Basic literacy and numeracy are essential life skills, how come so many in government seem to lack the latter? How do they pass the selection process? – Owl

Boris Johnson was “bamboozled” by the science during the pandemic and had to have details explained to him “repeatedly”, the Covid inquiry has heard.

Archie Mitchell www.independent.co.uk (Extract)

Sir Patrick Vallance’s bombshell diary entries revealed in excruciating detail how the former prime minister struggled to understand graphs and “just could not get” some scientific concepts.

The former chief scientific adviser – one of the government’s most senior advisers during the pandemic – told the inquiry about how he kept daily notes as a “brain dump” to help him “decompress” — and never intended them to “see the light of day”.

But the diary extracts have already proved humiliating for Mr Johnson, with the inquiry hearing how Mr Johnson sometimes struggled to retain scientific information, was “clutching at straws” and at one point queried whether Covid was spreading “because of the great libertarian nation we are”.

In one entry following a meeting with Mr Johnson in May 2020 about schools, Sir Patrick wrote: “Late afternoon meeting with the PM on schools. My God, this is complicated. Models will not provide the answer. PM is clearly bamboozled.”

Another entry, also written in May 2020, said: “PM still confused on different types of test. He holds it in his head for a session and then it goes.”

In another humiliating passage for Mr Johnson, Sir Patrick wrote: “Watching the PM get his head around stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.”

Later, in September 2020, Mr Johnson is talked through some graphs, after which Sir Patrick wrote: “It is difficult, he asks questions like ‘which line is the dark red line?’ – is he colourblind? Then ‘so you think positivity has gone up overnight?’ then ‘oh god bloody hell’. But it is all the same stuff he was shown six hours ago.”

Asked about the extracts, Sir Patrick said Mr Johnson “would be the first to admit it wasn’t his forte, and that he did struggle with some of the concepts and we did need to repeat them often”.

But Sir Patrick added that scientific advises from across Europe all recalled their leaders having problems understanding some concepts.