Boris Johnson ‘bamboozled’ by science, Covid inquiry hears – video

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, revealed that the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, found it a struggle to understand some graphs. Vallance, giving evidence to the Covid inquiry, said Johnson last studied science at the age of 15 and ‘would be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte’, and that he had a habit of pretending to misunderstand things to test out whether an alternative could be true. An extract from Vallance’s contemporaneous diary said the prime minister was at times ‘bamboozled’