In an extraordinary – and impeccably timed, from the point view of his Tory leadership campaign – interview with the Spectator, Rishi Sunak has felt compelled to out himself as the scrappy underdog of the cabinet’s Covid strategy battles. No one but him, he claims, even considered the potential harms of lockdown, such as missed doctors appointments, the NHS backlog or children not attending school. “That was never part of it … those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time,” he said.
He also says he objected to what he called the “fear narrative”, the messaging from the government about the dangers of the virus. Releasing posters of people on ventilators was the worst, he said.
It’s a potent image, isn’t it? All that fearlessness and resolve rippling beneath a cashmere hoodie. Sunak, in his own eyes, was nothing less than a one-man crusade for common sense and human rights in the face of evangelical lockdown monomania. Even more arresting is Sunak’s root cause analysis of how the UK came to suffer. The government’s fatal mistake, he claims, was to “empower” the independent scientists of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) to such an extent that they “screwed” the country.
Well. Even with lockdowns, according to the latest death certificate data, more than 170,000 people have died of Covid since the pandemic began. Just how many more tens of thousands of casualties would be required for Sunak to concede that actually lockdowns served a vital purpose?
The fact is, in almost every line of the interview – clearly an attempt to pander to the libertarian wing of the party faithful – Sunak is talking nonsense. He alleges, for instance, that Sage “had the power to decide whether the country would lock down or not”. But that’s entirely wrong. Sage’s role was, and remains, advisory. It’s up to the executive to make the tough decisions, a concept that I believe is known as leadership.
In reality, Sage was so impotent that after a few brief months of “following the science” – or at least purporting to do so – Downing Street swiftly went off piste. In September 2020, for example, Sage implored Johnson to lock down in order to avoid a catastrophic second wave. As Sage member Prof Stephen Reicher explained in this newspaper at the time: “On 21 September the scientific advisory body Sage produced a paper with a simple message: do something now or else lose control over the virus. That ‘something’ would have to be sufficient to reduce infections to a level where the virus could be controlled without shutting businesses and curtailing livelihoods.” The government chose to ignore Sage and sure enough Britain found itself, in Reicher’s words, “occupying the worst of all worlds: a limbo where the pandemic drags on and causes more damage, leaving us hopeless and praying for a vaccine”.
Sunak also alleges evasiveness, spin and lack of transparency from Sage, claiming that the committee would issue horrifying scenarios about what would come to pass if Britain did not impose lockdown, without revealing the basis upon which they had been calculated: “I was like: ‘Summarise for me the key assumptions, on one page, with a bunch of sensitivities and rationale for each one.’ In the first year I could never get this.” But this too is claptrap. Take, for example, the Imperial College modelling which influenced the decision to lock down for the first time in March 2020. That model predicted 250,000 deaths without any interventions. It was published, in its entirety – raw data, statistical analyses, executive summary and bullet point conclusions – on 16 March 2020. Perhaps Sunak, who must have missed it at the time, would like to read it here?
I can only conclude that Sunak is so desperate to be prime minister, he has decided to take a populist punt at rewriting Covid history. He reminds me of Dean Russell, the Tory MP who took on Chris Whitty last December by crassly asking him: “People are concerned we’re prioritising Covid over other things, especially with the Omicron variant. You know, Covid over cancer, Covid over other serious issues. What would you say to that?”
Whitty’s response, blistering in its understatement, applies to Sunak as much as Russell: “This is sometimes said by people who have no understanding of health at all. And when they say it, it’s usually because they want to make a political point. The idea that the lockdowns cause the problems with things like cancer is a complete inversion of the reality. If we’d not had the lockdowns, the whole system would be in deep, deep trouble and the impacts on things like heart attacks and strokes and all the other things people must still come forward for when they had them, would have been even worse than it was.”
Sunak is courting votes, twisting what actually happened to fit a narrative certain voters want to hear. Worse, the misinformation he’s spouting is dangerous. It encourages the public to think the worst of scientists, only exacerbating mistrust and division. The fact is, scientists weren’t empowered enough – and were used at times as human shields for political incompetence and procrastination. Shame on Sunak for debasing himself.
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
