Scientists were given too much power when it came to lockdown decisions, prospective Prime Minister Rushi Sunak has claimed. The Tory leadership contender says he “wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off” of lockdowns during earlier phases of the pandemic.
Mr Sunak said one of the Government’s biggest mistakes was giving too much power to scientists and claimed the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) edited its minutes to hide dissenting opinions. The former chancellor made the statements in an interview with the Spectator magazine.
“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did,” he is quoted as saying. “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. We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools.”
Mr Sunak claimed Sage removed some opinions from its final minutes, but said a Treasury official would listen to the meetings and brief him on the omissions. “The Sage people didn’t realise for a very long time that there was a Treasury person on all their calls,” he said.
“A lovely lady. She was great because it meant that she was sitting there, listening to their discussions.”
Former Conservative chief whip Mark Harper backed the claims that during the pandemic “dissenting voices were not allowed” in Government. The Sunak supporter who chairs the lockdown-sceptic Tory Covid Recovery Group, told Tom Swarbrick on LBC: “You will know that one of the roles that I had during the Covid pandemic, chairing the Covid recovery group with a number of my colleagues, was simply to ask the Government some questions about yes, the threat from Covid but also the cost and consequences of the decisions that were taken.
“In fact, in your news headlines, you just highlighted there, the impact there’s been on a number of children from the fact that we locked them out of school. That’s children who were at no risk from Covid.
“And all that I was doing from outside Government, Rishi Sunak was doing inside Government, was asking some questions about how we balance these things, how you trade it off and make the choices? And the Government was not being honest about that publicly.
"It was setting out that there were no choices, that you had to follow ‘The Science’, capitalised T, capitalised S, and dissenting voices were not allowed.” He added: “When I raised questions – and we questioned the modelling people in Number 10 briefed out to journalists that we deliberately wanted to kill thousands of people which was clearly nonsense – we were simply asking questions to get better decisions, and I’m pleased that Rishi Sunak shone a bit of a light on what was going on in Government at the time.”
The Department of Health has been contacted for comment.
The claims came as Mr Sunak prepares to go head-to-head with Liz Truss once again in the penultimate hustings of the Tory leadership race on Thursday. Ahead of the Norwich hustings Ms Truss put her focus squarely on the issues facing the East Anglian area, citing her plans of tax cuts, supply-side reform, better regulation and targeted investment zones. Ms Truss also pledged to tackle trade union strike action, such as that at the Port of Felixstowe this week.
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