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Hello and welcome to Coffee House shops. This is a spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Lecifhe and Fraser Nelson. And we have the confirmation today from the Prime Minister that a public COVID inquiry is coming. James, give us the details.

So it won't start until next year. Boris Johnson's argument for why that is the case is that

he thinks that there's a risk of a resurgence this winter and that preparing for this inquiry

is going to take up a considerable portion of people's time like Chris Whitty or Patrick

Balance or people on the SAGE committee and obviously he didn't say this but obviously people

like him as well and he wanted

to wait until you were through the winter before you got there. I mean given how long public inquiries

take this means it's highly unlikely that this inquiry will report before the next election.

Indeed looking at how long some public inquiries have taken. I don't mean it's even certainly

will report before the election after next and we don't yet know who is going to head it. I mean, one of the big questions,

which will tell us about what kind of inquiry is going to be, is it headed by a judge, in which

case it will be a kind of classic, slightly prosecutorial inquiry, or is it headed by a public health professional who would

have a, I think, a slightly different approach? And then I think the other big question is,

the terms of reference of the inquiry, which we don't yet, no yet. Does it look at not only

how did the UK handle this pandemic, but how well prepared it was for that, for this pandemic?

Because that might cause some of the government's actions in a very different light, or is it specifically

on how the government handled this crisis? I think there is an element, as Robert Peston wrote

on Coffee House here, of the government trying to get out ahead of Dominic Cummings' appearance

for the health and science technology select committee

or conducting a kind of their own kind of mini-inquiry into it.

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