Why I admire Isabel Oakeshott

I’ve been gripped by the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. The 100,000 WhatsApp messages on Matt Hancock’s phone, handed to the paper by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, contain an embarrassment of riches. For those who thought the curtailment of our liberties between March 2020 and July 2021 was justified by ‘the science’, these exchanges will be an eye-opener.

The former health secretary and others were not so much ‘following the science’ as doing their best to milk the crisis for favourable press coverage and career advancement, often with no attempt to conceal their indifference to the suffering that their ‘containment measures’ were causing.

Not a day passes without the Telegraph publishing what hacks refer to as a ‘marmalade dropper’ – a story in the morning paper so sensational it causes the reader to drop their toast on the floor. For my money, it’s the scoop of the decade.

Needless to say, the reaction of Isabel’s media colleagues has not been one of awestruck admiration. I’m sure she anticipated that there would be a bit of griping, but not on this scale. She must have reasoned that any scrutiny of her behaviour – breaking her agreement with Hancock when he handed over the messages for her to ghostwrite his Pandemic Diaries – would be eclipsed by the real story, i.e. the authoritarianism and incompetence that characterised the government’s handling of the crisis. But no. Most senior journalists seem to be more outraged by her behaviour than by the revelations.

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Partly, no doubt, this is because they feel guilty about not having done more at the time to challenge the coronavirus regulations, such as the mandatory mask-wearing in classrooms when schools were reopened in March 2021, even though we now know that the government was bounced into it by Nicola Sturgeon.