Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, made the comments in his diary on 14 December 2020, amid a huge Covid wave that led to the third UK-wide lockdown and killed 1,000 people a day at its peak.

Vallance claimed Johnson said that a lot of his party “thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them”, the Covid inquiry heard.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry is an independent public inquiry into the United Kingdom 's response to, and the impact of, the COVID-19 pandemic, and to learn lessons for the future.