Rishi Sunak has said the "fear narrative"' around Covid was "wrong from the beginning" and that the Government "shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did" during the pandemic.
The former chancellor - who says he is the "underdog" in the Tory leadership race - made the comments in an interview with The Spectator magazine. He also claimed that minutes from Sage meetings were edited so that dissenting voices were not included.
“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” said Mr Sunak. “And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place. We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.”
Recalling discussions during the early days of the pandemic, Mr Sunak said: “Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time.”
He also said he raised misgivings about the closing of schools. “I was very emotional about it," said Mr Sunak. "I was like: ‘Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare,’ or something like that.
“There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.”
Mr Sunak also claimed that minutes from Sage meetings were edited so that dissenting voices were not included, reports The Telegraph.
“The Sage people didn’t realise for a very long time that there was a Treasury person on all their calls," said Mr Sunak. "A lovely lady. She was great because it meant that she was sitting there, listening to their discussions."
Mr Sunak said this Treasury official briefed him on what was said in the meetings but omitted from the minutes. And he expressed regret over the "fear narrative", which officials believed could have long-lasting effects.
"In every brief, we tried to say: ‘Let's stop the fear’ narrative,” said Mr Sunak. “It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong.”
In September 2020, Mr Sunak gave a speech saying it was time to learn to “live without fear”. He said this was the closest he came to defying the Government’s messaging - and that the Cabinet Office “were very upset about that".
It comes after a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret over the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic. Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said last year: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”
In March 2020 SPI-B said that Ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.
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