Exclusive: Boris Johnson accepts he made a mistake in delaying first lockdown

Boris Johnson accepts it was a mistake to delay the start of the first national lockdown, close allies have said, while insisting the Prime Minister was let down by scientific advisers.

Mr Johnson would act “harder, earlier and faster” if he had his time again, supporters say, raising the possibility of a mea culpa moment in a future inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.

As the first anniversary of lockdown approaches, Mr Johnson has rightly won plaudits for the runaway success of Britain’s vaccine rollout, but knows he will eventually have to confront the question of why the UK has suffered the highest death toll in Europe and the fifth-highest in the world.

The Telegraph has learnt that the pivotal moment in imposing lockdown came on March 14 last year – nine days before lockdown started – when Mr Johnson was shown evidence that ministers and scientific advisers had badly miscalculated how quickly the NHS would be overwhelmed.

The Prime Minister was “stunned” to be told by a Number 10 data analyst at a hurriedly-convened Saturday meeting that his “squash the sombrero” policy was not working and that hospitals were as little as three weeks away from being past capacity.

Mr Johnson had, until then, been making decisions based on out-of-date projections provided by Government departments.

But he waited until March 23 to issue his “stay at home” order, a decision which scientists have claimed doubled the death toll in the first wave.

Ministers and officials involved in the Covid response have said it should not be viewed through the prism of “20-20 hindsight”, but admitted the Prime Minister’s instinct for delaying decisions as long as possible was the “worst” approach in the midst of a pandemic.

In a week-long series of articles investigating the early response to the pandemic, beginning on Sunday, senior figures in Government also admit to mistakes over test and trace, PPE, care homes and pandemic planning, ahead of a promised independent inquiry once the pandemic is over.

Ministers and civil servants are likely to point the finger at each other over the slow initial response to the virus as it spread from China. Senior Government figures claim the civil service was “overconfident” it could handle the crisis, while blame will be directed at ministers for being too preoccupied with their political goals in the wake of their general election victory weeks earlier.

One source said complacency cost the Government “lost weeks” at the start of the pandemic which it took months to recover from.

Ministers and officials have made it clear they will, if called, say that the nine-day delay in imposing lockdown was a mistake.

“With hindsight it’s unarguable that we should have gone into lockdown earlier,” said one senior figure involved in the decision-making process.

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, are also likely to come under scrutiny over what Government figures described as “bad calls”, such as advising that Cheltenham Festival could go ahead last year.

Others said Mr Johnson had learnt from previous mistakes.

One senior source said: “Ordinarily the impulse, when you’re taking decisions that have big financial implications, would be to take time, and even in the autumn it was still a case of trying to balance the economic and the health aspects of lockdown. By the winter there was a view that you had to choose.

“He now takes decisions very quickly, and will say ‘if we’re going to do this, let’s do it properly and quickly’.”

The Telegraph has also discovered that ministers feared lockdown would trigger unrest on the scale of the August 2011 riots as they discussed whether the British public would accept restrictions on their liberty.

It has emerged that scientific experts warned as many as 830,000 people could die in the first seven weeks of the pandemic before estimates were revised down, and that ministers discussed whether Britain would have to accept an extra 100,000 deaths every year if Covid could not be beaten.