‘When do we deploy the variant’, asks Matt Hancock after talking of the need to ‘frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain’. The messages yet again remind us of the mindset, at this stage in the pandemic, of the small group of men who had given themselves complete power during lockdown.
The tone of these messages matters. The idea of giving ‘marching orders’ to police, to arrest members of the public for going about normal life, did not seem to make them at all uncomfortable. We see Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, laughing at how they will lock up people who come off flights and saying he wishes he could see the faces of those about to be incarcerated. We see them talking about fear as a legitimate government tool, to be dialled up or down – and discussing how useful it is to the government that people should be scared.
What we don’t see in the Lockdown Files is whether there is a need for this. Is there reason to believe that people are not acting responsibly right now? And if not, on what moral basis can fear messaging be justified? A pretty strong evidential base should be needed before the state decides to scarify the public. Nor can we see proper discussion of the obvious negative effects of such messaging. Fear is spoken of as if the only outcome can be a helpful one.
Yes, these are flippant comments, comparable to the worst of Nixon’s comments released in the Watergate tapes. They are the most egregious remarks, not typical ones. Like the Watergate tapes, they give only a glimpse of what’s available. But having read all of these messages, I’m afraid they are consistent with the tone at this stage: having started being cautious, they had come to be flippant. They were not answerable to the cabinet, let alone parliament, let alone the country. The UK system had allowed for government-by-WhatsApp, with results that – thanks to the Telegraph – the world can now see. May it never happen again.
My takeaway from spending all that time with the Lockdown Files was not the stories – extraordinary and appalling though they are – but by what we do not see. Mainly, where are the voices of caution in the fear messaging? Where is the person in the room saying: hang on, what about the unintended consequences? We know that Rishi Sunak was deeply alarmed by this, thinking no one else in Europe was doing such fear messaging –and this would make the economy harder to revive. Then there are the vulnerable people, who really were scared to death. Today’s Sunday Telegraph interviews the mother of a 15-year-old boy saying he was so scared of Covid that he came to fear the air itself. She says she tried to shield him from the news, but the gloom was everywhere. Tragically, he took his own life.
Where, now, are the studies into the full effects of fear messaging? Is there – or was there ever – any evidence suggesting that people were not obeying the restrictions enough and needed to be scared? Is there a chance to learn about what worked and what didn’t; what was necessary and what was not?
Fear messaging, like lockdown itself, was new. And like most new tools, it was badly misused with hardly any understanding about the side effects. I can understand that Rishi Sunak is in no rush to revisit a chapter of history that he knows shows so many of his colleagues at their worst. But a proper study into the drawbacks of fear messaging might make the Matt Hancocks of the future more restrained when – and it will be when – the next pathogen emerges.
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