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October 15 - November 12, 2021
They argued that the late lockdown was the correct decision because it meant that the strict controls would need to be in place for less time. But, of course, the opposite was true.
Many people died unnecessarily because the prime minister allowed infections to spread so widely across the country as he dithered over lockdown.
Many other leaders across the world faced the same challenges yet saved more of their citizens’ lives, while also managing to protect their economies more effectively.
Johnson and his government went on to repeat many of the same mistakes that had caused so many deaths in the first outbreak.
The simple truth is that nobody knows for certain – at this time of writing – where the virus originated. Therefore, nothing should be ruled out.
Cobra is normally chaired by the prime minister, but Johnson decided he was too busy that day to listen to an earnest discussion about a foreign flu bug. He had things to do that he deemed to be more important, such as hosting a Downing Street reception for the Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming, as part of the celebrations for the country’s Lunar New Year – which doubled as an opportunity to discuss a post-Brexit trade deal.
A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March and were allowed to travel across Britain at will. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus – guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.
It certainly suggested Hancock was a flexible politician whose adaptable principles were carefully attuned to his own survival.
Britain lauded its pandemic planning as the best in the world, and maybe it was – once. But stockpiles had dwindled in the years of austerity and resources had been diverted to prepare for a no-deal Brexit that had become the country’s obsession.
‘Pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years,
The fear of a no-deal Brexit began ‘sucking all the blood out of pandemic planning’, the adviser said. ‘All the blood was flooding to the Brexit planning and we never picked it up.
In effect, the adviser said, ‘the UK’s pandemic plan had been mothballed around the time the Brexit planning got very intense in 2017.’
It turned out that many of the out-of-date respirators had been purchased in 2009 with stickers showing that the expiry date was 2012. The solution had been simple. All the stickers were covered with a new expiry label of 2016 to give them four years’ extra shelf life. But once those dates had expired, more stickers had been placed on top to pretend that the respirators were fit for use until 2019 or 2020.
‘Boris Johnson spoke to the nation,’ Horton writes. ‘He said of Covid-19, “We didn’t fully understand its effects.” His plaintive excuse will likely become the core defence of his government in the subsequent public inquiry into why the UK failed so spectacularly to protect its citizens. It is a defence that can and must be refuted.’
Brexiteers at the top of government instilled a culture in which the views of scientists were often dismissed out of hand, a practice developed during the Brexit referendum after multiple experts had argued in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union.
Even Hancock, who had been health secretary for almost two years, admitted that he had been forced to instruct his officials to find out what happened in Cygnus as a result of reading about it in the media.
Criminal neglect
In fact, Britain was, in effect, buying back the PPE it had given China for free in February. It would also take another six to eight weeks before Britain was able to purchase these supplies from China and, by then, the NHS was already running out of protective kit, with some medical staff having to resort to buying their own makeshift kit from DIY stores.
Hancock’s ‘enhanced monitoring’ had been ineffectual. Far from saving the world, his failure to take decisive action had actually helped accelerate the virus’s spread in the country he was supposed to be protecting.
Inexplicably, the final sentence of Johnson’s 2 March video message would later be lopped off the version posted on the prime ministerial Twitter page. It was: ‘I wish to stress that, at the moment, it’s very important that people consider that they should, as far as possible, go about business as usual.’
The British prime minister, however, was determined to carry on as normal. ‘I’m shaking hands,’ he told reporters that day. ‘I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know.’ It was reckless behaviour and it demonstrated once again that Johnson had failed to grasp the magnitude of the crisis unfolding around him.
A source who was advising Downing Street at the time has confirmed that herd immunity was central to the government’s plans in late February and early March.
Since herd immunity was self-defeating, the government’s strategy of delaying the introduction of measures to suppress the virus was a calamitous miscalculation.
Every day of delay will kill.’ It would still be almost two weeks before lockdown would happen.
It meant Britain would now have to navigate policy on the virus while being unsighted as to where it was spreading. ‘I was absolutely astonished,’ said Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at Edinburgh University, when she heard that contact tracing had been stopped. ‘I didn’t fully understand the ramifications of what was being said. And then it hit me that, actually, they’re letting the virus go. And so at the time I just felt like we were sleepwalking into disaster.’
the comment piece was full of Hancockisms – a word that if it ever made a dictionary would be defined as: noun – Bold, positive claims with a large dollop of wishful thinking, which turn out to be mostly untrue.
The cases had been doubling every three days and the contact tracing system had only managed to identify 1 in every 200 infections before it had to be jettisoned.
Usually at a Cobra they’ve got options and you go through them. There was none of that. It was more like a discursive discussion. It was like a bunch of people having a discussion about this thing. It wasn’t a normal Cobra meeting. Johnson was just not on top of his game.’
All ‘regulatory requirements’ were slashed to help facilitate the mass discharge and hospitals were indemnified against clinical negligence liabilities arising from the crisis.
As the hours of inaction ticked away, the crisis was becoming worse. It is an extraordinary fact that each day that passed that week before lockdown, the health service’s burden was increasing by a third.
The parliamentary public accounts committee, however, would later be less complimentary. The committee chastised the Treasury for waiting until mid-March before deciding on economic support schemes – despite the warnings from medical chiefs from January onwards. The MPs on the committee found that the government’s economic reaction to Covid-19 had been rushed and, in the process, neglected many sectors that needed help. This would have a long-term negative impact on the economy, it concluded. The sheer scale of the government failings were ‘astonishing’, the committee said.
Yet an investigation by the BBC programme Panorama discovered the move was at least partly a way to get around the shortage of protective equipment in the NHS. The problem was that the Health and Safety Executive had earlier ruled that the very top level of PPE should be worn when dealing with a disease ranked as an HCID. The change in classification therefore meant health workers could be kitted out with less protective equipment – making the most of the threadbare stocks available. The government had requested that the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens remove Covid-19 from the HCID
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‘If you were a Martian that landed at that meeting in his office,’ the source said, ‘you’d have thought Cummings was the prime minister, not Johnson. Cummings was far more aware and more lucid than Johnson.’
Curiously, with the whole of Whitehall waiting for a decision, Johnson slipped away for a ‘personal engagement’ that Thursday evening. It is not known why he considered it necessary to meet the Russian newspaper baron, Evgeny Lebedev, at that moment and disregard his own advice to avoid all ‘non-essential contact with others’. The owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent had in the past been a very generous host to the prime minister, inviting him to a lavish party at his Italian villa. But the purpose of the meeting remains a mystery. Later in the year it would emerge that Johnson
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In the afternoon there was a meeting of Cobra – and the prime minister was nowhere to be seen. ‘I turn up and Michael Gove is chairing it. Not Johnson. It was odd,’ one of those present recalls. ‘To miss such a critical Cobra meeting, I just don’t understand why. It’s inexplicable because this is the Cobra where we decided to bring in nationwide measures and he delegates to Michael Gove. It’s just odd. It’s literally a five-minute walk from Cabinet Office through the corridor to No. 10 to the press conference.’
Those 20 days of government delay since Johnson chaired his first Cobra meeting at the beginning of March are the single most important reason why the UK had the most deaths from the coronavirus in Europe and the second most in the world by the end of the first lockdown.
Neil Ferguson, the government’s chief modeller during that period, told a parliamentary select committee on 10 June: ‘The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced. So had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.’
This included taking unprecedented steps to keep large numbers of elderly and frail patients out of intensive care wards to avoid these being overwhelmed. It would mean many patients would die without receiving the life-saving care they needed. Downing Street was anxious that critical care units should not be visibly overrun as they had been in Italy, Spain and China, where patients in the city of Wuhan were photographed dying in corridors. So a veil of secrecy was now placed over Britain’s hospitals. The publication of critical care capacity figures was suspended, which meant nobody outside
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Without knowing they were infected, he and Johnson attended the last session of the Commons. As they were leaving the chamber, they were seen in a huddle of people who had gathered around the Speaker’s chair with just inches between them. It was the perfect example of why social distancing was important because they could easily have spread the virus to their colleagues. By failing to follow the very rules they had so stridently instructed others to adhere to, they were setting a bad example. And they were also endangering lives.
The government-commissioned age-based ‘triage tool’ was the only guidance they had been given to deal with such difficult decisions, so they used it to systematically exclude the elderly, the frail and patients with underlying illnesses from critical care. Those patients would not be given life-saving mechanical ventilation regardless of the severity of their condition. This age-based criterion is alleged to have been applied by hospitals in London, Manchester, Liverpool, central England and the south-east. Many of those who died, after being excluded by the triage criteria, might well have
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The government’s own advisers were incredulous that senior politicians had not taken greater precautions to avoid being infected. ‘Whilst the PM was telling people to stay at home and keep at least two metres apart from each other, the House of Commons was open for business and face-to-face parliamentary activities were carrying on,’ said Professor Michie, a behavioural psychologist who sits on one of the government’s key advisory committees. ‘Given the transmission routes of touching contaminated surfaces and breathing in virus-laden droplets, it should not come as a surprise to hear that the
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Professor Sir John Bell, the chair of medicine at Oxford University and the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, would later tell the parliamentary health and social care select committee that there may have been a deliberate policy to avoid testing NHS workers due to staff shortage fears.
She and fellow doctors were angered by the government’s positive messages about how well the NHS was coping. ‘I understand there’s a balance between not wanting to panic people, and I also understand about reputation management. But every evening at the [government’s televised media] briefing you just couldn’t recognise anything that they were saying. It was so discordant with what we were seeing. They’d made it all up.
But, in reality, Raab would run the country by committee as part of a so-called quad of senior ministers that also included Hancock, Sunak and Gove. Each day they would hold daily meetings at 9.15 a.m., either on Zoom or in person. They had competing agendas and egos, and none had the true authority of a prime minister. At one point Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, is understood to have read them the riot act, insisting that they pull together for the good of the country.
‘It is manifestly the case that large numbers of patients did not receive the care that they needed, and that’s because the health service didn’t have the resources. It didn’t have the infrastructure to cope during the first peak,’ said Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA).
‘We did not explain to the public that this was the delicate balancing act – we’ve reduced the likelihood of getting an ambulance but we’ve increased the response teams to pick up bodies in people’s homes.’ The adviser added: ‘The cremations were carried out in these very fast slots, running at weekends, running late into the night. A lot of concessions were struck with both Islam and the Church of England to just rush the bodies through, get them out, get them buried.’
From the beginning of March to the end of August, there were 25,200 more deaths in people’s homes than in normal years, yet only 2,400 of those were classified as being caused by Covid-19.
The source said care home residents were being treated as ‘collateral damage’ and described the strategy as ‘mass murder’. Many of those who died had lived through the Second World War, which was being commemorated in the summer as it was the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe.
The National Audit Office would later discover that almost 500 suppliers with links to politicians or senior officials were referred to the channel. The advantage of this fast stream was that bidding firms were automatically treated as credible by government officials. The departure from standard procurement practice would lead to allegations of cronyism when it was exposed later in the year. Some of the deals would beggar belief. A small loss-making firm run by a Conservative councillor in Stroud was given a £120 million contract to import PPE from China without any competition. A
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More than 650 health and social care service workers would be killed by the virus by the end of the year.
Johnson compared the virus to an ‘invisible mugger’ that the country had begun ‘to wrestle to the floor’. People were still dying, but the peak of the outbreak had passed. The UK had ‘defied so many predictions’, he claimed, by ‘not running out of ventilators or ICU beds’. This was untrue.
