“Victory has a hundred fathers, but failure is an orphan”. John F. Kennedy told that to a journalist after the Bay of Pigs debacle. One can’t help but be reminded of it by this week’s unedifying sessions of the Covid Inquiry.
I’m happy to say they have vindicated my long-standing belief that the whole affair is an expensive and pointless farce that should be scrapped. But they have also made clear that this so-called Inquiry is a prolonged attempt to make Boris Johnson the scapegoat for any flaws with Britain’s pandemic response. Unable to conceive that it may have made mistakes, officialdom seeks to set Johnson up as its scapegoat.
Hugo Keith KC’s attack lines were depressingly predictable. He assured us he had “absolutely no interest in the salaciousness” of Dominic Cummings’s WhatsApps but was keen to use them as an example of “incompetence and disarray”. At least this time his primary focus wasn’t on showing whether anyone in Number 10 had ever used a naughty word.
Johnson was charged with having said the pandemic should have been allowed to “let rip”, and of letting Downing Street staff think rules should not be taken seriously. Representatives of various groups of grief-stricken families had the opportunity to denounce the ex-Prime Minister to his face. The usual war of words over where we fell in the international pack played out, without enlightenment or agreement on either side.
At the end of two days of questioning, we had learnt nothing new. The respective parties had their day in court. Keith expressed surprise that Boris Johnson was disorganised and often uninterested in detail. Johnson attempted to defend his record to a room of people who weren’t willing to listen. It rolls onto the next set of testimonies. The game commences, for the usual fee, plus expenses.
The price tag is expected to exceed a quarter of a billion pounds. Geoffrey Howe suggested we have inquiries for six principal reasons: establishing facts, learning from events, providing catharsis for those affected, reassuring the public, allocating accountability and blame, and showing something is being done. On those metrics, is the Inquiry delivering value for money for the hard-pressed taxpayer?
Obviously not. If the Inquiry was really interested in learning lessons for another pandemic, we would have split it into two stages, as advocated by our Deputy Editor. Rather than concentrate our efforts on a series of protracted show trials, we could have an efficient fact-finding and lesson-drawing inquiry designed to report as soon as possible, followed by an extensive process of blame and catharsis.
Such was the approach of Sweden, whose Coronavirus Commission produced an 800-page report in less time than it took our Inquiry to settle on its terms of reference. Ours threatens to follow in the footsteps of its recent predecessors. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry took 12 years. The Iraq War Inquiry took 7. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry is in its sixth. That deals with the death of 72 people, not 220,000.
For both public health officials hoping to prepare for the inevitable next pandemic and bereaved families hoping to fond some kind of closure, an Inquiry that will not finish its hearings until 2026 is utterly absurd. Who is excited that we have several more rounds of Johnson vs Keith to look forward to? Thousands and thousands of hours of testimony, each more climactic than the last.
That is all the hope that the conclusions of Baroness Hallet’s dogged efforts will eventually result in something worthwhile. But even at this early stage, it has become patently clear that the Inquiry has already made up its mind.
Despite its remit extending into judging the efficacy of “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions’ such as social distancing and the use of face coverings”, Keith and co appear to be operating on the assumption that lockdowns were effective and should have been implemented sooner. Little or no interest has been paid to critics of the Government’s approach.
Increasing evidence is available not only of the consequences of lockdown but of its efficacy. The decision not to lockdown again two years ago after the arrival of Omicron showed the advice of SAGE and their hangers-on was not infallible. The example of Sweden has always been plain to see; this week’s PISA results show the long-term harms of choices made in a panic in early 2020.
Yet to admit that the advice officials gave was faulty, that the public-health establishment might have got it wrong, would be to commit a cardinal sin against the apparatchik class. Both officialdom and grieving families have an interest in turning this into a witch hunt against Johnson and any other politician unfortunate enough to have become trapped in his orbit.
Don’t bother speaking to the Head of Public Health England or the Head of Civil Contingencies in the Cabinet Office. Pin it on Johnson, the greased piglet who partied whilst your relatives died. Nobody must admit the SAGE emperor has no clothes. The machine closes ranks, the Blob protects itself. Nobody must lose their jobs, and nobody must admit the Rolls-Royce has long since gone rusty.
But the irony of the efforts of the officialdom-grief industrial complex – the ‘Left-Wing Entertainment Industry’ about which our Editor has previously written – is that they have vindicated the very ex-Prime Minister they so clearly seek to condemn.
This ghastly, fruitless behemoth may have turned on the very man who established it. But Johnson has been shown to have been one of the few individuals willing to push back against the lockdown cult. As much as he may be apologetic about the mistakes that were made, Johnson pushed against the consensus which treated ever-increasing restrictions as the only viable option, inviting Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta to challenge SAGE groupthink.
Johnson makes an absurd poster boy for lockdown scepticism. He was the Prime Minister who ordered them, for Christ’s sake. For months, as Cummings hared around Downing Street thrusting graphs at anyone who would listen, and the public health establishment flapped about having prepared for the wrong pandemic, Johnsons seems to have grasped the situation’s absurdity, and pushed back in his own small way.
He asked questions about trade-offs, he sought alternative opinions. In doing so, he did more than the uncritical suits currently interrogating him. That is not to suggest his response was not deeply flawed, or to excuse him for eventually towing the lockdown line. But it does at least highlight one of Johnson’s essential virtues: his ability to stick two fingers up at a herd and think for himself.
As I switched from watching the former Prime Minister at the Inquiry and the current Prime Minister oozing further into the Rwanda mud, did I feel a slight twinge of regret for not defending Johnson last year, and for advocating for Sunak in his place? Not particularly. One still remembers the utter chaos into which his Number 10 descended, and his inability to grip the government machine. Asking questions about lockdown harms is no substitute for ordering them in the first place.
One also remembers that it was Sunak who flew back from California just in time to stop Johnson from signing off on another lockdown over Omicron. The current Prime Minister has always had a better understanding of the trade-offs that entailed than his predecessor-but-one. As ever, his greatest fault is to lack Johnson’s capacity for communication or generating public interest.
Either way, both bear the responsibility for first establishing and then failing to scrap this appalling charade. The price both will pay is to have their names and reputations dragged through the mud by an Inquiry far more interested in policing language and politicising grief than learning lessons.
Fortunately for the pair, that same inadequacy should ensure another pandemic finishes us off long before it will bother to report.