A war of words played out over the first two years of the pandemic. On one side were commentators and scientists opposed to any form of social restriction as a way of keeping infection rates down. On the other, those who argued the government should be pursuing a “zero Covid” policy to eliminate the disease at all costs. Caught between this tug of war were the majority of scientists and the British public.
Sometime last summer, those debates melted into the background with the promise of a “to be continued…” when the statutory inquiry into Covid eventually starts to publish its findings. But the second season of Lockdown Wars has been thrust on us sooner than expected after the Telegraph obtained more than 100,000 pandemic WhatsApp messages. They were passed on by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who was granted access to them by Matt Hancock while she was co-authoring the former health secretary’s pandemic diaries. She has argued that the public interest in releasing the messages justified breaking her non-disclosure agreement.
Oakeshott has described pandemic social restrictions as a “reckless overreaction” and “monumental disaster” and universal vaccine rollout as “one of the most extraordinary cases of mission creep in political history” and has been clear that she chose the Telegraph because of its anti-lockdown editorial stance. So it’s perhaps little surprise the paper is combining news reports of these messages with columns from prominent lockdown sceptics – Nigel Farage and Rachel Johnson among others – claiming they prove they were right all along.
While this risks creating the perception that the Telegraph might be selectively releasing messages to shore up its preferred narrative that social restrictions were a case of ideology trumping evidence, it’s notable that there isn’t – yet – anything that really supports that view. But there are plenty of messages that fit in with what we already know, for instance that some cabinet ministers – most notably Rishi Sunak – strongly opposed restrictions. So far, the Lockdown Files echo a previous investigation by the same paper, but with a crucial difference – it is as if the Telegraph had published its explosive 2009 MP expenses revelations, but packaged them with a set of opinion columns arguing – against the evidence – that this was all a problem of one party only.
But the story demonstrates one thing beyond question – that it was wrong for the government to kick the assessment of its Covid record into the long grass by setting up a statutory inquiry that would take years to report. There are two questions to which we deserve an answer. First: were the decisions taken in the battle with Covid the right ones? And second: how were those decisions taken and who was responsible for any mistakes made? Both are important for learning lessons from the pandemic, but the first can be answered relatively speedily. In fact, there were calls – backed by the Observer – to conduct rapid reviews of what went right and wrong just a few months into the pandemic. Other countries have already published the results of such reviews.
Beyond reinforcing a lot of what we already know about the main characters – such as Hancock is a walking self-destruct button – the Telegraph leaks are really about the second question. The truth is we don’t need a big cache of leaks to understand what the government got right and wrong; there is plenty already out there for a rapid inquiry to draw on. The balance of evidence shows that government-imposed restrictions that reduced people’s social contacts cut infection rates and saved lives. It also suggests that countries that acted more quickly to impose social restrictions did a better job of protecting the economy. Allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled would have incurred substantial economic costs.
These broad headlines disguise important contextual differences. A country such as Peru struggled to enforce its strict lockdown and ended up with a higher death rate than neighbours that had less strict measures. The case of Sweden – the darling of anti-lockdowners – is nuanced. Sweden only really deviated from similar countries in the stringency of its social restrictions in the first Covid wave and even then it imposed some measures. Its Covid mortality rates were significantly worse than its Nordic neighbours and while the Swedish Covid commission concluded that its government was right to focus on requests rather than mandates to avoid social contact – and levels of compliance with these requests were generally very good – it said it should have taken faster and stronger action to slow the spread of Covid in the first wave, such as closing restaurants.
The evidence about impact on lives and the economy isn’t by itself sufficient, however: different social restrictions inflicted different types of cost. The lifelong heartbreak of knowing your beloved parent died alone is different to the impact of not seeing friends for a few weeks. Children missing out on months of school is of a different order to being prevented from enjoying live music.
Why did the government reopen pubs before schools? Why did it do so shamefully little to mitigate the impact of school closures in the first wave? Why did it not learn the basic lesson of the first wave – that acting too late in the case of an exponential virus means not just more deaths but more economic damage – and apply this in the second wave even as it was getting ready to roll out a vaccine that would eventually reduce the need for restrictions? What actions could it have taken to blunt the cruellest impact of the first-wave restrictions? Was it necessary to give the police such draconian powers to enforce regulations when public compliance, apart from in Downing Street, was generally very good?
In trying to shoehorn the WhatsApp leaks into their own ideological narrative, the Telegraph’s anti-lockdowners obscure these important questions. We urgently need a rational assessment of what the government got right and wrong, based not just on scientific evidence but on how the response aligned with the values of citizens, the vast majority of whom still think the government either got the balance right overall on social restrictions, or didn’t go far enough, and who will have their own views on the specific trade-offs involved. The longer we go without it, the more we will see ideologues trying to fill the gap.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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