Covid Inquiry: Boris Johnson "not aware" other countries went into lockdown when coronavirus hit

Boris Johnson was “not aware” that other countries had imposed lockdowns in March 2020, Sadiq Khan has said.

Today (27 November) London mayor Sadiq Khan has been giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry panel. The panel is investigating potential failings in the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and what lessons can be learned from it.

The mayor said he was "disappointed" that the government did not provide him with more information about the virus in February 2020, before Covid-19 reached UK shores. He added that he also was not given access to early emergency Cobra meetings. But Khan then told the inquiry that Boris Johnson was "not aware" other countries had already gone into lockdown, stating that "the prime minister wasn’t persuaded," by proposed lockdown measures.

He said: "“The prime minister wasn’t aware that in other parts of the world they had lockdowns in place and fines could be issued if you breached the lockdown. I was surprised he wasn’t aware of that in relation to what was happening elsewhere.

"I was writing to the government and contacted the government to ask for information – that wasn’t coming in January, February or March. That is unusual by the way. I can give examples of other emergencies where this hasn’t happened."

By the time the UK had gone into lockdown on March 23, 2020, the likes of Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Netherlands, Poland, Germany, France and Malaysia had already set the precedent.

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who has also given evidence, asked to attend the Cobra meetings too, but was not invited to a single one.

"There was a London-centricity in decision making," he said. "wanted to create the balance in people’s thinking by saying ‘look, this is how it seems from here’. And genuinely, it was in the spirit of national emergency.

"We weren’t there to use it as a platform for politics or anything like that, it was simply to say ‘we are worried, this is a challenging situation, we want to be heard and taken as seriously as anywhere else’.”

Burnham added that Johnson was also unaware of the restrictions imposed in Greater Manchester during 2020, with the former having to remind the then-Prime Minister that ongoing lockdown measures had been in place since July.