Toby Was Right and Gove Was Wrong on Lockdown

Back in March 2020 Toby found himself among a depressingly select group of journalists who opposed the lockdowns. The other side included erstwhile Brexit comrades, including his now Spectator Editor Michael Gove, who has let him write about it in this week’s magazine under the heading ‘I was right – and Gove was wrong – on lockdown‘. Here’s an excerpt.

I thought I could count on the Tufton Street mafia to weigh in on my side – after all, aren’t they wedded to the principle that ‘government is best that governs least’? Surely, paying people not to work, forcing businesses to close and increasing public expenditure by £400 billion was anathema to them? But most of the Right-wing policy wonks became enthusiastic supporters of the Covid restrictions, a group I dubbed ‘libertarians for lockdown’. Boris Johnson passed the initial test with flying colours, urging the public to ‘take it on the chin’, but soon fell into lockstep with the more cautious people surrounding him, including my political lodestars Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. As someone who’d shared foxholes with them during the Brexit wars, that was heartbreaking.

I’d like to say all these people now recognise the error of their ways and come bounding up to me at parties to tell me how right I was, but as Mark Twain said: “It’s easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled.” The only person I’ve received any kind of mea culpa from is Boris, who sheepishly told me at the end of a long evening last year that I may have been right about lockdown. At least, I think that’s what he said. As friends of his will know, he rarely looks you in the eye and half-mumbles, half-gabbles when admitting to a mistake, so I may have misheard. I give him credit for standing his ground in December 2021, refusing to cancel Christmas, and I’ve no doubt Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the pandemic would have been worse.

I was initially sceptical about the official Covid Inquiry, worried that Baroness Hallett had already made up her mind that we should have locked down sooner and harder. But after seeing her Module 1 report, which was more nuanced than I’d anticipated, I’m optimistic she’ll condemn some aspects of the lockdown policy, such as the decision to close schools. On the other hand, I don’t think it matters very much what she concludes, because a future government, when faced with another pandemic, will just ditch all our carefully laid plans and do whatever is politically expedient, like the Conservatives did in 2020. The influenza pandemic preparedness strategy, which cautioned against locking down, was unceremoniously dumped within weeks on the grounds that it was designed to manage an outbreak of bad flu rather than something more serious. In fact, the fatality rate of COVID-19 was comparable with that of the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-70. Sweden, which did follow our strategy, experienced fewer Covid deaths per capita than us.

In fact, the Government’s Pandemic Preparedness Strategy didn’t just “caution against locking down”, it ruled it out: “The U.K. Government does not plan to close borders, stop mass gatherings or impose controls on public transport during any pandemic.” The jettisoning of this mostly very sensible plan is perhaps the most egregious error of all.

Toby concludes by letting the weak politicians off the hook, saying he’s decided to forgive them “because their room for manoeuvre was constrained by the public’s limited appetite for risk. They might now accept that locking down caused more harm than it prevented, but still argue they had no choice”.

Though doesn’t that just doom us to repeat the debacle next time around? We can only hope lessons have been learned. In Gove’s case at least it seems they have.

Worth reading in full.