CABINET Minister Michael Gove offered the first government apology today for its errors in handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Mr Gove, now Levelling Up Secretary and a senior minister during the pandemic, told the Covid inquiry: “I want to take this opportunity to apologise to the victims who endured so much pain, the families who’ve endured so much loss, as a result of the mistakes that were made by government in response to the pandemic.

“As a minister, responsible for the Cabinet Office, and who was also close to many of the decisions that were made, I must take my share of responsibility for that.”

He further acknowledged that he should have been more “forthright” in pushing for a lockdown in March 2020, itemising for the inquiry headed by Judge Heather Hallett the major government mistakes: “We were too slow to lock down initially in March,” he said. “We should have taken stricter measures before we eventually decided to do so in late October.

“While it was admirable that we succeeded in building testing capacity so quickly, the strategic approach to who should be tested, why and what our tests were for was not as rigorously thought through as it might have been.

“I am also concerned that we did not pay enough attention to the impact on vulnerable children of some of the measures that we took.”

Mr Gove admitted that the government’s handling of personal protective equipment (PPE) procurement “deserves at the very least reflection.”

This comprehensive indictment of the government’s conduct from one of its insiders will surely embarrass already-struggling Tories anxious at the impending verdict of the electorate.

But Mr Gove defended Boris Johnson’s own conduct as premier, which has come under strong criticism from other witnesses at the inquiry. 

The then prime minister had the right to test arguments and was a natural libertarian, Mr Gove said, who ended up taking the right decision on lockdown but took “a little longer to come to that conclusion than others.”

Mr Gove was even blunter in March 2020, telling Mr Johnson’s then-Svengali Dominic Cummings: “We’re fucking up as a government” and “the whole situation is even worse than you think.”

He was referring not only to the looming Covid calamity but to what he regarded as the dysfunctional nature of the Cabinet Office, the heart of the Whitehall machine.