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.
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I wonder what will need to be added to next year’s edition…
If the censorship coming our way is implemented there won’t be a next year’s edition….
Yep. Labour will probably introduce an amendment to counteract crockery misinformation.
Ha! What a beauty I want one!
It’s a bit of satirical fun I know, bit it just doesn’t capture how I feel about the last two years – Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech. and the idiotic masses all conspiring (most completely unwittingly) to create a dystopian society where a law forced people to die alone, banned people from breathing too much fresh air, brainwashed all the lemmings into thinking they would kill Granny, deliberately pitted citizens against each other to create hatred against one group, killed childhoods (literally for some) created mandates that meant unless you gave your body to the state for experimentation then you couldn’t work etc. No, it somehow fails to capture the ridiculousness, the malevolence and the downright lunacy of the last two years. It doesn’t capture the frustration, the astonishment and the simmering rage that I know many of us feel. A lot to fit in on a plate I suppose! Perhaps a commemorative elephant might be a more suitable canvas? There’s certainly no longer a problem fitting one in any room these days.
A superb piece which captures the evils foisted upon us these last two years.
As I read through your post I thought – did we really allow all this, did we actually live with this medieval nonsense? It upsets me now just thinking back on what we went through. The sheer evil of it all is now difficult to comprehend.
God forbid.
The hardest thing for me to take was, still is, the complete feeling of helplessness. Of knowing that the world has lost its head, gone absolutely batshit bonkers, but of knowing there was little that could be done. It’s easy to forget these evil w*!@£$^s – might as well use some currency symbols while I still can! – played a long-in-the-making and disempowering hand. They had roleplayed all the scenarios, knew from current societal trends (supported by social media data), how this would unfold. They did their homework and then some. Most of us (I was definitely one) were too comfortable in modern life and were caught completely off-guard. That shock formed one of two responses, either total submissiveness or total bewilderment/astonishment/anger. It was (still is) the biggest fight or flight test of our lives. Being in the former group, the much smaller dissenting group, there was little we could do to quickly and peacefully fight back – we found against a globally coordinated system that ran so deep that virtually nobody could believe it even existed. A system that owns and orchestrates pretty much everything that we see, hear and touch; a system that is omnipotent. Don’t beat yourself up too much, to say we’re up against it is the biggest understatement that was ever uttered.
Completely agree. Another terrific post.
Each and every N95 self-muzzled housewife-activist out there who’s still righteously glaring at a heartless and indifferent world is secretly yearning for the good times, when everybody had to listen to their hysteric ranting about dangerous germs all around, to be brought down on us again. These people are a stark reminder that we’re really just temporarily out on bail and not free. Johnson has promised them that they can have it all right back if they can come up with a credible pretext.
It cannot be long now before books such as Laura Dodsworth’s ‘A State of Fear’ and Robert Kennedy Jr’s ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ are condemned to the banned list and ritually burnt outside Parliament.
I agree totally with the comments preceding. It’s a shame that this piece of craft is so expensive… £100-£200 buys quite a lot of energy, food and/or fuel…Perhaps DS could offer one as a prize in “Most Convincing Debunking Of Official Orthodoxy”-type raffle?