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

Johnson has said that the government was not pursuing a herd immunity strategy. The theory behind that was enough people get coronavirus to build up a large population resistance.

He said: “Our objective was to protect the NHS and save lives and to save lives by protecting the NHS – that was our objective. Our strategy was to suppress the curve and to keep the R below 1 as much as we could. And we’re going to use everything we could to do that. Herd immunity was going to be, we hoped, a by-product of that campaign which might be very long and very difficult."

In WhatsApp messages dated March 14 with Matt Hancock and Sir Patrick Vallance, Boris Johnson said he was “concerned when some on teams were suggesting last week that we actively need a proportion of pop to be infected. Civil service need to grasp.”

Johnson is just over a quarter of the way through his evidence, but already he is looking quite tired and sad. He is hunched over his desk, and is spending a lot of time looking down instead of facing counsel Hugo Keith KC. This is not the boosterish, bold Boris that people may have expected to see, but a rather meek man, who perhaps has now reflected on the mistakes he made.

Johnson has effectively admitted saying "why are we destroying everything for people who will die anyway soon?" just four days before the Covid lockdown on 23 March 2020. Notes by aide Imran Shafi, corroborated by Dominic Cummings, stated that the former PM said this and we are "killing the patient to tackle the tumour" about being bringing in too many restrictions around Covid.

Johson said he was "trying to find a way, crisply, to summarise part of the problem" with lockdowns. Hugo Keith KC asked him if this showed his erratic decision making process.

Johnson replied: "It's an indication of the cruelty of the choice that we faced and the appalling balancing act that I had to do throughout the pandemic and in order to, if i said something like that, what I was saying was the truth was to drive down the virus, to stamp out the virus. You have to say some things that are going to be damaging in all sorts of other ways. Perhaps it wasn't designed to be publicly broadcast."

Boris Johnson is talking about making the decision to lock down on 23 March 2020. He said Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific officer, and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, had told him that effectively there was no other option.

He says at the point he gave arguments against locking down "pretty short shrift as I thought my job is protect human life and that is the number one duty of government". He says he had "no other tool" to protect the NHS.

The Inquiry is now examining messages which appear to show Johnson's flip flopping around lockdown. As we've already seen, four days before ordering the lockdown the then-Prime Minister questioned "why are we destroying everything for people who will die anyway soon?"

Then on 23 March 2020, he announced a national lockdown, where people had to stay at home, to protect the NHS. And now the Inquiry has seen evidence that on 26 March 2020, he is already questioning his own decision.

A message read: "We have taken these extraordinary steps without being sure how deadly it [Covid] is."

He told the Inquiry: "I couldn't take the gamble with public health ... the media needs a proper explanation of why this is necessary and why it's working. Here I'm saying, if we're being attacked for not standing up our actions then we need to substantiate it."

Boris Johnson has said he believes the lockdown was necessary and it worked. "I believe that it helped to supress the R [rate]. I think that it was cumulative, I think the R started to go down as a result of a series of things we did," he said.

He added: "I find it difficult to quantify the impact those measures had. The more we can do to explain why NPI [non-pharmaceutical interventions] measures of any kind work, why they are necessary, to the satisfaction of everybody, the easier it will be for government next time and the more public buy in there will be."

Boris Johnson has just been asked: "Could it have been imposed earlier had the government been more alert?"

He says the key thing was the data. "It was the sudden appreciation that we were much further along the curve than we thought," he said. "We weren't four weeks behind France or Italy we were a couple of weeks, maybe less. They [Sage] were wrong in their initial estimation, we were wrong in our initial estimation."

He says "the penny dropped on evening of 13 March ... and then we acted". Remember the lockdown wasn't announced until 10 days later.

Rishi Sunak was "frustrated" at too many people choosing to work from home during the pandemic, Hugo Keith KC has said. We haven't seen Sunak's witness statement yet, he is expected to give evidence next week, but Keith said this comment was from it.

He was asking Johnson about the advice which said "work from home if you can, but go into work if you can't work from home". Keith said that Sunak, who was Chancellor at the time, was "frustrated at, as he sees it, over compliance with the stay at home messaging ... exacerbated the economic impact of the lockdown".

Johnson is being asked about slowly lifting restrictions over the summer of 2020. Keith says that Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance wanted to open up at a slower rate than Johnson.

According to Sir Patrick Vallance's diary, a skewed political viewpoint may have sparked different treatments between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool - based entirely on who is mayor.

"I don't recall a Conservative mayor in Manchester," Johnson said. Keith KC responded that Sir Patrick's diary entry referred to the level of co-operation on both sides being dependent on political positioning.

Johnson added: "I don't remember that at all. Liverpool certainly was heroic in trying to get mass testing going. There was terrific hardship because of the lockdowns but they were vital to the campaign."