Has No. 10 really solved the problem of Covid groupthink?

It is hard to deny the importance of the issues raised this week by Dominic Cummings. His decision to identify the many mistakes made at the start of the pandemic is not about seeking vengeance; it is a vital process to ensure that errors are identified and not repeated. A vaccine-evading variant or a new virus could come along at any time. Should this happen, ministers must be ready.

Some of the world’s finest minds worked on pandemic planning, in Britain and throughout the western world. The UK was once ranked as more prepared for a new virus than any country in Europe. But the failure to provide adequate PPE equipment was the most visible sign of implosion. We had made a plan to fight the last war: to tackle a new influenza, rather than a Sars-style coronavirus that Asian countries had widely anticipated. Cummings was candid about his own regrets: specifically, failing to run a ‘red team’ analysis (i.e. a critical assessment) of the pandemic plan.

This is a crucial point. Efforts could have been made to find dissenting experts who would have pointed out flaws in the old plan. A blind eye was turned to minority arguments, with calamitous results. The question is whether things have now swung the other way, with a refusal to take a critical look at the effect of lockdowns — and if this failure means we might yet again repeat errors.

Initially, Sage modelling underestimated Covid. But it then lurched from one extreme to another: wildly inaccurate advice convinced the NHS a Covid tsunami was on the way, so 59,000 ventilators would be needed on top of the 7,400 already in hospitals. Cummings said he believed NHS capacity would be exceeded by a factor of ten.