Rishi Sunak has been accused of trying to “rewrite history” after he claimed the harms of lockdown were ignored, meaning curbs on people’s freedoms may have gone on too long and been overly strict.
The Conservative leadership hopeful was criticised for his account of the discussions at the heart of government when he was chancellor amid frantic attempts to curb the spread of the virus and avoid the NHS becoming overwhelmed.
Sunak said he was effectively blocked from raising concerns about the negative “trade-offs” of lockdown, such as the surgery backlog and most children being home schooled – and too much effort was put into peddling a “fear narrative”.
Minutes of meetings held by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) often did not reflect the criticisms made of certain policies, Sunak added.
His comments were disputed by senior figures who were in Downing Street during the Covid crisis and said the downsides were considered but lockdown had been the “best option available”.
Dominic Cummings, the former No 10 chief of staff who turned against his former boss to help bring Boris Johnson down, said Sunak “seems to be suffering … from rewrite-history-syndrome”.
He called Sunak’s comments, made in an interview with the Spectator magazine, “dangerous rubbish”, saying the article “reads like a man whose epicly [sic] bad campaign has melted his brain and he’s about to quit politics”.
Members of Sage who advised the government on Covid restrictions also offered a fierce rebuttal to Sunak’s attack, saying it had been up to ministers to decide on policy.
With just over a week left in the Conservative leadership contest, Sunak is trailing behind rival Liz Truss in polls of party members.
He said in December 2021, when he flew back from California to pressure the prime minister not to reintroduce restrictions over Christmas that “I just told him it’s not right: we shouldn’t do this”.
“Everything I did was seen through the prism of: ‘You’re trying to be difficult, trying to be leader’,” Sunak claimed. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off. The script was not to ever acknowledge them.”
He added: “Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time.”
One big lesson was that “we shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did”, Sunak said. “And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.”
Pressed on how different, Sunak said: “We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.” Lockdowns could have been “shorter, different, quicker”, he said.
As well as attracting criticism from Cummings, the comments were also attacked by Lee Cain, who was director of communications in Downing Street until November 2020.
“Huge admirer of Rishi Sunak but his position on lockdown is simply wrong,” Cain tweeted. He said it was “misleading to suggest we weren’t having those conversations”.
No 10, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Treasury “met multiple times daily and discussed the trade-offs”, Cain insisted.
“We all knew lockdown was a blunt instrument that had many downsides but in a world without vaccinations it was the best option available.
“The alternative was to ‘let Covid rip’, which would have killed tens of thousands and left the NHS in total collapse. Imagine Lombardy, only for months on end. The idea we would have been in a better state to deal with the issues the NHS has faced in recovery is for the birds.”
Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who sat on Sage, said ministers were the ones responsible for decision making, “so if one member of cabinet thinks that scientific advice was too ‘empowered’, then it is a criticism of their colleagues rather than the scientists”.
“The Sage meetings were about the science, not the policy options, and the minutes reflect the scientific consensus at the time,” Medley added.
Ian Boyd, a professor at the University of St Andrews and member of Sage in the pandemic, told the Guardian: “Members [of the committee] were acutely aware of the trade-offs associated with implementing specific actions. To the extent that it was possible with the information available at the time, these trade-offs were included within the uncertainty expressed in the advice.”
And John Womersley, professor at the college of science and engineering at the University of Edinburgh, said Sunak’s comments would “play well with a certain section of the Conservative base”.
It comes as the right of the Tory party is also increasingly vocal in its calls for the UK to ditch the policy of net zero by 2050. Climate experts fear the attacks falsely linking the policy to energy price rises are undermining UK emissions targets.
Truss, the frontrunner in the leadership contest, also said on Thursday that the government’s Covid restrictions had gone “too far”.
“I was very clear in cabinet, I was one of the key voices in favour of opening up,” she said, although she admitted her attention was less focused on domestic issues given at the time she was the international trade secretary.
“My view is we did go too far, particularly on keeping schools closed,” she said. “I’ve got two teenage daughters and know how difficult it was for children and parents and I would not have a lockdown again.”
Meanwhile, Sunak was told by Nick Brook, the deputy general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, that it was inexplicable he chose not to grant the necessary injection of cash for a schools’ recovery programme to help children catch-up with lost learning.
He said MPs should not be “attempting to justify or distance themselves from collective decisions they took at the start of the pandemic”.
A No 10 spokesperson said: “At every point, ministers made collective decisions which considered a wide range of expert advice available at the time in order to protect public health.”
