The inquiry is now breaking for lunch – so let's look back over the key lines so far:

An apology: Rishi Sunak opened by saying how "deeply sorry" he was "to all of those who lost loved ones" and who "suffered" in the pandemic

Missing WhatApps: He told the inquiry he did not have access to WhatsApp messages from the start of the pandemic as he had changed his phone "multiple times over the last few years". He added he was "not a prolific user" of the app

Long hours: Sunak gave some insight into the demands of the job, saying he saw Boris Johnson "more often than I saw my own wife"

It felt fine to me: Asked about alleged "dysfunction" in No 10 and the Cabinet Office, the former chancellor said his interactions with both offices "felt fine to me"

A defence of Johnson: Where others have criticised Johnson for his decision-making and language, Sunak said his old boss was right to "go over the arguments" and "test out different points of view"

Bond market panic: Sunak recalled the "very significant move" in gilt rates - i.e. the cost of government borrowing - on 19 March 2020, causing "enormous anxiety" inside the Treasury

Eat out questions to come: The inquiry has not asked yet about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme - but one protester outside is holding a placard that says: "Meet, eat, die"

The inquiry lawyer is discussing plans at the end of June to end lockdown, including by opening hospitality.

Keith asks Sunak if he was aware that health advisers labelled the plan as being "at the riskier end of the spectrum".

Sunak says he does not remember this, but says the package was designed to keep the R rate at or below 1.

He says the policy would probably send R "closer to 1 than to 0.1" but that a "whole range of considerations" were taken into account.

He reminds Keith the aim was not to "completely suppress the virus" - but to make sure the NHS was not overwhelmed.

Helena Rothman
Reporting from outside the inquiry

While Sunak is giving evidence inside the inquiry, protesters have gathered outside Dorland House in London.

Peter Beagan is here to support his friends who have lost loved ones to Covid.

He feels very angry on behalf of the thousands of people who he thinks lost their lives due to the Eat Out to Help Out initiative.

Peter, who suffers from a long Covid issue with his eye, tells me that even to a layman it was clearly a bad idea to encourage people to dine in enclosed areas - especially when they had to take masks off to eat.

Sunak has not been questioned about the scheme yet, but it's likely he'll be asked to give evidence on this later today.

As a reminder, though, the impact of the scheme on Covid transmission is contested.

Sunak is now being asked about the events that led up to the announcement of the first lockdown on 23 March 2020.

He says he was told on 19 March about a "very significant move" in gilt rates - or bond markets - the day before.

These showed the global investment community was "starting to take a different view on the UK government's ability to borrow or the price we should pay for that", he says.

He says the cost of borrowing at that point had tripled in about a week, and therefore had an impact on the government's ability to fund itself.

The PM adds that on 21 March there was a failed gilt auction - the government tried to borrow at the auction in order to fund itself, it could not raise the money.

He says this was an "extremely serious and rare event" which caused "enormous anxiety" inside the Treasury.

The government subsequently had to enter a ways and means facility which Sunak described as essentially as "overdraft facility" at the Bank of England.

Nick Triggle
Health correspondent

While Sunak resumes his evidence after a brief break, let's look back on some of his answers from this morning.

As has been the case with many witnesses in recent weeks, there has been a lot of questioning about the timing of lockdown. Why did the UK wait until 23 March 2020?

Sunak said that was because up to that point the government’s scientists were not pushing for it. The aim had been to “flatten the curve” and manage the spread, rather than suppress it.

Advice from Sage, the scientific advisory body, was followed as soon as it was made, Sunak said. This chimes with what other ministers have said.

That changed over the weekend of the 14 and 15 March when new data showed the virus was spreading more quickly than the scientists had originally thought.

The concern was the NHS was at “imminent” risk of being overwhelmed. Sunak was then pressed on how far ministers explored the likelihood of that threat. He said he trusted those warnings.

That is an important line of questioning. The NHS stopped doing routine treatments en-masse in those first few months of the pandemic.

But in hindsight that decision has been questioned given the numbers in hospital with Covid peaked at under 20,000 in England – that is around a third of the beds available at that point.

Image source, .

Rishi Sunak has so far painted a picture of smooth communcation and decent debate within government during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic.

But previous evidence suggests a more fraught environment - not least from former adviser Dominic Cummings, who said on 19 March that Johnson was in "Jaws mode" and "melting down".

Note - there is some strong language in these messages.

Image source, .

In other WhatsApp exchanges, Cummings said Johnson thought Covid would be "like swine flu".

He and former No 10 communications director Lee Cain also said they were "exhausted" by Johnson.

They then discussed a tweet from Times journalist Steven Swinford, saying Johnson had sent a "confusing message" at a news conference.

Cummings adds: "It's only a matter of time before [Johnson's] babbling exposes fact he doesn't know what to say."

Jim Reed
Reporting from the inquiry

Image source, PA Media

Rishi Sunak is being asked about claims Boris Johnson veered from one extreme position to another when making key decisions during the pandemic.

In a WhatsApp message sent on 26 August 2020, for example, the now cabinet secretary Simon Case said he was "at the end of my tether" because Johnson was "changing strategic direction every day".

Sunak just said that having a "vigorous debate" about the direction of policy was no bad thing at the time.

He added that it would have been "far worse" to have signed off on "momentous" decisions with no substantive discussion whatsoever.

This echoes the words of Johnson when he was giving evidence last week. The former PM suggested he would often deliberately take a "devil's advocate" position in meetings to explore the different policy arguments.

The inquiry lawyer is asking Sunak about the ways in which the ex-prime minister - Boris Johnson - would make decisions.

Keith shows the inquiry an email sent by Sunak's principal private secretary which says: "On Monday I am just going to check where No 10 have got to and ensure our track for Tuesday. Until announced you never know!"

Keith suggests that this implies a degree of "backing and veering" in government decision-making.

Decision-making is a "process", replies Sunak, and Johnson would "go over the arguments" and "test out different points of view" and this might lead you to "change your mind".

"I don't think there's anything wrong with that," he adds.

PM making it hard for the headline writers so farpublished at 11:28 Greenwich Mean Time 11 December 2023

11:28 GMT 11 December 2023

Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent

Some of the witnesses who have appeared before the inquiry so far have used it as an opportunity to tear into their former colleagues' decisions, and the way they made them.

It is fair to say that so far Rishi Sunak is taking a different approach.

In particular, he has defended the way that government discussions took place, arguing that for all the attention on WhatsApps, conversations and decisions “of significance” were recorded in more official ways.

Though others have complained about a toxic culture in Downing Street, Sunak says that his interactions with Number 10 and the Cabinet Office “felt fine”. And he says he felt “able to feed in appropriately and adequately” to Boris Johnson’s decision-making.

Clearly it’s early in the hearing and Sunak’s approach might change as the questions change. But as it stands it appears that the prime minister is trying to rise above some of the more combative exchanges we’ve seen at the inquiry over recent weeks.

It may well be that, as the serving prime minister - with a fractious Conservative Party to keep happy and the voting public to appeal to - this is the most sensible course.

Image source, PA Media

We're currently hearing about evidence from other witnesses who have appeared before the inquiry.

Lawyer Hugo Keith KC puts it to Sunak that during the early days of the pandemic, some witnesses reported "dysfunction" in No 10 and Cabinet Office.

He asks whether this characterisation was "apparent" to Sunak while he was in the Treasury

Sunak says his interactions with both offices "felt fine to me" and that he "didn't feel...shut out".

He adds that in March 2020 "things were moving so quickly" and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson "largely acted on the advice given to him by Sage".

The prime minister began his evidence to the inquiry by saying he was "deeply sorry to all those who lost loved ones" during the pandemic.

Rishi Sunak said it was "important that we learn the lessons so that we can be better prepared in the future".

You can watch that moment below:

They inquiry is seeing evidence now, with lawyer Hugo Keith KC pointing to a document from 15 March 2020. It is from a prime ministerial meeting before the first lockdown.

In this, the economic impacts of the lockdown were outlined as prepared by the Treasury - Sunak's department at the time.

The PM says this was "very early on", and the "quality and granularity" of the information and analysis improved "considerably" over the coming weeks.

He says analysis became more detailed as the pandemic progressed.

Jim Reed
Reporting from the inquiry

Rishi Sunak has been talking about his relationship with Boris Johnson and other officials in the pandemic.

"I saw the PM more often than I saw my own wife [over that period]," he says.

Other witnesses have also spoken about the pressure of working long, intense hours during Covid.

Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, talked of working regular 16-hour days.

And Sir Patrick Vallance, the government's then chief scientific adviser, said he worked seven days a week for at least 18 months.

Image source, PA Media

Rishi Sunak is being questioned by the lead counsel to the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC.

His CV includes , externaladvising Chelsea FC on its sale in May 2022, and representing Queen Elizabeth in the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

He appeared in the inquest of Alexander Litvinenko - the British-naturalised Russian defector who died in 2006 of polonium poisoning - and was appointed lead counsel to the inquests into the London Bombings of 7 July 2005.

Hugo Keith KC, the lawyer for the inquiry, begins by asking Rishi Sunak about his use of WhatsApp and his methods of communication.

The prime minister says he is "not a prolific user" of WhatsApp and that he mainly uses it for communication with his private office.

He adds that he does not have access to any of those messages sent during the pandemic as his phone has changed "multiple times" over the past few years.

Image source, Covid inquiry

Rishi Sunak kicks off today's evidence session by saying how "deeply sorry" he is "to all of those who lost loved ones, family members through the pandemic".

He also offers an apology to "all those who suffered in the various different ways throughout the pandemic as a result of the actions that were taken".

Sunak adds it's "important we learn the lessons so we can better prepare in the future".

The PM says he will give evidence "in the spirit of constructive candour" to help the inquiry with its deliberations.

Image source, Covid inquiry

Rishi Sunak has been sworn in and placed his hand on the Veda, the sacred Hindu text.

Hugo Keith KC, the lawyer for the inquiry, is on his feet.

As a reminder, you can watch along by pressing Play at the top of the page.

Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent

At the Conservative Party conference just a few months ago, Rishi Sunak sought to recast himself as the candidate of change, defining himself not just against his Labour opposition but also against his Tory predecessors.

Since then, Sunak brought back one of those predecessors — David, now Lord, Cameron — to government as foreign secretary but his fundamental pre-election strategy is still the same: to demonstrate that unlike Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and other Conservatives he can fix various long-term problems in the British state.

The prime minister’s appearance at the Covid inquiry today, though, will be an emphatic reminder that Sunak was part of what came before. He will face questions about the decisions he made as Johnson’s chancellor, including to pursue the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

But he is also likely to be confronted on some of the issues the inquiry has pursued with other witnesses, such as questions about a "toxic" culture in government during the pandemic, and lockdown rule breaking, for which Sunak, like Johnson, was fined.

Today, at least, Sunak’s task to define himself against what came before him is a lot harder.

Image source, .

You can watch every moment of Rishi Sunak's evidence from 10:30 by pressing Play at the top of this page.

If you can't see the icon, refresh your browser or reload this page on the BBC News app.

Image source, Covid Inquiry

Let's bring you a little more detail on Boris Johnson’s appearance at the inquiry last week, during which the former PM faced questions over two days:

• Late to twig: Johnson said he should have recognised the seriousness of Covid sooner - though he defended not chairing five Cobra meetings in early 2020
• Choked up: The ex-PM opened up about his time in hospital with Covid in April 2020, where he realised some middle-aged men “like me” would not survive
• Eat Out to Help Out: Johnson defended the summer 2020 policy, saying it was not a "particular gamble"
• Let it rip: He denied ever wanting to "let the virus rip" during the pandemic - and said, if the idea was raised, it was merely to test the argument
• Partygate: Johnson said the idea of mass rule-breaking in Downing Street was a "million miles" from the truth - even if he could, in hindsight, have been stricter with his team