The public inquiry has already started and it is going badly for Boris Johnson

In a similar vein to the Iraq inquiry, the problem seems to be the initial response from the government's scientific advisers, says John Rentoul

There will be an independent inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

We know that there will be an independent inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus, because the prime minister said so in parliament last month: “I do not believe that now, in the middle of combating the pandemic as we are, is the right moment ​to devote huge amounts of official time to an inquiry, but of course we will seek to learn the lessons of the pandemic in the future, and certainly we will have an independent inquiry into what happened.”

Several attempts have already been made to sketch out what the findings of such an inquiry would be. One of the least edifying was a news story about the health secretary from an anonymous source to The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, which said: “Matt Hancock is being blamed in Whitehall for a series of poorly focused Cobra meetings at the start of the pandemic which hampered early attempts to fight the virus.”

More impressive, in my view, was an article in June by Professor Lawrence Freedman of King’s College London, who identified the tentative initial response of the government’s scientific advisers as a potential problem.