Yes, Dominic Cummings was in almost every way the ultimate colleague from hell. Yes, Boris Johnson was in a different way the sum of all nightmares as a national leader. Yes, the macho culture of the Downing Street in which they strutted their stuff was a disgrace. And, yes, many people died of Covid-19 in every part of the United Kingdom who should not have done so, partly because of their responses to the Covid pandemic.
In its hour of need, our country was lamentably governed by Johnson and Cummings. That’s indisputable. But, shameful as it is, this is not really the most important lesson emerging from Heather Hallett’s official inquiry into the pandemic. Focusing too much on the individuals who were faced with making pandemic policy decisions, understandable though that is and reprehensible though many of them proved, risks missing the larger picture that will matter more for the future.
The Covid-19 inquiry is revealing a broader problem than individual pathologies, inadequacies and incompetences, important though these are. It is showing an institutional failure in a system of government, and above all in the UK state, that did not work well enough when faced with a life and death national situation in early 2020. Poor leaders and advisers made all this worse, but the system failed too. Johnson and Cummings have now gone. The system has not. It needs to change.
The former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara was exceptionally clear about some of the structural things that went wrong in her evidence yesterday. The contingency plans for governing in an all-consuming crisis of the kind that arrived with Covid-19 simply did not exist, she said. Nor did those for responding to the public health needs caused by a global pandemic. MacNamara spoke in more measured language than Cummings had done the previous day, when discussing the same period. But her message was just as devastating about the lack of preparedness.
Where there ought to have been plans and tools in early 2020, properly tested and regularly reviewed, with a clear strategy and a comprehensive set of jobs, meetings, and messaging to be put into effect, there was, in effect, nothing. Faced with Covid, government then had to make up a lot of its own priorities and solutions on the hoof. It is a tribute to some of those involved, notably the government’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, chief medical officer Chris Whitty, and Kate Bingham of the vaccine taskforce, not to mention the thousands in the frontline, that we survived as well as we did.
For all his faults and all his defects, of which he showed off a dazzling variety when he answered questions from the inquiry on Tuesday, Cummings is actually right about a lot of this. Many will not want to acknowledge this, because his behaviour has been so egregious and has done such harm. But read his evidence statement. Look at some of his long blogs. Listen to what he said to the inquiry on Tuesday. Cut through the self-justificatory language and the inability to work with others, and you will find a significant critique, flawed and incomplete though it is in some ways, that no British government can afford to dismiss.
Of course, Cummings is not a trustworthy guide through the failures of the UK state. He has too many character flaws, too many scores to settle and too many intellectual prejudices to indulge for that. He is beguiled by the conceit that everyone he disapproves of suffers from groupthink and a fear of new ideas. His WhatsApp abuse of MacNamara marks a new personal low, even for him.
But Cummings did, and does, grasp one big thing all the same. Unlike Johnson, who with characteristically slapdash optimism thought the pandemic might all blow away in a few weeks, Cummings saw that a pandemic is a moment when only the state can provide the necessary protection or remedy for its inhabitants. Yet in early 2020 the UK state was in many ways too badly damaged to play the role that was expected of it.
The absence of meaningful contingency planning exposed by MacNamara was a disgrace. But it was only one example. As the Covid months passed, others would join it and become more acute. Government epidemiological data was inconsistent and disorganised. There were not enough hospital beds or dedicated wards. Supplies of personal protective equipment for health workers was soon in a shambles. Testing and tracing was a non-starter. Procurement policies verged on the corrupt. The care sector was not properly integrated. More generally, the NHS was bureaucratic and many staff alienated, even before the stresses of the pandemic.
Some of this reflected the years of public sector austerity since 2010. Some the difficulty of keeping up with the expansion of the elderly population. Some reflected upward spurts in inequalities of race and class in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Although the NHS remained dear to British hearts, substantial parts of the governing party believed in a private good, public bad approach to welfare. The idea that the state should be the universal provider had morphed over the decades in favour of a range of mixed public-private provisions.
When Covid struck there was thus no consistent approach to ensuring state needs in a modern way. Covid quickly exposed the cost to the state of this uneven approach, leaving Johnson and his ministers with few levers that they could confidently pull to secure national objectives, even if they had agreed – which they did not – about what those objectives should be. The devolution settlement made things even more complicated. Cummings’s support for so-called red teams who would stress-test contingency arrangements would have been a fine idea if the contingency arrangements had existed. But they did not.
So the big question arising out of Covid that will continue to face all future governments, not just a badly run one like Johnson’s, is whether they can be any better prepared. There is little evidence of that so far. Yet it would be foolish to leave the whole problem to Hallett to solve. Another pandemic, a climate catastrophe or another border control crisis will not wait for the Whitehall machine to process her report.
The problem is not whether Britain’s civil servants or politicians are up to the task of dealing with the challenges of the 21st century. Cummings is wrong to dismiss both groups so arrogantly. But he is right that one of the great lessons of the Covid pandemic is that the British state was not up to the job. If Keir Starmer’s Labour wants to be better at dealing with its own inevitable emergencies than Johnson and Cummings were three years ago, it should have its own red team already working on the case.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
