No, the Lockdown Files Don’t Prove the Government’s Pandemic Response Was All a Giant Cock-Up

Eugyppius argues that the many thousands of Matt Hancock’s finger-flicking conversational exchanges leaked to the Telegraph do not provide evidence of a conspiracy.

His argument has much that is sound in it and I admire its tone. But in the great argumentative battle between cock-up and conspiracy as explanations of pandemic protocols, he comes down on the side of cock-up. The protocols were “driven by autonomous political and institutional forces rather than nebulous globalist conspirators”. In short, he claims:

Advisers and bureaucrats originally pushed for lockdown.
Once lockdown protocols were initiated, the Government and the media terrorised citizens to ensure they would comply.
Politicians used public panic as an opportunity for politicking.
Everything was really about politics, not science.
There was a feedback loop, whereby restrictions were introduced, strictly enforced, generating a fear in citizens which justified further restrictions and enforcement.
The politicians knew that there was no medical justification for the protocols, but allowed political imperatives to keep them in place.

After these arguments he concludes that the people responsible are not only “callous and evil” but also “really dumb”. Then he sets aside the first claim (“callous and evil”) to emphasise the second (“really dumb”). He says, and I paraphrase, that nothing meant anything, that no one had any idea of what they were doing, that all the policies were illogical, and that the politicians themselves were shallow abusive narcissists.

This is a fine, robust, amusing and invigorating argument. But it has two related flaws running through it.

The first flaw is that by emphasising “really dumb” over “callous and evil” he loses the necessary clarity of insisting that the policies were foolish and evil.

Folly and evil are different. Folly is a consequence of ignorance, and is forgivable, or exculpable. Evil is harder to forgive. (Jesus made it evident that forgiveness was only owed to those who were penitent and admitted their sin. The unrepentant should not be forgiven.) I think saying ‘it was only folly’ is to let the politicians off the hook. It is as if we are saying to ourselves that Hancock was a sort of 1960s seaside postcard character, of ‘How’s Your Father’ vintage, who was a bit of a lad, nice but dim, got everything wrong, but had a good heart. He sought more than his 15 minutes of fame, and quite remarkably ended up with more than half an hour.

We can summarise Hancock’s career thus:

Boring preliminary. Before 2020: ‘Knows where the bodies are buried.’
Terrifying development. In 2020, poses as a saviour of bodies.
Comic interlude. In 2021 and 2022, after groping a particular body, is found out as a foolish figure, but tries to make something of this, burnishing a reputation by being on television and causing a book to be compiled out of some of his words.
Justice is done. In 2023, suffers deeper damage to his reputation when many more of his words, this time unburnished, and substantially political instead of laughably trivial, appear without his permission.

I think the policies were evil, and that if we attempt to point to casual correspondence and cynical utterances of the sort we see in the Lockdown Files in order to justify the idea that it was all just human comedy then we miss the significance of everything that happened.

The other flaw is related to this. It concerns the word ‘conspiracy’. Unlike Eugyppius, I think there was a conspiracy, or, to speak more exactly, there were chains of conspiracies which we may as well attempt to see as contributing to a singular event in such a way that they can be called a ‘conspiracy’.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic I checked the etymology of ‘conspiracy’ and found that it literally meant ‘breathing together’. This was ironic. For the politicians, bureaucrats, advisers, etc. were conspiring – though it seems more by text messaging than in actual corridors of power – to prevent us, the people, from conspiring. We wanted to breathe together: we were not allowed to. Ironic, but also deadly.

In Book I of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously said that people of the same trade “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick”. He was referring to what he called ‘merchants’ but we may apply the same insight to politicians, bureaucrats, advisers, journalists, academics. Now, what is interesting is that Eugyppius agrees with this. He more than once points out that all these figures conspired against the public. But he nonetheless does not want to call the whole thing a conspiracy. Well, Eugyppius, we could instead call it ‘a congeries of conspiracies’: but, for short, and for simplicity’s sake, why not call it conspiracy?

In addition, Eugyppius says as part of his case that the original pressure for lockdown came from public health officials, advisers and bureaucrats, not from politicians. He does not ask the obvious question, ‘Why?’ And surely the answer has to involve chains of conspiracies, of lines of possibility opened up by those who sought to influence opinion: in short, ‘conspiracy’. Why was everyone insisting on a strong response – a strong unprecedented, disproportionate response – as soon as they possibly could?

If I caricature Eugyppius’s argument then it is this:

There was a grotesque series of accidents.
This generated an immediate reaction.
The accidents and reaction were immediately locked into a feedback loop, and suddenly everything was out of control.
The cause is stupidity.

My answer to this is ‘Nay’. It is not only stupidity. It is also, as Eugyppius says, evil. And since it is ‘evil’, then there was always an obvious ‘good’, which was to avoid reacting to a grotesque series of accidents, and certainly, even if there was such a reaction, to do everything possible to prevent the emergence of a feedback loop. But no. The Government, the corporations, the advisers, the reporters all encouraged the loop. They took their opportunity. They conspired. They contributed to the grand conspiracy.

To be sure, excuses can be found if we look for them. The zeitgeist is relevant. We live in a world of health and safety, an irreligious world, a world of entitled higher educated people programmed to favour state intervention, a world dominated by state taxation, state expenditure and state employment, and a world in which the state is penetrated by private corporate interests. But I favour the word ‘conspiracy’ for a very clear moral reason. It alleges responsibility.

We do not have to envision Klaus Schwab as a Bond villain. But we do have to hold Schwab, Gates, Ferguson, Fauci, all of them, responsible: and the only way to do this is to credit them with enough Machiavellian intelligence to have had some idea of what the consequences of their actions must have been: and to have known that, to have acted as they did, they were contributing to the most successful conspiracy against lived life ever carried out by peacetime politicians.

I am not saying that the entire thing was planned from beginning to end. That is impossible. But some can see much. And others can pay for much. And many think the public is not capable of dealing with something like a pandemic. And once one begins to trace connections, one sees that certain figures proposed foolish and evil possibilities only because they were encouraged to propose them. The success of the conspiracy may have been unexpected, even to the conspirators. Conspiracy may not have been the singular cause of what happened (though it may yet be shown to have been), but it was a consequence and continual accompaniment of what happened. The conspiracy against the public was relentless, and almost watertight. There was folly in it, but the substance of it was not folly. It was evil. No participant in that evil should be able to evade responsibility for it by pleading ignorance or folly.

To be sure, conspiracy was helped along by corruption, collusion, compliance – all of which floats on Hobbes’s two most important words, ‘fear’ and ‘pride’ – and there were a thousand aspects to the entire sorry tale, many misunderstandings, accidents, interruptions. Many consequences were unintended. But many, if not all, were intended. And the closure of the narrative, the tying up of the narrative by government and media, meant that these figures were conspiring, consciously and coercively, against the public; they were conspiring against anyone who attempted to reveal any aspect of the conspiracy; they used the word ‘conspiracy theory’ as a clever way of distracting from their own conspiring; and they should not be let off the hook just because we do not want to risk being called ‘conspiracy theorists’.

Conspiracy theorising is just as important as cock-up theorising. Each is almost worthless without the other. Both are required.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

Stop Press: Matt Hancock joked about Bill Gates, telling aides the Billionaire “owes me one” considering “how many people I’m getting his chips injected into”. Not evidence that it was all a conspiracy theory, but typically stupid, given that he handed over the messages to a sceptical journalist. MailOnline has more.