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October 15 - November 12, 2021
The UK’s late lockdown meant it not only had Europe’s worst death toll during the outbreak, but also suffered the continent’s deepest recession. It really was the worst of all worlds.
Two weeks earlier, the second of our investigations into the handling of the coronavirus crisis had revealed how Johnson had allowed more than a million extra infections to spread as he dithered in the last nine days before lockdown and this had been the key reason why Britain suffered the worst death toll in Europe.
Johnson’s final answer was to blame the scientists, including Ferguson. ‘We made the decisions at the time on the guidance of Sage, including Professor Ferguson, that we thought were right for this country,’ he said. But Vallance would later tell a parliamentary committee that Sage had actually advised Johnson to lock down almost a week before he did so.
Super Saturday] didn’t seem like a gradual change to me. That seemed like a lot of things happening all at once,’ the adviser said. ‘If you have to reverse any of those measures, then which ones do you pick to reverse if you haven’t got the data? You don’t know which one it was that triggered the spike. We’ve been in that situation ever since – having to guess.’
Sunak had been made aware of the risks of persuading a virus-wary public to return to crowded indoor eateries. His communications director, Allegra Stratton, is said to have advised that his spotless reputation might be tarnished if there was a second spike of the virus and it turned out that his initiative had caused it. But he had decided to press ahead anyway.
Hancock said masks were needed because sales assistants, cashiers and security guards had suffered disproportionately during the first wave. ‘The death rate of sales and retail assistants is 75 per cent higher among men, and 60 per cent higher among women than in the general population.’ It was effectively an admission that the government had previously got it badly wrong on face masks and shop staff had died as a result.
But the government would continue to disregard the advice of its top advisers and allow R to slide upwards.
‘Eat Out to Help Out may in the end have been a false economy: one that subsidised the spread of the pandemic into Autumn and contributed to the start of the second wave,’ he said. ‘Alternative policy measures, such as extending the furlough scheme, increasing statutory sick pay and supporting low-income households through expanding free school meals may well prove to be far more cost effective than demand-stimulating measures that encourage economic activities which actively cause Covid-19 to spread.’
Professor Sridhar believes that if restrictions had been maintained and infections had continued to be driven down, then the testing system might have averted a second wave. ‘We might have had a second bump but it would have been manageable because test and trace works at low levels,’ she explained.
‘They seemed to be making decisions and it wasn’t really clear what the rationale for them was,’ he said.
Some of Johnson’s own advisers were incandescent with rage about his decision that week in September. ‘I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,’ said a senior source on the Sage committee whom we interviewed extensively about the lead-up to the second wave. ‘We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that … It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.’
‘I thought the chancellor was in charge. He was the main person who was responsible for the second wave
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
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Johnson’s delay had an enormous human cost. The prime minister, this time with strong encouragement from his chancellor, had led the country into another tragedy. According to estimates from Imperial College, more than 2.5 million people were infected between the day the prime minister ignored his expert advisers’ calls for a circuit breaker on 22 September and the end of the second lockdown on 1 December.
With the virus’s death rate estimated at between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent, it suggests that between 6,700 and 13,400 people might never have lost their lives had stricter measures been introduced earlier.
On New Year’s Eve, there were more deaths reported in Britain from the virus in 24 hours than there had been in the whole of Australia over the year. In fact, there were more fatalities from the virus recorded in the UK in just an hour than the total death toll from the pandemic in New Zealand.
Their inquiry found that the government’s flawed approach of holding back restrictions until it was too late in an attempt to protect the economy had caused the UK to have the highest death toll in Europe as well as suffering one of the deepest recessions.
A country divided by Brexit had voted in a government shorn of many of its more experienced hands. But, as this book has covered in detail, the weight of responsibility does fall heavily on the shoulders of the prime minister himself. He would almost certainly agree that individuals do shape history, as is attested by his biography of Winston Churchill in which his hero saves his country from the scourge of Nazism. Unfortunately, Johnson’s decisions – in particular the delays to the lockdowns – had a cataclysmic impact on his country, leaving it viewed internationally as a ‘plague island’, to
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‘If in the interests of the economy you allow the disease to spread it only means you then have to go into a longer more expensive lockdown. The government has been trying to deal with this pandemic in a grossly inefficient manner,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got the worst of all possible worlds. It is not just thousands of people who have died unnecessarily, it’s tens of thousands. It has also caused an unprecedented hit on the economy.’
The lawyers say the prime minister’s actions during the pandemic have left the government vulnerable to civil claims being brought for negligence and the violation of human rights. Weatherby and Abrahamson believe that Johnson’s conduct could also amount to ‘the criminal offence of gross negligence manslaughter’, although they believe it is unlikely that the Crown Prosecution Service would take up such a case. That may change, they note, if further evidence emerges at a future public inquiry.
Johnson had caused mass worry and confusion by claiming, on the Sunday, that schools were ‘safe’, but then, the following day, admitting they may be ‘vectors for transmission’ between households.
They allowed us to see the government’s handling of the pandemic for what it is: the most scandalous failure of political leadership for a generation.
