Lady Hallett has been holding hearings of the UK Covid-19 inquiry for much of the past two months. It is only this week, however, that the hearings have forced their way to the top of the news. There is no mystery about the reason. The evidence to the inquiry by senior civil servants, government advisers and health chiefs this week has been extraordinary and shocking.
For most of us, the shock has been the graphic reminders from those at the heart of government of how poorly the UK state was prepared for the Covid pandemic, of how indecisively the government responded, and of the bitter rivalries between some of those taking life-and-death decisions at the top. Among the multiple serious issues that have been aired in the past four days, two in particular stand out: the absence of any national planning for the pandemic and the inadequacy of Boris Johnson’s leadership.
Others, however, are reacting very differently to the inquiry. On the right, indignation is focused on the inquiry itself, not the pandemic incompetence. The proceedings are being mocked as a circus or as a blame-fest. Lady Hallett is derided as presiding over an exercise in confirmation bias and of having no interest in science. Above all, she is accused of not embracing questions that are now dogma in parts of the rightwing press and the Tory party: whether lockdowns worked at all, whether masks did any good and whether testing and tracing was in fact a waste of time and money.
Part of the answer to all this is that the critics should be more patient. This week has focused on a single “module” in the inquiry’s programme, devoted to “core UK decision-making and political governance”. This is just one module among six announced so far – others are preparedness, impact on healthcare, vaccines, procurement and the care sector. Other modules will follow. Since this week’s focus is political decision-making, it is hardly surprising that politics was under the microscope. Like all ideologues, the inquiry’s critics have already made up their minds. Fortunately, the inquiry has not.
The other part of the answer is that this week’s evidence matters. It matters that the prime minister could not make up his mind, was not on top of the detail and that he was on holiday when he should have been gripping the response. It matters that his advisers were constantly abusing one another and that they were mostly white middle-class males, giving little thought to issues of class, gender and ethnicity. It matters that ministers made statements that they must have known were untrue. Together, they let the country down, and with fateful consequences.
Yet a lot of this would have remained hidden if it was not for the inquiry. Because the inquiry has teeth, it has the power to dig deep. Without it, for example, would we have ever known what the former NHS England boss Simon Stevens revealed on Thursday – that someone as ill-equipped as the then health secretary Matt Hancock wanted the power to decide which patients should live and which should die if England’s hospitals became overloaded during the pandemic?
It is true that Lady Hallett’s work is proceeding at a stately pace. Her final report is not expected before 2026. But she is inquiring into the biggest nationwide trauma and the state’s most significant domestic policy blunder of modern times. “When the public needed us most, the government failed,” said Dominic Cummings in 2021. It should be this era’s epitaph. It is important that Lady Hallett should get the story right, in all its complexity, taking every argument into account and learning every lesson, however embarrassing they may be to those in power who let Britain down so badly.
