No one reading leaked messages from a former health secretary will be surprised to discover that Britain was badly governed during the pandemic. The evidence was not concealed in private WhatsApp exchanges, but played out in public view as a parade of equivocation, contradictions and dissimulation.
Statistics showing tens of thousands of Covid-related deaths in the care sector spoke of negligence at the time. Matt Hancock’s claim to have thrown a protective ring around the sector has long ago been proved false. That private communications, published by the Daily Telegraph, appear to show him resisting testing measures that might have helped avert the calamity can be shocking and predictable at the same time.
Nuances, perhaps mitigations, might emerge when the Covid inquiry has completed its work, but that is years hence. For bereaved families, the need for acknowledgment that terrible mistakes were made is urgent.
Whether that need is helped by the leaked messages is a different matter. Hancock has claimed that the leaks misrepresented his position. He might be justified in feeling aggrieved that the material is being cynically deployed to serve a partisan agenda, but his complaint would get a more sympathetic hearing if he hadn’t already chosen pursuit of celebrity status over public service. A man who parked his duties as an MP to appear on reality TV will struggle to elicit sympathy for an invasion of privacy relating to his former ministerial role.
To view pandemic policy through a lens trained on Mr Hancock’s phone is to indulge his vanity, even when that view casts him in a terrible light. It was Boris Johnson who led the government. It was Mr Johnson whose indecision and lack of grip allowed precious time to slip by, as it became clear that drastic action would be needed to limit the spread of the virus. The pattern of shabby procurement deals – billions squandered on protective equipment that was unfit for use; contracts awarded to Conservative donors – expressed a culture of corner-cutting and contempt for procedure that had its origin in Downing Street.
No country handled the pandemic perfectly, and Britain’s policy was not uniquely or unremittingly bad. The vaccine rollout was a success, although the undoubted benefits are scant compensation for lives needlessly lost through indecision and mismanagement before the jab was available.
When all the evidence is collated, there will still probably be no consensus on the wisdom of lockdowns – their timing, duration and stringency. There is no doubt that many lives were saved by closing schools and businesses, and also that there were social and economic costs. Those two things can be true simultaneously. Collective efforts to grapple with a painful episode in recent history are not helped by the revisionist agitations of a libertarian faction that casts lockdowns as a folly or, on the more paranoid fringe, a conspiracy.
It is also possible to hold simultaneously a view of the pandemic as an unavoidable tragedy for which there was no perfect response, and also a case study in bad government marked by avoidable, deadly error. It may be too soon to form a definitive judgment of ministerial culpability, but that is not an exoneration of Mr Hancock, Mr Johnson or their party. The full record of their mistakes might not yet be public, but enough is known to justify demands for contrition. Their failure to show any condemns them.
