The Silence of Boris Johnson's Enablers

The very people who helped create the disaster of Johnson's premiership are now seeking to pretend it never even happened

As each day passes yet more damning revelations about Boris Johnson emerge from the Covid Inquiry.

This week alone we have learned that:

• Johnson believed the UK was being "pathetic" about Covid and should just have "a cold shower" and "let it rip” through the population

• He told aides he sympathised with the view that Covid was "nature's way of dealing with old people"

• Key communications between Johnson and senior officials were routinely deleted

• Johnson wasn’t able to understand even the basic science of Covid and had to be repeatedly walked through simple things like infection rates

• He asked Government scientists if Covid could be cured by ‘blowing a hairdryer up your nose’

• Johnson was told to advise the public to hold “chicken pox parties” in order to help spread of the virus and create ‘herd immunity’

• Covid rules were “almost never” followed in Number 10 during the pandemic

• Crucial lockdown measures were delayed due to pressure from the press, potentially costing many thousands of lives

• Officials feared there was a “corrupt” relationship between Johnson and the Evening Standard in which cash was “funnelled” to the paper during the pandemic

Now you might expect that any one of these stories would lead to a full spread of newspaper front page headlines.

Yet while some papers have prominently covered these stories, there has been a notable silence from two of the UK’s biggest outlets.

In particular, Boris Johnson’s current and former employers at the Daily Mail and Telegraph have almost entirely ignored these revelations, focusing their ire instead on Johnson’s long-since departed former aide Dominic Cummings.

So what is really going on here and what is behind the wall of silence on this story?