'Wounded' Rishi Sunak today claimed “empowering” independent scientists “screwed” Britain as he lifted the lid on his fight against Covid lockdown.
The ex-Chancellor gave his most eye-catching interview of the Tory leadership contest as he battles to open a last-minute lead over Liz Truss.
Mr Sunak claimed minutes of SAGE - the government’s scientific advisors - edited out dissenting voices, which were only revealed to him by a Treasury staffer on the call.
Even with lockdowns, more than 177,000 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test in the UK.
But Mr Sunak said the “fear narrative” around Covid, which was deadly and had no vaccine, “was always wrong from the beginning” - adding posters of patients on ventilators were “wrong to scare people like that”.
He said no one ever calculated the economic costs of lockdown compared to the deaths, and “I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off.”
He told The Spectator: “The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.”
He added: “This is the problem. If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.”
It comes as Mr Sunak makes increasingly worried claims about his rival, saying her plans to cut taxes will leave millions of the poorest facing “destitution”.
A Liz Truss ally today complained Mr Sunak was adopting a "scorched earth" policy, telling The Times: “He's thrashing around all over the place like a wounded stoat. All he's doing is attacking her.
"At some point someone has to grab him by the scruff of the neck and say what are you doing? Are you trying to destroy this party?”
No10’s former director of communications hit back at Rishi Sunak’s claims.
Lee Cain tweeted: “Huge admirer of Rishi Sunak but his position on lockdown is simply wrong.
“It would have been morally irresponsible of the govt not to implement lockdown in spring 2020 - the failure to do so would have killed tens-of-thousands of people who survived covid.
“In addition, without lockdown the NHS simply could not have survived & would have been overwhelmed. This would have seen an even greater backlog of excess deaths for missed cancer appointments etc.”
Lib Dem MP Layla Moran, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, blamed Mr Sunak’s “desperation to salvage his floundering leadership ambitions”.
She said the government’s “indecisiveness and unscientific approach gave us the worst of all worlds; the biggest economic hit in the G7, a tragically high death toll, enormous NHS waiting lists and ironically, more time in lockdown.”
Mr Sunak said “no one talked” about missed GP appointments, the NHS backlog or lost learning for kids.
In one meeting “I was very emotional about it,” he claimed: “I was like: “Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare” or something like that.
“There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.”
Despite his comments Mr Sunak did not argue lockdown was a mistake - just that the downside could have been mitigated better, the Spectator reported.
Mr Sunak later appeared to backtrack - insisting he had not suggested lockdown shouldn't have happened.
Quizzed by the BBC's The World at One, he was unable to name anything he'd have done differently because "it's hard to know".
He added: "The point I was making was that looking back on it, it is right that we learned the lessons from it.
"Obviously at the time, everyone was doing the best job they could in incredibly difficult circumstances, dealing with something that we'd never faced before.
"There's no point in trying to second guess those decisions, but it's right that we learned the lessons from it.
"And looking back, one of my reflections was that, you know, when things like that happen, I think we need to have all the facts and involve the trade-offs involved in those decisions very openly and honestly."
It comes as Mr Sunak goes head-to-head with Liz Truss in Norwich tonight in the second-last hustings of the Tory leadership race.
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.
But she faced a furious backlash from hospital chiefs over her plan to divert billions away from the NHS.
On Tuesday she said she would keep spending a £12bn health and care pot - despite scrapping the National Insurance rise that’s funding it.
More crucially, she said the money would go to care homes - despite only £5.3bn of the first £36bn being earmarked for them.
She said: “I would spend that money in social care. The fact is quite a lot of it has gone into the NHS. I believe it should go to local authorities to deal with the very real issues in social care.”
NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor, an ex-Labour advisor, told The Times: “The NHS is still reeling from a decade of austerity and two years of the pandemic.
“If this becomes policy, NHS leaders will face impossible choices on what to prioritise for their patients.”
Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers, added: "Taking away this money from the NHS will put the brakes on the elective recovery plan and efforts to bring down long waiting lists."
