Isabel Oakeshott, who ghost wrote Matt Hancock’s diaries, has handed over a cache of WhatsApp messages from Hancock’s phone to the Telegraph. Oakeshott was given the messages by Hancock as an aide-mémoire and she has now passed them on. They appear to be pretty sensational, revealing that the then Health Secretary ignored Sir Chris Whitty’s advice about testing people in the community before admitting them to care homes, among other things. The Telegraph has the most sensational revelations on its website. Best of them at the foot of this page.
Needless to say, the messages confirm the Daily Sceptic‘s general position at the time, namely, that the Government’s pandemic response was prompted by political calculation, not ‘the Science’. The files give the impression that nearly everything the Government did to try to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 – social distancing, tiers, lockdown, masking, closing schools, restricting access to care homes – was just nonsense it made up as it went along, desperate to be seen to be doing something. I think they also confirm my own analysis of the Government’s pandemic response, which is that it wasn’t part of some grand plot long planned in advance – the plandemic – but just a series of cock-ups made by people of limited intelligence desperate to shore up their own positions. A clown show, not a conspiracy.
It beggars belief that Hancock simply handed over these incriminating messages to Oakeshott without any guarantee she wouldn’t share them with anyone – but, then, he’s a bear of very little brain. She calls this a “sensational cache of private communications”, which seems about right.
Here is the Telegraph on what appears to be the most scandalous revelation in the files – Hancock’s decision to ignore Whitty’s advice about testing people in the community before admitting them into care homes.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the then Health Secretary early in April 2020, about a month into the pandemic, that there should be testing for “all going into care homes”. But Mr Hancock did not follow that guidance, telling his advisers that it “muddies the waters”.
Instead, he introduced guidance that made testing mandatory for those entering care homes from hospital, but not for those coming from the community. Prior to the guidance, care homes had been told that negative tests were not required even for hospital patients. The guidance stating that those coming in from the community should be tested was eventually introduced on August 14th.
Between April 17th and August 13th, 2020, a total of 17,678 people died of Covid in care homes in England.
In the first two years of the pandemic, there were more than 40,000 Covid deaths in care homes in England, as the most vulnerable in society bore the brunt of the fatalities.
Mr. Hancock himself later told MPs that transmission from the community – particularly from staff – was the “strongest route” for Covid into care homes.
The Telegraph has obtained more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then Health Secretary and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic.
The messages comprise 2.3 million words – three times as many words as the King James Bible contains.
The communications span the years of the pandemic and reveal discussions between the then Health Secretary and those at the heart of the decision-making process, including the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Other conversations involve Sir Chris, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, its Chief Scientific Adviser.
The messaging groups have names such as “Top Teams”, “COVID-19 senior group” and “crisis management” – the name of a group created to deal with the fallout from Mr. Hancock’s relationship with his aide, Gina Coladangelo.
Over the coming days, the Telegraph will reveal the messages, which lay bare the extent to which groupthink among aides and ministers affected pandemic decisions.
The messages also reveal the often casual approach that ministers took to making major decisions, including the call to close classrooms, introduce face masks in schools and provide testing in care homes.
They show how Mr. Hancock expressed concerns that expanding testing in care homes could “get in the way” of his self-imposed target of 100,000 Covid tests per day.
Very much worth reading in full.
Other stories from the files include: ‘How Matt Hancock hit his audacious 100,000 daily Covid testing target‘; ‘Matt Hancock was told care home Covid rules were “inhumane” – but kept them’; ‘Hancock adviser arranged personal test for Jacob Rees-Mogg’s child at time of massive shortage’; ‘“No one thinks testing is going well, Matt,” George Osborne told Hancock’.
We‘ll be bringing you more in the coming days.
Stop Press: Fraser Nelson makes a decent fist of trying to sum up the main take-away in his Telegraph column:
Over the next few days, the Lockdown Files will show how much political concerns shaped policy – with ‘the science’ used, all too often, as verbal dressing. If you suddenly find out that people don’t need to self-isolate for as long as you once thought, what do you do? Apologise, and let them away earlier? Or delay sharing the advice to avoid embarrassment? The closed-loop decision-making process, the confidence that no one might ever know, encouraged all kinds of political misbehaviour.
Worth reading in full.
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Nick Dixon’s article on the appalling Jaguar advert shows the incredible power of Globalist Brainwashing on a massive scale.
Here are the real-life results of that brainwashing: selfie photos of beautiful young Ethnic European women in America, with their fatherless children…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQb_AOxaYAEQ7FC?format=jpg&name=large
But, but.. advertising is all about encouraging people to buy your stuff because it is better than the competition. That is distinctive, exclusive and separate from boring old conformity.
Can’t say I’ve seen many adverts for cars that don’t actually feature a car. This could just as easily have been an ad for United Colours of Bennetton, just with a generous dollop of cringe.
Agreed or an Ad for Persil washing powder for colours.
I bet it’d be funny to hear Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear gang’s opinion of it though.
Someone said there was the rear view of a Jag at the end of the ad. How fitting that we should see the back of Jaguar after watching the ad
Yes. It’s a car – not psychobabble.
They are compelled to do it. It is complicated but they are you can read about it. I thought a Jaguar was a elegant slightly dangerous and raffish James Bond sort of car. From a marketing perspective this isn’t just misguided it can only be designed to undermine sales because who would buy a car after seeing this? It is the very antithesis. I can’t think of a single category of people even in a society as sick as ours that this sort of thing would appeal to.
Miserable looking bunch of mentally ill people.
Miserable looking bunch of mentally ill people.
The guy in red’s giving off Boney M vibes…”She’s crazy like a fool…Wild about Daddy
Cool?” 
You can say that again!
It looks like a Star Trek casting call.
I think they took inspiration from the Paris Olympics.
Off-T but worth a read in order to understand the cloth-eared plonkers inhabiting our capital.
https://thecritic.co.uk/when-the-farmers-took-on-starmer/
The author James Price is so adrift of reality it is unreal. He reluctantly concedes that maybe, possibly the IHT attack on farmers is perhaps an attempt to do away with family farms.
Go back to sleep lad because crap journalism such as this we can do without.
Lunacy.
As the article states – where are the cars?
Will. Never. Buy. A. Jaguar.
For me that was true before the advert. I don’t think I’d have bought one even if I’d won the lottery (which is very long odds as I don’t buy lottery tickets). Just not appealing to me – even less so now.
Perhaps I’d have had a Morse-style one but that’s no good for JLR’s sales.
Didn’t Trump say something like “everything woke touches turns sh*t”…?
It has to play out at the end of it all. Beer, luxury cars, basically anything that smacks of a man wearing a leather jacket with whisky and tobacco breath. Has been undermined for decades. Brut 33 is a pale imitation of its former self. When a man walked into the room wearing Brut or Old Spice then you took notice. The Milk Tray man, The Saint, slowly they were taken from us. Even as harmless a character as Benny HIll felt that he was no longer welcome in this country towards the end of his career but we thought we were moving into some bright new and improved future. It definitely isn’t just a phenomenon of the last decade.
Ever since Jaguar announced that they will produce just EVs, I’ve realised this is a company doomed to fail. Their current sales reflect this already. Goodbye – it was good while it lasted
Hear hear
Especially since sales of battery powered cars are cratering and hybrids with an engine that drives it are poor on economy when the battery is exhausted so only any good as local runarounds.
A lot of American bankers and politicians have gotten out in the last 24 hours and gone to the southern hemisphere or Hawaii. Even Kamala apparently. They are doing it because they have the money and they read the signs. If you have relatives in Australia it might be worth giving them a call. Except that they are part of the same apparatus. This situation could’ve been easily avoided that it the most important thing to bear in mind.
Imaging being young and condemned to living in an ideological box where you are never going to get a woody? No wonder they are all a bit nuts.
I love my F-Pace P400; but it’s the last Jaguar I will own. Brand suicide; didn’t Bud Lite teach them anything? These sick weirdos are a cancerous scourge.
Well apparently the bud Lite fiasco was going to be used in courses on marketing but I assumed it was what not to do, not something to aspire to.
Unless they deliberately want to run the company into the ground, it’s hard to a see what they want to achieve with this ad.
This doesn’t make me want to buy a Jaguar, or indeed any other car. This ad makes me want to not buy a Jaguar car.
What self respecting man would buy one now? He’d be a laughing stock down the pub or golf club
First model ” Budlite Coupe “
Well, one of the most famous owners of “two” Jags has just died.
I hope he didn’t see the new ad.
Mind you, when I was growing up up in the 60s, 70s and 80s the standing joke for jag owners was that you always needed two.
One on the road, one in the garage being repaired. They were so unreliable.
I think he must have seen it and just given up hope
Testosterone free zone
There is no way this ad would have made it out to the Public without sign off from senior management, such a rebranding if the Marketeers can truly believe its that! would have taken months to produce, used a large budget, and an agency, it would have been viewed by the CEO and senior execs. One has to question what exactly is the senior management team about?, it clearly has not understood its core market, and even if it does it very obviously wants them gone, well they certainly achieved that. So now they must recruit new customers, presumably they are seeking to persuade the sub 40/30 age group, who have high discretionary income, who like virtue signalling through owning an electric car, who are subscribers to net zero, trans ideology and don’t already own a premium brand electric car.
Good luck with that one. Personally as a retired senior exec if I had let this one out the door, and displayed the very obvious contempt of my companies brand history and its loyal customers I would be clearing my desk now and getting my coat. The owners of JLR need to get on a plane from India and sack the lot.
Clearly no one was brave enough to say it was bollox
Grandad was a mate of Bill Lyons, Jaguar’s founder, in 1921.
They used to wash cars together.
Bet Bill is spinning in his grave right now!
Geoff Buys Cars podcast on Jaguar’s Woke Suicide is hilarious. Glad I don’t have any Shares in the company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ1XSE8QRhE
Um… I used to be embarrassed to admit to owning a Jaguar, because I so fitted the stereotype of the bald, ageing man having a mid-life crisis. What fresh hell does THIS represent? Is some kind farmer going to set aside a large field somewhere, where thousands of shame-faced owners can quietly abandon their cars under the cover of darkness…?
Obviously the last straw for Johnny 2 Jags Prescott RIP
I really really love my XJRS 575, easy on the eye and oh boy what a pleasure to drive. It is a design classic like so many other Jaguars over the years. Recently they decided to remove the XJ model as an option with no equivalent replacement. I realised they must be losing it when they decided to do that…Obviously a bit too ‘FAR RIGHT LOOKING’ for the current crop of marketing pantywaists at JLM Head office.
Now this! FFS
I will never own another Jaguar! I no longer even want to be associated with the brand. Its embarrassing.
They have shot themselves in the face IMHO.
Ironic we say good bye to ‘Two jags’ John Prescott today. He’d have swung a punch in their general direction ..
It is meant to be “provocative” because it will create lots of publicity “free” – the assumption being all publicity is good publicity.
But – they think they are riding the crest of the wave, but they missed it.
People are just fed up with the nonsense.
But who exactly are the target audience for this trash? Certainly not people who would buy a Jaguar.
Fail.
See how easy it is to destroy your own company
all the macho guys I know who drive a “jag” will drop it in a ny second when they get a whiff of this advertising nonsense. Adios “jag”.
I’ve bought my first jag!
Loving it