Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So is the luxury of spending £200million on a Covid inquiry which tells us nothing we don’t already and has turned out to be an expensive Boris-bashing exercise. The ex-PM has been accused of causing 23,000 deaths by not acting fast enough and presiding over a “chaotic response” to the pandemic. Of course it was bloody chaotic. It was unprecedented. The whole world was in chaos. But there were only two questions this inquiry had to answer – did lockdowns save lives and what do we do if it happens again? And neither have been, which is why Lady Hallett, who’s heading it, should be ashamed of presiding over this monumental waste of taxpayers’ cash. Instead of the inquiry finding answers she and her colleagues have used it to slate Boris for doing “too little too late”.

I’m sick of hearing how the Tory Government didn’t have a Covid plan. Yes, it did. It was the same plan as Sweden’s (which had the fewest covid deaths) but then along came dopes like Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson and medics, Patrick Valance and Chris Whitty, who showed a terrifying ignorance of the risk posed by the virus and flung Doomsday-scenarios at us, all based on Ferguson’s horribly flawed ‘modelling’ which claimed 500,000 could die if we didn’t lock down. (BTW, ‘modelling’ is just another name for speculative guesswork). So, the plan was dumped.

But incredibly this report’s conclusions aren’t that lockdowns were a catastrophe – which we now know they were – but that they should have been implemented harder and faster. Which we now know wouldn’t have been the answer to anything. At the start of Covid, I was a lockdown believer because Ferguson and his oppos scared many of into believing we were all going to die.

But years later, research has shown that locking up an entire population cannot control an airborne virus. Yet incredibly this inquiry still seems to believe it can! It’s also chosen to ignore what Sweden did. They didn’t lock down. They just banned large meetings, asked the elderly to stay at home and gave everyone else sensible advice to follow.

The fact is Boris, and the Tories, were always going to be damned whatever they did. If they’d refused to impose lockdowns in the face of medical advice and people died, there’d have been uproar.

As it was, they imposed them – and still, there was uproar. And let’s not forget 93% of Brits backed that first lockdown and 85% backed the second. And, incredibly, 71% railed against Boris when he finally did lift restrictions.

But the biggest damage lockdown has done is to kill this country’s work ethic stone dead. It persuaded many that being paid to sit at home was the way they wanted to live. Hence huge numbers never properly went back to work and are now languishing on benefits. It’s also when the working-from-home phenomenon really took off and now great swathes of our country believe it’s their God-given right to WFH which is one of the major reasons why our economy and our productivity is in the toilet.

But Lady Hallett isn’t interested in that. She wants to kick Boris in the goolies. We need to pray there isn’t another pandemic looming. Because if, as this inquiry says, Boris was guilty of a lack of leadership, just imagine the pig’s ear Starmer would make of it? We’d all be dead within weeks.

Whatever this inquiry says, Boris DID oversee one of the fastest vaccination programmes in the world. And he did unlock the country despite being told not to, which allowed it to function again. But all too many choose to remember is that he had a bit of cake on his birthday.

This inquiry was never interested in answers or solutions. It just wanted scapegoats and it got a big one in Boris. But crucially, after a £200million spend, it hasn’t said what we should do if it happens again. So, what is the point of it?