As Rishi Sunak prepares to become U.K. Prime Minister after all his opponents dropped out, it’s worth recalling what he said during the leadership race in the summer about lockdowns. As part of his leadership pitch to Tory Party members he boasted that he was responsible for stopping lockdown in December 2021 when he cut short an overseas trip and flew back to London to intervene.
In an interview with Andrew Marr on LBC, the pandemic-era Chancellor said he rushed back to “stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown”.
We were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.
I noted at the time it was the first time a leading U.K. politician, whether Government or opposition, had implied that opposition to lockdown was a reason to vote for him, and this seemed indicative of a major shift in public opinion about Covid restrictions. The fact that he felt no fear about trumpeting his anti-lockdown stance and saw no need to couch it in careful language about taking the virus seriously marked a big shift from the pandemic era when lockdown scepticism was often beyond the pale. Even more striking was that Marr didn’t bother to challenge him on any of it, despite alarmist calls at the time from the editors of the BMJ and HSJ, among others, for restrictions to be urgently reintroduced.
Will Sunak remain sceptical of lockdowns and put this scepticism into practice when faced with a new surge in infections and hospitalisations, or indeed when pressured to sign the U.K. up to international pandemic agreements? That remains to be seen. The fact that he was one of the quad of four ministers who made all the awful major pandemic decisions is not exactly encouraging – though he now claims to have been a frustrated sceptic trying to bring another point of view to the table. His Eat Out to Help Out scheme in summer 2020 to try to get the economy moving and people meeting again may be an indication of his genuine anti-restriction instincts – if also of his willingness to splash the (borrowed and printed) cash. The fact that he now has the impossible job of clearing up the inflationary mess created by his own fiscal and monetary incontinence does perhaps have some justice about it, though is also obviously perverse: “Yes I made the mess, but don’t worry, I’m the one you can trust to clear it up!”
A number of sceptics are concerned about his links with the World Economic Forum. To me, he comes across as someone who is generally sceptically and practically minded but also prone to going along with elite groupthink. This is also seen in his attitude to Net Zero. Rumours of his Net Zero scepticism have often swirled, the Telegraph notes, but in public he has not disputed the target. During the leadership contest he pledged to make the U.K. energy independent by 2045, saying: “We need more offshore wind, more rooftop solar and more nuclear. We need to insulate millions of homes and ensure that people know about the steps that they can take, at no cost, to improve the efficiency of their homes.” He pledged to streamline planning and licensing rules for green energy to help achieve that goal – so more unsightly, land-hungry renewable developments people don’t want. He also told the COP26 climate conference in 2021 he would make the U.K. the “world’s first Net Zero financial centre”. What role any scepticism about Net Zero or lockdowns will play in his tenure at the head of Government is anyone’s guess. It will be worth watching closely to see if any can be detected, or if he will slip seamlessly into becoming as much an evangelical preacher of the new fashionable causes as his former boss.
Here is what he said to Andrew Marr on lockdowns in full.
I’ll tell you what I was doing in December, though, because I still remember it quite vividly. You know what I did in December was fly back from a Government trip I was on overseas and I flew back to this country to stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown. Because we were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.
That’s really important in December Andrew because we were hours away, we were hours away from a national lockdown, but I came back and challenged the system, and said this is not right and we don’t need to do this and I’m glad I won the argument. But it should give people some confidence that in the same way I stood up for Brexit, in the same way I did that, I am prepared to push hard and fight for the things that I believe in even when that’s difficult.
Watch it here.
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He came in for a lot of stick when he announced he’d been vaxxed in order to travel – another admission of defeat, in my view brought on by covid being the umpteenth thing he’d been a lone voice on. Some of the stick was justified but most wasn’t, IMO. He remains a powerful ally who called covid right from the start and worked hard to get his views across, and has called many other things right over the years.
The frustration for me wasn’t so much that he took the V, but it was the defeatist tone of his article. He openly said “We’ve lost” and absolutely destroyed people’s morale and momentum in keeping up the fight.
He was seen as the de facto mainstream voice of criticising the Covid narrative. Yet he capitulated and wrote a throughly demoralising article, which I was very disappointed to read.
Of course it was disappointing but if it destroyed people’s morale and momentum then I’d say those people invested too much in him. Of course we want as many people on our side as possible, and we are sad when others flag and falter, but honestly the vitriolic attacks on him just seemed childish to me, as if people were expecting him to be some kind of saviour. Put yourself in his shoes – he has spent a large part of recent decades supporting unpopular positions from within the mainstream, and getting pilloried for it. Covid comes along, which he calls correctly, and he sees it as the fight of his life, and the reaction from the general population is almost non existent. And let’s face it, we did lose many battles and to an extent we’re still losing the war. They are still vaxxing people, still lying and getting away with it, people still think the lockdowns were an understandable reaction, that the vaccines saved us. Not a single reform has been put in place to stop this happening again, and almost none of the guilty have been punished or even recognised their guilt.
Crikey! When you put it like that…
I am less pessimistic than I was. I expected worse. It’s possible that the narrative will unravel significantly in my lifetime. But far from certain.
Fighting two world wars with borrowed American money has turned Great Britain from the world’s foremost power into something like a global doormat. On balance, this has accomplished the destruction of the Germany monarchy, large-scale depopulation and devastation of eastern central Europe and 70 years of a Russian, panislawist and nominally communist empire in the same location (and an originally French but later American hegemony in Europe west of Russia).
Plus, at least the second of this wars, including all of its side effects, had been entirely avoidable by acting more prudent and more in line with European traditions (ie, a negotiated instead of a dictated peace) wrt to the first. That could have ended in 1916 or 1917. Even the 1918 outcome could have been less worse (a negotiated peace had been possible since late summer 1918) and even the actual outcome could have been salvaged by acting less inanely wrt how to recover the enormous cost.
What an excellent article. Thank you.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/hitchens-on-the-death-of-all-we-hold-dear/
“Today, the Conservative Party is, in his words, ‘a device for seeking out men and women without any trace of conservative desires or tastes, making them into MPs and ordering them to shout at Sir Keir Starmer every Wednesday at noon’.”
Good profile of the one contemporary journalist/commentator whose stuff I consider unmissable.
I disagree with this though: “Anyone who argues that the First World War and Second World War were mistakes has to be something of an imperialist.”
Britain’s participation in the Great War was catastrophic for its destruction of the flower of British manhood (as Hitchens has put it) in the first place, and its destruction of the country’s considerable accumulated wealth, and the independence of action that afforded, in the second place. The lighting of the touch-paper on the empire is well down the list for many people. I would gladly have traded the empire in its entirety for iron-clad British neutrality in 1914. Instead we lost the empire anyway, and a great deal besides.
Another point on Peter Hitchens: he is understandably pigeonholed as a misery-guts, but, like Orwell, he also writes beautifully on all kinds of everyday topics. His columns in The Lamp magazine are always a treat.
Misery guts. Indeed a bit like Philip Larkin he’s considered as such but like Larkin he clearly loves life and has many deep passions. But also like Larkin he can’t unsee what he has seen.
The Irreverend Pod interview is well worth a listen, though, as you rightly imply, Hitches just ploughed on answering his own questions & rather swatting away the 3 good vicars.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing can i recommend another Irreverend podcast of a few weeks ago with Yoram Hazony. I thought his analysis of what constituted conservatism & liberalism was fascinating.
Wish I was bright enough to understand this article.
You are not alone.
I’m sure you’re “bright” enough! Besides, understanding this article is not really so much a question of being bright (although that helps, lol) – as simply being well informed. Articles like this are littered with highbrow allusions, which, with a bit of research, make sense after a while! His arguments become much clearer once his allusions are understood. Trouble is, most of us don’t have the time to do all the reading around the subject. (The article itself is also confusingly phrased here and there, in language I’d be inclined to edit slightly. Occasional lack of clarity doesn’t help with comprehension!)
I wonder how his brother Christopher Hitchens would have dealt with Covid? Would he have almost reflexively taken the opposite stance that Peter did? Or would it have been one of the very few times they agreed on anything?
I would like to think that it would have been the latter; both men worth listening carefully to.
This was an extremely interesting article. I haven’t always followed Peter Hitchens (I don’t know how so many people manage to read everything – I really struggle to keep up), but I completely see him as a hero. Like him, I too am aiming for the city of God and am thus a pilgrim in this world which is not my home. Thank God for this brave man! Would that there were more like him.
What an impressive array of ideas and prose all mustered logically to try and stuff Mr. Hitchens safely in a pigeonhole. Not so easily done as can be seen. My impression of Hitchens is someone who values open minded debate, which he defends at every opportunity. All beliefs are debatable.
“It is the major way of making sense of foreign involvements.”
“It is also the major way of making sense of domestic politics.”
Bit puzzled – what is meant by “major” in these sentences?
“Hence the interest Hitchens has always had in the policeman” – A bit more than an interest, surely; his ‘Abolition of Liberty’ is an exploration of what’s wrong with the modern world. And it’s the disappearance of respect for authority. I don’t disagree with anything Dr Alexander says in his essay, but there’s a slightly dismissive tone about it, don’t you think? Something purely linguistic perhaps.
“7. The rest of the model includes 19th Century meritocracy, and hence 19th Century education, with an emphasis on ultimate or original equality or opportunity, but also interested in fostering the right sort of elites by filtering them out through a modest but forceful higher education system; then moving them around on the right sort of transport; entertaining them with the right sort of entertainment, etc.”
Not a clue what the good Doctor is talking about here. Anyone care to enlighten me?
“The Dreadnought is not made for conversation: Hitchens’s arguments, when one knows them, come along the road like Soviet parades of tanks and ballistic missiles.”
Dr Alexander is right, but only to a point, surely; discussing, debating, arguing with P Hitchens must be hard going, to be sure – and yes, he’s very prepared; but that surely doesn’t mean he won’t/can’t do those things – discuss, debate etc. You just have to be as prepared as he is! In the end, it’s not his preparation that comes along the road like Soviet etc – it’s his intelligence!
“The falling away from Christianity is decisive for Hitchens; and has some relation to, and is dimly to be discerned behind, his far more pointillistically detailed paintings of our falling away from the old worthy secular Britain or England into our current tinselly despond.”
Great sentence, but could the Doctor explain what he means by “pointillistically” here? I mean, I know what ‘pointillisme’ is, but does he just mean ‘very detailed paintings’? Is “pointillistically” a bit of a pleonasm? Very picturesque but does it contribute much – or am I missing something important? (I’m picking on details here, by the way; am enjoying and agreeing with just about all of it…)
Great essay, much enjoyed.
Sorry, thought I’d finished…
“There is also a habit of mentioning his own early Trotskyism as if this gives him an unfailing antidote against the nonsense of everything since. Not so: some of us have never been attracted to machine age revolutionary politics – and Augustine, say, gives one everything one might not already have taken from, say, Plato or Aristotle.”
Not the most accessible of pieces, Dr Alexander!
In my reading of Hitchens, he evokes his Trot past as a way of demonstrating how far it’s possible to travel from the distortions of full-on (youthful) leftism to the common sense of mature (grown-up) conservatism. Does he refer to that part of his past very often? I honestly can recall – but Dr Alexander is right in saying, or implying, that it’s all very well to point to one’s own journey from the nuttiness to lucidity, but some of us have been nutty in the first place. Or is there a reading of the quote above that I can’t see?
The allusions to Augustine, Plato and Aristotle are even more challenging – but then, well, I’m not all that clever. Are you saying, Dr A, that if one hasn’t grasped the message of Plato and/or Aristotle, there’s always Augustine, nearly a millennium later, to reinforce it? I’m going round and round in circles trying to puzzle out your meaning here; could you explain the metaphor? Seriously, I’d really appreciate it (illman.clive@gmail.com)
Thanks.