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On Monday, Rishi Sunak will appear at the Covid inquiry. What he says doesn’t matter, because it’s as predictable as the dawn that will be ridiculed for the mistakes of others, which turns out to be the popular goal of politicians.
In his own appearance, Boris Johnson said he was “very inspired by and dependent on the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser, either of whom are notable experts in their field”. Weren’t we all one? In the early months of 2020, most of us relied on Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty to find the most productive way to get through the approaching pandemic. We were satisfied to “follow the science. “
However, we now have to pay attention to a lawyer, Hugo Keith KC, who tells us, in hindsight, that the total pandemic is entirely the fault of politicians.
The virus, the Chinese regime, and scientists must have an impeccable reputation. If Sunak and Johnson had acted differently, apparently, almost no one would have died.
This is claptrap. No country – not Sweden, not Japan, not Outer Mongolia – escaped the pandemic. Britain suffered about as many waves of the virus and excess deaths per head of population as France, Germany, and Italy, and rather better than Spain. Many places that did well in the first wave did badly in later waves.
Not that Mr Keith knows this: he shamelessly told Mr Johnson that Britain had one of the worst pandemics in Europe and had to be corrected by the former prime minister.
Never in Britain’s history have politicians so obviously given up their own policies and instincts at the behest of technocrats. This was evident day in and day out as scientists took to the airwaves and took to the podiums, to say nothing more of the politicians who echoed and praised them. to them.
Unsurprisingly, the scientists were largely wrong. I vividly attended a well-attended assembly on 10 March 2020 in the House of Lords, where Dr Whitty told us that there was no threat to travelling on public transport. “So what? I thought, I seemed completely caught up in the myth. “It’s not up in the air. “
Then I remember the experts going too far in the opposite direction: showing inaccurate slides to justify a second lockdown in the autumn of 2020, using idiotic models to demand an unnecessary (as it turned out) third lockdown in December 2021, and failing utterly to take into account the damage lockdowns were doing to mental health, children’s education and cancer diagnoses.
Of course, Boris Johnson also made mistakes, but he listened too much to clinical advisers, before and after he almost died from the disease. Their biggest mistake, in my opinion, was to abandon – at the request of the experts – a Swedish-style voluntary lockdown for a draconian and mandatory lockdown, which devastated children’s schooling and led to an epidemic of deaths from cancer and central diseases.
Yet we now know that on excess deaths Sweden did better than almost any country in Europe; economically, too, it suffered less harm.
The excuses that Sweden is an obedient and sparsely populated population are because the “experts” at the time spoke in a very different tone.
They didn’t say, “Well, it may work in Sweden, but not here”; they declared that Sweden would be “the world’s warning”, that it was “unlikely to feel any economic benefit”, a “catastrophe”, a “disaster”. However, it turns out that Mr. Keith is not happily aware of all this.
Increasingly, it turns out that this investigation, created through the Blob, directed and directed through the Blob, sees its task as blaming the politicians and excusing the Blob.
In fact, as I watch politicians take responsibility for the mistakes of quangos and agencies, I wonder if all elected legislators are now scapegoats.
If the lesson drawn by the investigation is that everything would have gone well if another political team had been elected in 2019, this would only be a mistake, but also a danger.
The five true lessons of the pandemic are: epidemiology is unpredictable so planning ahead won’t work; changing course can be sensible; authoritarianism is a mistake; experts do not have a monopoly on wisdom; and there are always trade-offs.
When Sunak shows up, I bet you might not hear that.
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