To lock down, to not lock down, when, for how long, what tier and what level of financial support, masks at school, outside, or only on crowded undergrounds? This was where debate raged during the pandemic. In every home, on What’s App, over Zoom, between colleagues and family, doctors and teachers, within government, and in the media.
For many, being reminded of that time is painful. We were happy to wait for the Government inquiry but the pandemic, and our reaction to it, has exploded back into our consciousness again. This is due to the wisdom of Matt Hancock handing over 100,000 messages between fellow politicians, advisors and civil servants from his time as health secretary to journalist Isabel Oakeshott, to help her ghost-write his book, the Pandemic Diaries. Which she then released to a national newspaper that spent two months poring over each conversation, before the details began to be published this week, framed within a prism of lockdown scepticism.
Many of these messages had already been handed over to those running the inquiry, which is the proper process for measured learnings. Cue withering disdain from Hancock’s colleagues and friends, whom he has embarrassed and betrayed. Arguably he has also wrecked the effectiveness of the inquiry to hold our attention. His apology yesterday to his colleagues will do little to stem anger. Any media lawyer could have warned him that the public interest argument was a risk to a signed NDA.
Oakeshott’s actions are for her conscience, and she was in robust form when I saw her on Wednesday night in the Talk TV studios. She claimed in a statement yesterday that the ‘Lockdown Files’ are about ‘the greatest betrayal of this country’ and that “we were all let down by the response to this pandemic.” Well, it’s her right to have an opinion.
I suspect, unfortunately, that it is the little indignities we end up remembering from these revelations, rather than the important takeaways — a slim grasp of mathematics from some running the country, a Covid test being chauffeur-driven to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
That there were heated arguments over the direction of travel on pretty much every decision during the pandemic was no secret.
Delaying urgent cancer treatments, forcing people to live alone, allowing a child to die without his parents at his bedside in a hospital — these were aberrations in societal behaviour that I hope no government insists on again.
It is not just lockdown sceptics that take this line. And many of those rules were removed for subsequent lockdowns. There were many government decisions at the time we either argued for or against in leaders and columns in this newspaper. Others had very different takes. And that is the problem: the hope that we can scrutinise every decision and come up with a firm future ideology to guide us through another global emergency is a mistaken one.
There will be informed opinion where absolute proof is absent but opinion all the same. There is no smoking gun in these WhatsApp messagess (to date!). Take yesterday’s main revelations: we discovered arguments blazed in Cabinet over shutting down schools as a new variant let rip through society. Even if the government had insisted that schools stayed open during that terrible January in 2021, whether the unions or the teachers would have acquiesced given their own health fears, was a serious consideration.
In the round, many messages, despite some fruity outbursts, reveal thoughtful scientists, politicians and advisors battling with unknowns, and in many cases getting those decisions wrong meant choosing between a terrible range of choices, given what we knew at the time. Should we have been offered more choice? My recollection was many of the population took matters into their own hands anyway, as the pandemic progressed.
Where there was not robust scientific data for commands they enforced and the reasons were in fact political, should we have been told? Like masks for children in schools? Yes, absolutely. Should we scrutinise incompetence, and try and discover firm lessons? Also, yes. But the idea that waste in panicked procurement, or disagreement, would not happen again, in another, different pandemic, is for the birds.
Two clear conclusions we can from this week all agree on: WhatsApp did not suit the severity of the discussions, however much we are enjoying the salacious reveals. And Matt Hancock is never returning to politics.
Boris is full of bombast, but he knows his time has passed
AH, the BoJo. While the rest of his party were enjoying a day away with their new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was giving a speech in London, making clear for the first time his reaction to the new deal over the Northern Irish Protocol that Rishi Sunak just negotiated with the EU.
And his behaviour was as normal: ensure everyone is talking about him and proffer himself as the leading man for those wanting to rebel and overturn the current leadership to my benefit. What he didn’t do was offer any clear answers as to how, if his Protocol Bill was pushed through parliament, we would bring the EU to his way of thinking. There wasn’t much movement before.
This was a more muted Johnson than we used to know, however. I suspect he senses that the herd both here and in Northern Ireland are moving away from him. We are exhausted, and we want our economy to recover.
Personally, I think his speech should have thanked the Prime Minister for finally sorting out the mess he left us.
Why Andrew over Harry and Meghan?
Whatever the practicalities of the King deciding to take Frogmore Cottage away from Prince Harry and Meghan, I see no wisdom in, as stories indicate, offering it to Prince Andrew.
For the public, this seems like preferential treatment for a member of the family who has caused more trouble for the Royal family’s reputation than his son can ever be accused of. Let them keep it. And the King can see his grandchildren.
