For those of us who were cynical about the government’s pandemic response as it was unfolding in real time – as I was – the Daily Telegraph’s ‘lockdown files’ confirm our worst suspicions. Judging from the revelations in the 100,000+ WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock’s phone that Isabel Oakeshott has handed to the newspaper, the then-Health Secretary’s decisions were driven as much by a desire to shore up his own political reputation as they were by medical considerations.
To be fair to Hancock, the medical advice often changed from one moment to the next and wasn’t always consistent, as these messages reveal. The overall impression left by the ‘lockdown files’ is that the government wasn’t ‘following the science’, as Hancock and others claimed – not because the scientific advice was clear and they were ignoring it, but because there was no such thing as ‘the science’. We were in uncharted waters and no one really had a clue what to do, including the government’s scientific advisors.
What’s unforgivable is that the government imposed policies it knew would cause widespread suffering, such as banning people from visiting their dying relatives in hospitals and care homes, without really knowing whether they would save lives. As Hancock’s WhatsApp messages make clear, such measures were often imposed because the government wanted to be seen to be doing something – anything – rather than admit the truth, which is that it was completely out of its depth.
So far, the Daily Telegraph’s revelations, based on its filleting of the 2.3 million words in the WhatsApp messages, don’t look good for Hancock. They include:
- He rejected Chris Whitty’s advice on 14 April 2020 to test all people going into English care homes, introducing guidance that only made testing mandatory for those being transferred from hospitals.
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