Boris Johnson Covid Inquiry live: ex-Prime Minister gives evidence on coronavirus pandemic - latest updates

Johnson says that the UK was "well down the European table and even further down the world table" of Covid deaths. Hugo Keith KC said that the Inquiry has heard that the UK had "one of the highest rates of excess deaths in Western Europe" bar Italy.

Johnson said he thought that the country's dense population may have impacted this.

Johnson is quizzed by Mr Keith KC about the advice he received during the pandemic - and discussions that were held with them outside of official regularly scheduled meetings.

"I of course relied on the advice I was given," Johnson said. "Advisers advise and ministers decide. I think once or twice I looked at what Sage had said - they certainly produced a lot of documentation.

"In retrospect it might have been valuable to hear the Sage conversation unpasturised - I was more than content with the clear summaries I was getting."

Johnson said: "The overwhelming priority of the government was to save the NHS and save lives. That is what we wanted to do. It was important in that context to do things that were difficult and costly.

"I would submit that any powerful and effective government has a lot of challenging and competing characters whose views about each other might not be fit to print, but get an awful lot done.

"In all this stuff is a lot of highly talented and motivated people who are striken with anxiety about what is happening, who are doing their best and who, like all human beings, under great stress will be inclined to be critical of others."

In response to a message sent by Johnson calling health secretary Matt Hancock “totally f****** useless” the former prime minister said: “It would not have been right to have a load of WhatsApps saying ‘aren’t we doing brilliantly folks’ - your criticisms might have been even more pungent. I would say my job was not to accept that everything we were doing was good, although the country as a whole had notable achievements.

“It’s part of life - everybody is constantly militating against some other individual, that’s just the nature of it. I stuck by the health secretary, I thought he worked very hard and was doing his best in very difficult circumstances.”

Numerous WhatsApp messages, diary entries and more suggesting a toxic work culture have been read out by Hugo Keith KC - who suggests that people working in Downing Street were refusing to come into work because of it - but Johnson refuses to acknowledge that this was toxic.

Perhaps the garden parties and quizzes were a bid to mask that toxicity, or lift the spirits of those who were being targeted?

“Those comments reflect a deep anxiety of people doing their best who cannot see and easy solution and are naturally critical of others,” Johnson claimed. “I decided at the time it was best to have an atmosphere of challenge.”

Time to catch your breath, folks - the inquiry is pausing for 10 minutes.

Hugo Keith KC is now looking at the weeks and months building up to the first lockdown in March 2020.

Hugo Keith KC says health secretary Matt Hancock "raised the matter repeatedly" of the seriousness of Covid-19 and the need to go into lockdown.

"I remember thinking about it and telling him to keep an eye on it," Johnson said. "I don't remember all those conversations but it's true we would have spoken on many occasions.

"In that period, January towards the end of February, Covid was a cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man's hand. You had no idea if it would turn into a typhoon or not - that became clearer much later."

Mr Keith KC is asking the ex-Prime Minister how seriously he considered Covid-19 in January and February 2020. At that time, health secretary Matt Hancock was chairing Cobra meetings on coronavirus at least once a week.

Johnson said: "I think that had everybody stopped to think about it, they would see the implications of what was happening in China. I don't think they necessarily drew the right conclusions in that early stage.

"It was completely outside people's living memory. I don't think people computed the implications of that data and it wasn't escalated to me as a matter of national concern until much later."

"I don't wish to say that we were oblivious because we weren't," Johnson insisted.

"I think what went wrong was we were just underestimating the pace, the contagiousness of the disease."