​I'd swear the Covid inquiry tells us little we didn’t already know - Vladimir McTavish

In order to find out why so many million pounds had been overspent on the project, there had to be held an official inquiry into the overspend which itself cost millions of quid in public money.

While the Covid inquiry is obviously a very necessary process, it so far has told us very little we didn’t already know or suspect.

Three and a half years on from the height of the pandemic, we now find out, at huge public cost, that Boris Johnson was an incompetent, dithering liar who didn’t care about the how many old people died of the virus. If anyone had asked, I could have told them that for nothing in April 2020.

Top Downing Street aide Helen McNamara’s evidence of a toxic, sexist culture within Number Ten which undoubtedly cost lives was revealing but hardly a shock. Nor was her reported e-mail at the start of the outbreak which warned that “we’re f****d, thousands are going to die”.

There is something grotesquely ironic that an enquiry being held in public to get to the root of the truth has to be continuously bleeped on TV and that its transcripts contain more asterisks than actual words. In particular, when Dominic Cummings was questioned about whether it was true that he thought Matt Hancock was an utterly useless bleep and a total bleep-ing bleep.

What I do find amusing is the weight now given to the evidence of Cummings, as if this modern-day Machiavelli has suddenly changed his spots and is now being routinely honest is all his public utterances.

So, according to his WhatsApp, we now learn that Cummings thought that the cabinet were a bunch of c***s, b******s, and f*****ing morons. Probably true, although it does omit the fact that they were being advised by Cummings, arguably the worst c*** of them all.

Douglas Ross and the Scottish Tories are predictably trying to divert attention from the debacle at Westminster by asking why Holyrood ministers haven’t handed over WhatsApp messages to the

inquiry. We all know what those messages will say, namely that they thought the UK Government were all c***s, b******s, and f*****ing morons.

Dominic Cummings embodies the slide in public standards that has occurred in the past decade and more of Tory rule. Let’s not forget that this is the man who drove 240 miles on a motorway to test his eyesight. That shows how much standards have slipped since the nineties. David Blunkett would never have done anything like that.

What we really need to find out is how this bunch of c***s, b******s and f*****ing morons doled out millions of pounds worth of government contracts to their cronies, like Baroness Mone Of The Bra, or whatever she calls herself, to provide shoddy substandard PPE. That surely should be part of this inquiry.

Or will that be a subject for another inquiry costing millions of quid? If that’s the case, then in the words of Helen McNamara, “we’re f****d” !