Watching the new intake of MPs file into the House of Commons in 1918, Stanley Baldwin is said to have remarked that they were “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”.
Who were they? During the Great War Britain could not trade with the Central Powers; nor could sprawling imperial supply chains be relied on. The shortages, and the need to fill them, had created a new class of seamy and unscrupulous businessmen – mostly drawn from the lower ranks of pre-war industry.
Stanley Baldwin was dismayed at this. But he wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t hard to imagine that total war might lead to a coarsening of national life. The willed collapse of international trade, the controls on commerce, the controls on information – these were hothouse conditions for the spiv and the sneak. It had even produced a political analogue: David Lloyd George, who sold slap-up honours at marked up prices. National emergency; national oligarchy. The two were more or less inextricable. Baldwin could grasp that this was the unavoidable side-effect of a war that he had supported.
This is an insight too far for the Britain of 2023. One feature of a politically immature society is that it blames national problems on the ill will or incompetence of individuals, rather than the systems they inhabit. Remove these individuals, they think, and the system will work. So it is with Britain’s Covid Inquiry which turns on the doings and undoings of a handful of people. Who knew what and when? Who was acting under what advice? Who approved certain contracts – and why?
Fundamentally, these are people who refuse to accept the inevitable side-effects of their own project. Faced with the terrible consequences of the policy of lockdown, they cast about for individuals to blame, for “wreckers”.
Take procurement. The Covid spivs – those who cashed in on lockdown contracts drawn up in a hurry – are not an appealing bunch. They are an indeterminate mass of Wonga loaners, actor-managers, fintech frauds, heat pumpers, ad men, Comms men, ESG gurus; the flotsam and jetsam of the Chipping Norton set. Their spiritual chief is not Lloyd George, but Matt Hancock. Like the Great War profiteers, their rise was eminently predictable. During lockdown, the vast majority of companies in Britain were prevented by law from operating normally. Only the fiat of Whitehall could designate a sector as ‘essential’; this depended on access to power, not on producing anything that people wanted to buy. The world of lockdown was practically designed to operate on the backslap; it did. You cannot have a lockdown without creating the Alex Bourne’s to match.
Still, the Inquiry is likely to stay focused on the old charge of corrupt and inept politicians – always an authoritarian slogan. Nor does the rough contempt for civilian Government stop there. In the Inquiry’s hunt for wreckers, elected politicians are the only fair game. Scant little has been said about Chris Whitty, or SAGE, let alone Independent SAGE, its wild Ultra cousin. This comes as something of a surprise. During lockdown, established Britain could agree that the elected Government did not have any particular right to disagree with these people. They exercised power at every level, and kept up a direct line with the news media. There’s Chris Whitty in the WhatsApp groups, acting the part of the pained parent – a vain conceit. It is only now we are told that these people are, in fact, humble public servants who play no part in frontline politics. This idiom, the idiom of bureaucratic twee, has always been self-serving. But it is utterly pervasive, even among the politicians themselves. Official inquiries – mysteriously – always happen to shore up established opinion. This one will prove no exception.
The Covid Inquiry, then, is not an empirical exercise – but a political one; perhaps even a therapeutic one. It hopes to rebrand lockdown as a noble cause, led astray by guilty men. In this way it seeks to revive the moral case for restrictions, and, still more, the moral case for the civil service. In the end, it is not a chance for catharsis, but a classic case of power petitioning itself.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.