Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

by Jonathan Calvert

The chancellor was determinedly set against a lockdown. ‘Any responsible party of government would acknowledge the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown,’ he argued. ‘The Labour Party may say it has a plan, but be under no illusion: a plan blind to the hard choices we face – a plan blind to and detached from reality – is no plan at all.’ There was no way, he said, that the UK would be allowed to ‘blithely fall into another national spring-style lockdown, as the Labour Party wants to’. He accused Labour of ‘political games and cheap shots from the side-lines’ and rounded off his attack by saying, ‘The Labour Party can either be part of this solution or part of the problem. It is called leadership, but from them, I am not holding my breath.’ This was just three weeks before Johnson and Sunak would perform another extraordinary U-turn by introducing the very lockdown they had so vehemently repudiated. The continued delay would mean the shutdown was twice as long as the scientists had deemed necessary in September, which precisely proved Starmer’s point.