerous inaccuracies and would be corrected.
Asked on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show whether Johnson missed five meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee, and about the shipment of hundreds of thousands of items of personal protective equipment (PPE) to China during February, Gove refused to comment.
“I won’t go through, here, a point-by-point rebuttal of all the things in the Sunday Times story that are a little bit off-beam, but that will be done later,” he said.
But in a subsequent interview on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show, Gove, who holds the cabinet role of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, accepted that both claims were correct. He said missing Cobra meetings was normal for a PM.
“Most Cobra meetings don’t have the prime minister attending them,” Gove said. “That is the whole point.” Cobra meetings were “led by the relevant secretary of state in the relevant area”, he argued.
“Whoever is chairing those meetings reports to the prime minister. The prime minister is aware of all of these decisions and takes some of those decisions. You can take a single fact, wrench it out of context, whip it up in order to create a j’accuse narrative. But that is not fair reporting.”
Gove is correct in that prime ministers do not always, or even routinely, chair Cobra meetings. But it is common for them to do so during a major crisis.
The five meetings Johnson missed came during a period in late January and February where he spent an entire parliamentary recess out of sight at his official country retreat of Chequers, prompting Labour to accuse him at the time of being a “part-time prime minister”.
The Sunday Times quoted one unnamed senior adviser as saying Johnson “didn’t work weekends”, and “there was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning”.
Gove told the Ridge show it was wrong to argue that Johnson had been “anything other than energetic, focused, determined and strong in his leadership against this virus”.
“The idea that the prime minister skipped meetings that were vital to our response to the coronavirus I think is grotesque,” Gove said.
On the shipment of PPE to China, in his interview on the Ridge show Gove refused to say three times whether this had happened, saying only that some aspects of the Sunday Times story were wrong.
A shortage of PPE for NHS and care home staff has been a repeated criticism of the UK response to coronavirus, with the Guardian revealing on Friday that NHS staff had been told to wear plastic aprons if stocks of protective gowns ran out.
But on the Marr show he accepted it was true, saying this was done “to help with the most extreme outbreak in Wuhan”. The PPE had not come from pandemic stockpiles, Gove said, and since then the UK had received “far more” PPE from China, he added.
Asked whether the government had made mistakes in its response to the pandemic, Gove accepted this broad point: “All governments make mistakes, including our own. We seek to learn, and to improve every day. It is the case, I’m sure, at some point in the future that there will be an opportunity for us to look back, to reflect and to learn some profound lessons.”
Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, told the Ridge show that Gove had given “possibly the weakest rebuttal of a detailed exposé in British political history”.
There were, Ashworth added, “serious questions as to why the prime minister skipped five Cobra meetings throughout February, when the whole world could see how serious this was becoming”.
He said: “And we know that serious mistakes have been made. We know that our frontline NHS staff don’t have the PPE, that they’ve been told this weekend that they won’t necessarily have the gowns which are vital to keep them safe. We know that our testing capacity is not at the level that is needed.”
In this context, he added, the knowledge Johnson had missed key meetings “suggests that early on he was missing in action”.
Johnson is back at Chequers, recovering from a bad case of coronavirus which led to him being briefly placed in intensive care. Gove said the PM was “in cheerful spirits” and had talked on Friday to Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, who is standing in for him.
Gove rejected the idea that on aspects of the response to the virus, including PPE and testing, the government had consistently been playing catch-up, arguing that it had instead been “considered”.
He told the Ridge show: “There is a temptation, of course, to act in certain circumstances because of understandable pressure from commentators and elsewhere. But our approach is to be guided by the science, and to move in a way that is not knee-jerk but considered.”
