In the alternative universe in which I advise David Cameron, here’s what I would have proffered in advance of his appearance at the Covid inquiry: offer a concession of failure on the part of your administration, presenting an image of humility without inviting public anger. Crucially, deflect attention away from the policies you pursued that stripped Britain of its defences when the pandemic hit.
Nothing fits the bill better than expressing regret that, in discussions about possible pandemics, there was too much of a focus on influenza at the expense of coronaviruses. It’s calibrated to steal headlines. Rather than say “David Cameron denies austerity left Britain unprepared for Covid”, there will be a sense of you looking reflective about how things could have been done differently.
Who knows if any such conversations actually happened. But that appears to be the chosen strategy, and it has worked. It says something about our political culture that we have spent 20 months interrogating Boris Johnson’s dishonesty and illicit partying – outrageous behaviour, to be sure – rather than a far graver pandemic scandal. That Cameron was subjected to just a two-hour interrogation at the inquiry is revealing of skewed priorities. In British politics, style is given heftier weight than substance: thus Johnson’s vulgarity is considered a graver sin than, say, how Cameron and his sidekick, George Osborne, shredded the social fabric of the country and left us brutally exposed to an external shock like Covid.
Sure, Cameron reeled off the well-honed lines of a former PR man. Interrogating him, Kate Blackwell KC made it clear she would not engage in political arguments surrounding austerity, but Flashman had other thoughts. Britain would have ended up like Greece without cuts, he claimed – a risible nonsense – and cuts returned the economy to health. The truth was that with interest rates then at nearly zero, “extra borrowing had essentially no impact on long-term government bond (gilt) rates”, as the economist Jonathan Portes put it. The government could have invested money without dire economic consequences, but it was more interested in an ideologically charged project of shrinking the state, and inventing a dividing line to torture the Labour party.
Cameron’s claim that the NHS budget was protected because – unlike other government departments – spending on it increased, is classic Tory smoke and mirrors too. As the King’s Fund put it in 2015, under the Cameron-Osborne regime, the NHS suffered the lowest annual average real increase in spending since it was founded in 1948. As former health secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted last year, NHS staff shortages left the country exposed to a major health crisis. Cuts to social care also “went too far”, he confessed, making it a “silent killer”. When you adjust for an ageing and growing population, as esteemed professor of epidemiology Sir Michael Marmot puts it, NHS spending actually went down.
That’s before you even discuss a chaotic top-down reorganisation and never-ending real-terms pay cut for burnt-out staff. The government “ground down and pulled apart public health systems until they were threadbare,” as the chairman of the British Medical Association, Phil Banfield, puts it. Conceding even an inch to claims that this multipronged assault on the NHS did anything other than undermine pandemic preparedness is to indulge a politician lost in the murky no man’s land separating fantasist and conman.
Presented with evidence that health inequalities worsened under his government, Cameron swatted away any suggestion austerity was responsible. This “flies in the face of scientific opinion”, in Prof Marmot’s words – a polite way of describing our former prime minister as a flat Earther. One striking indicator of this is that life expectancy for the poorest people actually fell. Why does this matter? Because Covid was a heat-seeking missile for health inequalities. Those with bad underlying health were more likely to become seriously ill, and to die: and they were disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the British poor, among whom minorities are overrepresented.
We could go on: our already insultingly inadequate statutory sick pay – the lowest of the industrialised OECD countries – was allowed to fall in real terms, and millions weren’t even eligible for that. Here was a deadly incentive for employees fearing for their ability to provide for their families to opt for work over self-isolation. While there has been much-needed discussion about Johnson’s lockdown failures, there has yet been no reckoning on how the virus flourished amid economic insecurity.
Yes, tales of No 10 staff drunkenly vomiting and bellowing karaoke songs while bereaved relatives couldn’t hold the hands of dying loved ones is maddening. Yes, Johnson is powered by deceit, an obvious fact that should have been rather more politically salient earlier on. But is not leaving Britain desperately vulnerable to national catastrophe – through a series of ideologically driven policy decisions that cost many thousands of our fellow citizens their lives – not a greater scandal? Yes, Osborne has also been peeled away from his new vocation as sage political pundit to be interrogated, but – like Cameron – it was for an all too brief session.
That austerity failed on its own terms – it delivered the worst squeeze in living standards in modern times and stagnant growth without eliminating the deficit – is one thing. But these men also left their own citizens gruesomely exposed to terrible danger. If we are to avoid future catastrophes, the Covid inquiry should spend weeks examining what they did, not hours. Partygate is the scandal that felled a prime minister, but Cameron and Osborne are the principal architects of our national ruin, and history should record that, even if this inquiry does not.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
