It’s hard to shake the feeling of parliamentary necrosis within the Tory party. In the last few weeks, around a dozen MPs have indicated they will be stepping down at the next election. The party is decaying before our eyes.

At every election, a few old faces and former big-wigs shuffle off the stage, but what is striking now is the youth and vigour of those announcing their early exit. Chloe Smith, Chris Skidmore, and Andrew Percy were Bright Young Things of the Cameron era and are still barely into their forties. William Wragg, elected in 2015, is 34, while Dehenna Davison, the breakout starlet of the Red Wall, is only 29. This is not the stream of usual retirements, but an exodus of some of the party’s most promising hopes for the future.

Equally, it seems like those who could form the backbone of an opposition cabinet are mulling their options. Though none has explicitly handed in their badge, Matt Hancock’s appearance on I’m A Celebrity suggests that he will be standing down, having irritated both the whips and his local association by spending a fortnight chowing down on kangaroo penis rather than attending to their political needs. Michael Gove, despite his renewed interest in housing and Levelling Up, also feels like he is easing his way to retirement.

It’s not hard to see why they might step away. Most of those who have announced they are off represent seats the Tories won on the way back to government and are likely to lose on the way down. For some, this is exacerbated by the proposed boundary changes. Fighting an electoral battle is a gruelling experience, especially when you anticipate losing comprehensively. Even if they do defy the current polling, these MPs would find themselves on the opposition benches for the first time — denied both the chance to chase ministerial briefs and to get stuff done.

The departure of so many young MPs, however, points towards the changing nature of how we see parliament — less of a vocation, more of a career choice. For much of the 20th century, those who went into parliament at a young age stayed in and around politics for life. Harold Macmillan was first elected to parliament in 1924, three decades before he reached the highest office (and more than six before he gave his final speech in the Lords). Churchill’s parliamentary career spanned 64 years, and like Macmillan he found himself losing seats before staging a comeback. On the other side of politics, Attlee served a similar time. Those who only stayed in office a term or two tended to have entered politics late, a nod to public service in their later years.

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By contrast, the trend of youngish MPs returning to private life seems to be increasing. Labour’s opposition period also saw young MPs walking away, whether they were established (David Miliband) or up-and-coming (Tristram Hunt). These departures, like some of the Tory ones, were partly tied to ideological disagreements with their own side and the prospect of a long time in opposition, but also the increasing onerousness of being an MP.

A parliamentary career was once seen as a rather gilded time of public service. It appealed to the bright and young who wanted to change the world, often off the back of early success in private life, and the elder statesmen who fancied some time giving something back. Now it is a far less appealing prospect. Increasingly, constituency workloads have placed more demands on the time of parliamentarians, while social media has exposed them to new levels of abuse. The generosity of the expenses regime has been curtailed, and salaries have lagged compared to the outside world. Though still nearly three times the median wage, an MP’s pay is likely lower than an inner-London headteacher’s, never mind comparable private-sector roles.

As the incumbent party staring into the wilderness, the Tories are going to feel the brunt of this. This will be compounded by the general malaise which haunts the party; its inertia means few will feel that the party is going in their direction, or that the period in opposition will be a brief one. An early, dignified exit might well seem preferable to defeat or a lacklustre term watching Labour enjoy themselves.

This unwinding will only magnify the Conservative Party’s problems. Losing experienced MPs in winnable seats as well as those that go to Labour will increase the damage done. The Tory opposition will lack institutional memory and parliamentary experience. It’s hard to keep the government on its toes when you are still finding your feet in Westminster. Meanwhile, returning MPs will have significant sway over the post-defeat direction of the party. The narrower this group is, the narrower the road becomes.

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This is not just a problem for the party, but for politics too. Poor oppositions allow poor governments to flourish without proper scrutiny. Equally, the longer it takes for the Tory party to be rebuilt (or, indeed, replaced) the more one-sided our politics may remain. It’s essential to have the balance there to hold Labour to account, and to make an active case for Right-of-centre politics. In an era where people are becoming more disillusioned with democracy, the retreat of one party could be dangerous.

In the meantime, rebuilding the parliamentary party will become even more difficult as the party’s popularity diminishes. The Conservatives have always relied on a vanguard of talented wunderkind to shape and lead the party — the post-war intake of 1950 had Heath, Macleod, Maudling (and Powell), while Clarke, Howard and the rest of the Cambridge Mafia sustained the party through the late Eighties and Nineties. Cameron and Osborne led the party back to power while still under 50, and now the mantle has passed to the youthful Sunak. Each generation brought with it a fresh energy to the political problems of the day. Now they seem to be fleeing.

Where the next vanguard comes from is unclear. The Tory vote has collapsed among younger people, with some polls suggesting the party is at single-figure support in the under-50s  The party is especially struggling with the professionals it used to tempt into the parliamentary party. Failing to connect with these voters not only harms the party’s long-term electoral process but narrows the pipelines of potential MPs. At the same time, a party’s ideas are defined by its people, and the fewer young MPs the less it will be connected to the needs of those demographics.

On an individual level, the actions of these MPs are entirely rational. Their political career is likely to be ended at the next election and stepping down now is beneficial for everyone — the party has a chance to select a new candidate well in advance, and the MPs can have the pick of the best jobs they might be offered. They also get to ease away over the next year or so, spending more time with their families after years of what can be a very isolating job.

For the party, however, it feels like a symptom of hastening decline. MPs are drifting away, not even committed to the pretence that they might win. Equally, they seem to show little interest in the rebuilding project and fightback that is likely to be needed. For the rest of this parliament, it will make them harder to control, with little to fear from the games of the whips. Moreover, unless managed well, this lack of optimism will infect the bloodstream of the backbenches, making them more likely to stand down or just check-out.

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As the rot sets in, more MPs will be looking to polish their CVs. Public affairs and lobbying firms will offer handsome remuneration without abusive DMs or Saturday mornings knocking on doors. Matt Hancock will likely try to follow Ed Balls and Michael Portillo into the world of inoffensive TV. It’s hard to blame them, with their lack of enthusiasm matched by many Tory members, activists and voters.

The worrying thing for the party, though, is where the infusion of new, hungry talent might come from. If the necrosis spreads too far, too fast, there will be no recovery. The Conservative Party will decompose — leaving Labour, and Britain’s voters, deprived of any meaningful Opposition.

The writer-director Michael Winterbottom begs to differ. Sky Atlantic announced his six-part drama about the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, towards the end of the period it covers. Winterbottom’s original title was This Sceptred Isle but Sky, fearing that the allusion was too niche, requested a more broadly legible phrase from John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: This England. It began filming in February 2021, when the first picture of Kenneth Branagh, buried in prosthetics as Boris Johnson, was released. At the last minute it was delayed for a week due to the death of the Queen but it’s still a good six months away from Orwell’s three-year red line.

“Here’s a chance to engage with something which has that certain uniqueness — but engage with it now, as soon as possible after it happened, as opposed to trying to recreate a war story from 70 years ago,” Winterbottom said in a defensive interview with the New Statesman. He co-wrote the series with Kieron Quirke but had to delegate directing duties to Julian Jarrold for health reasons. He added: “It’s very neutral. Almost a diary. A record of something we all lived through.” Perhaps he was trying to pre-empt early-bird hatchet jobs like the one in the Mail on Sunday, which called it “yet another sneerfest by the TV-land Lefties” and accusingly introduced Winterbottom as “a staunch supporter of the Labour Party and close friend of actor Steve Coogan”. Oh no, not a friend of Steve Coogan! Nadine Dorries, still Johnson’s most loyal attack dog though no longer responsible for the culture brief, slammed “a self-regarding, metropolitan, theatrical class whose favourite sport is trying to take pot-shots at the Johnsons”. The Mail claimed credit for the addition of a disclaimer, “This is a fiction based on real events,” but Sky told me that this is “standard practice”.

Looking at Winterbottom’s freewheeling filmography, it’s easy to spring to conclusions about which lane he would choose for this story. Perhaps it would be what you might call Coogan Mode: antic, postmodern portraits of charismatic narcissists from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 2002’s brilliant 24 Hour Party People to a fashion mogul rather like Philip Green in 2019’s misfiring Greed. Or maybe the sober, polemical style of documentaries such as The Shock Doctrine and Eleven Days in May. But This England, which tracks the six months from the 2019 election to Dominic Cummings’ rose garden press conference and the end of the first wave, is neither of those. Barring an incomprehensibly ill-advised recurring dream sequence, it is cautious in a way that Winterbottom rarely is, fully conscious of its responsibilities to history. In aspiring to neutrality, however, it winds up proving that neutrality is impossible.

We have to start with Branagh, who read every word and watched every second of Johnsonia he could lay his hands on, and pays Johnson the compliment of taking him seriously. I’m no fan of prosthetics but he captures the burly, bearish demeanour, the blustery charm, the cosplay gravitas, the constant air of improvising his way out of a tight spot. He compulsively rifles through a mental wardrobe of ready-made quips, comfy quotations from Shakespeare and the Classics, and self-flattering allusions to Churchill. Criticised for boasting about shaking people’s hands in the early days of the pandemic, he protests that not to do so “would be like Churchill hiding in the bunker”. But whereas one national crisis transformed Churchill from an erratic, divisive politician into a great leader, this one exposed Johnson’s fundamental shallowness and reluctance to make big decisions. His failure is framed as having less to do with specific choices than with the question of character. He was a people-pleasing booster thrust into a once-in-a-century cataclysm that he couldn’t bluff his way through.

Yet Branagh’s Johnson is unexpectedly sympathetic, unless you’re Nadine Dorries. He has some witty lines. “Not dead,” he says when he’s in bed with Covid. “Or if I am, nobody’s briefed me.” His hospitalisation, easily forgotten now, is genuinely traumatic. His relationship with Ophelia Lovibond’s Carrie Symonds is warm and playful. While each episode is frontloaded with evidence of his arrogance, infidelities and glib provocations, he does at least emerge as a palpable human being.

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The other tentpole character is Dominic Cummings, played by Simon Paisley Day as a far more gaunt and sinister character than Benedict Cumberbatch’s flamboyant disruptor in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. (Confusingly, Paisley Day was Douglas Carswell in that earlier drama.) Cummings, in this telling, wanted to exploit the systemic failures of Covid policy to strengthen his case for a root-and-branch reform of Whitehall in his own image, pitting his fantasy team of hypercompetent mavericks against a caricature of the sclerotic establishment. “He wants everyone to be crap except him,” complains Matt Hancock. Of course, that would-be revolution stalled after Cummings’ road trip to Durham and died with his firing six months later but it was always less a coherent plan than the projection of a gigantic ego.

This England illuminates when it shows the tension between health strategy and political optics. We see Hancock’s obsession with hitting the testing target by the end of April driven primarily by concern for his own reputation. Shri Patel’s Rishi Sunak is a glib, headline-hungry lightweight and director of communications Lee Cain (played by Derek Barr) a petulant bully who stomps around yelling, “We need something to announce!” Focus groups appear to have been almost as important as SAGE. Government announcements, taken from real news footage, are met with a Greek chorus of unimpressed doctors, scientists and journalists. Winterbottom shows his hand in these scenes but who would now defend the handling of PPE procurement, or the decision to return elderly patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them? Compared with Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s damning book Failures of State, This England might even be accused of being too generous. Matt Hancock, for one, should be pretty chuffed on balance, and not just because he’s played by the earnestly handsome Andrew Buchan.

The directors recreate the sense of how bewilderingly fast everything happened, especially in March, when the facts and calculations changed from day to day. Beyond the Johnsons and Cummings, most scenes are kept short, like shards in a collage of British life under Covid. The irony can be heavy-handed but no less true for that. Cutting from Johnson’s promise that “2020 will be a year of prosperity, growth and hope” to a tray of bats in Wuhan market? Well, that was the case. Juxtaposing the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid on 11 March with a dying man? A report by MPs concluded that 37 people died as a result of that match, and 41 because of the Cheltenham festival on the same day. Cummings in Durham grimly watching Hancock on television reiterate the order to stay at home? The dates align. I remember all of that and you probably do, too, although there are some things we didn’t know at the time, like the rapidity with which the vaccine was designed in February 2020.

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For most of us, the first phase of the pandemic was an unprecedented blend of anxiety and boredom. The lucky ones can look back on it as a strange hiatus, enlivened by Joe Wicks, Tiger King and sourdough loaves, so there is value in forcing viewers to focus on the unlucky. The director’s cut briskly from the corridors of power (and the corridors of Zoom) to ICU wards, care homes and houses across the country, where NHS staff faced an overwhelming tide and tens of thousands people died who might have lived if things had been done differently. The regular sound of coughs and the beeping of monitors provides the drama with a kind of sickly drumbeat. With this panorama of pain and grief, This England does similarly vital work to the Covid memorial wall, commemorating those who paid the price for bad short-term decisions and inadequate long-term planning at a time when the country is keen to move on. Whether the bereaved will feel that their anger has been represented on screen as well as their loss, I’m not so sure.

I think that This England has a strong answer to the question of whether it is too soon for a drama like this. It passes Orwell’s test of seeing the events of the moment in perspective. In fact, I was shocked by how much I had forgotten, or was unable to piece together sequentially. Exhaustively researched through documents and interviews, the series is a gift to posterity. The effort to tell it true and tell it whole is undeniable, yet I still got the impression of conscientious people working extremely hard to do what could not be done: withhold judgement.

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“I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly, or incorrectly,” Winterbottom says in the press pack, but I can’t see how that could possibly be true, not least because he and Quirke have Johnson tell Cummings in the final episode: “I think we failed… We fucked up, Dom.” There is no such thing as neutral history, unless it is an unfiltered mountain of data. As soon as you begin to tell a story you have to make choices about what to include and how to frame it. There need not be partisan bias but there must always be judgement. While a historian can assemble evidence for competing accounts of an event, a dramatist must pick one version to show you and say, yes, this is how it was. In an effort to pretend that such decisions have not been made, the writers mute their impact.

If you tune in hoping for the clear assignment of blame, then you will be disappointed, whatever your priors may be, but perhaps that task should be left to the official inquiry. This England does what a drama can do, which is to convey how it felt across the country to live through that unreal period when the world seemed at once to stop and to unravel. Muttering Shakespeare to himself in the dark, Johnson sees himself as a tragic hero, but the tragedy was ours.

Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat, Hancock worked on the student radio station at the University of Oxford.  A contemporary, Gina Coladangelo, reminisced that Matthew read the sport “because he wasn’t good enough to do the news.” Another remembered Hancock as the “butt of everyone’s humour”. He wanted to go to Westminster and be an MP.

He nearly blows himself up. Guildford, 2001. Young Matt does an election leaflet for the Tory candidate Nick St Aubyn. Instead of saying that St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community, a 22-year-old Hancock writes: “I want to untie the community”. The leaflet lands in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn loses his seat by 538 votes.

Shortly after becoming a junior minister, Hancock compares himself to Pitt the Younger, Disraeli, and Churchill; their achievements are quite well known, but he will make history on his own terms in 2018 when he becomes the first MP to launch a personal app: The Matt Hancock App.

Its creation leads to the memorable onscreen prompt “Matt Hancock would like to access your photos”  — and he appears to get them even if users deny the ‘The Matt Hancock App’ access to their libraries. A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office admits, “We are checking reports about the operation of The Matt Hancock App”.

In a party where the average age of a member is 57, Hancock appears young and bright. He is marked out by the early patronage of Osborne, who says of his protege: “In a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.”

That nickname fits well. Tigger Matt has the tamped energy of the short man, over-exercised. Enthusiastic; readily and sycophantically agreeable. His colleagues mock him — Matt Wankcock and Matt Handjob will be insider nicknames for him — but they are usually reluctant to fire him, even when it makes sense to do so.

***

As the Conservative Party tortures itself in 2019, Hancock decides he would like to be leader. Or raise his profile. So he attacks Boris Johnson and a hard Brexit: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

He fuck fuck’s himself into sixth place in the first ballot of the party’s MPs. Then he withdraws; he spends a month on television and radio praising the new leader… Boris Johnson. Hancock expects a promotion for his breathy verbal parkour. He keeps his job as Health Secretary instead.

To run the NHS is no Conservative’s idea of a dream. Neville Chamberlain was the last Tory Health Secretary to become Prime Minister. The service itself is a patched-up patchwork, a tax sink, an organisation colossally vast and maddeningly confusing. Hancock’s real brief is to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when people are looking.

The pandemic is the greatest health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought that an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. Fate, or a lab-leak, means that soon everybody will look at the NHS.

***

A relaxed, Prime Minister-less COBRA meeting is held at the end of January 2020. After chairing it Hancock tells reporters the risk Covid posed to the public was “low”. On the same day a study published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet suggests SARS-CoV-2 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people.

The risk to the UK is deemed so low that on 24 February the Government supplies 1,800 pairs of goggles, 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. Looking back at meetings that month, one senior Department for Health official remembers thinking “‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’”

***

A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.

Loo paper soon begins to disappear nationwide. Hancock is rolled out — he was always being rolled out, like a new carpet to be trodden on — into a breakfast TV studio to deny that the Government wanted to massacre the Grannys. “Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus.”

Then Neil Ferguson releases his controversial paper. It claims hundreds of thousands will die if Britain is left to take the virus on the chin. Sage advises the Government to embark on a full lockdown that day.

It arrives on 26 March 2020, as Covid cases double every 72- hours. Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown. And the Grannys? Care home deaths accounted for 40% of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales during the pandemic.

***

Like other ministers, after the passage of the Coronavirus Act, Hancock develops war fever. “Our generation has never been tested like this”, he writes to a nation frantically, pointlessly washing its hands. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz… they pulled together in one gigantic national effort.” The allegory is both ugly and lazy, but Britain is a country where poppies are made to wear poppies.

***

Prince Charles opens the first Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in London. He says the Nightingale “will be a shining light”. The hospital is constructed in nine days, and holds 500 extra intensive care unit beds. (For every hundred thousand members of the population the UK has 7.3 intensive care beds — less than Spain, Greece, and Estonia. This lack of provision will mean more deaths.)

More Nightingales open across the country. They cost the taxpayer 500 million pounds. Only three of the seven hospitals end up treating patients. They are described by one MP as a “massive white elephant conjured up by Matt Hancock to create a good headline”.

***

It’s not really worth it, going outside. A family of five is sent home by the police in Conwy after being caught having a day at the seaside. They scuttle back to Merseyside. Police in Derbyshire “divide opinion” when they use drones to film people walking in the Peak District. A “major incident” is declared when thousands travel to Bournemouth beach, to swim, eat ice cream, and burn in the sun. (Belatedly, it is revealed that the “major incident” did not lead to a spike in Covid cases.)

Speaking to Andrew Marr, a concerned Hancock threatens to ban outdoor exercise. “Let’s not have a minority spoiling it for everybody.”

***

Nothing works properly. The Test and Trace App doesn’t work. PPE doesn’t work — because it’s all out of date. Protecting care homes doesn’t work. Dido Harding doesn’t work. The Civil Service literally doesn’t work. Big-hitter commentators start saying that the entire British state doesn’t work. It is described as “simultaneously overcentralised and weak at its centre”.

But ‘The Matt Hancock’ app still functions. In May 2020 the Telegraph reports that it is becoming a “virtual home for online pranksters and trolls”. Posts to the ‘Have Your Say’ section include drawings of cocks, general abuse, and a date invitation for the (then) married Health Secretary.

When ‘The Matt Hancock’ app is updated a year later, access to the ‘Have Your Say’ section is hidden. One of the last posts read: “Is there a portal on here where I can be awarded a Government contract for an area I have little experience of scale please?”

***

Hancock always looks caught between a giggle and a sob. A new round of Covid restrictions makes casual sex illegal. Or at least that’s how Sky News’ Kay Burley interprets the guidance when she interviews him about it. “You are saying that no social distancing is needed in established relationships,” she notes. “But what about people who are not in an established relationship?”

The Health Secretary, embracing his role as national sex cop, confirms that Government rules do ban shagging someone who is not your normal partner. Apropos of nothing, he adds that, fortunately “I’m in an established relationship”.

A few weeks later, the Times reveals that Gina Coladangelo was appointed to a £15,000-a-year advisory PR role in the Health Ministry. The appointment was never declared. Coladangelo and Hancock are described as “close friends”. A source tells the paper: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”

***

He appears to cry on television when the first Pfizer jabs are stuck into the arms of two pensioners: Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare. “It’s been a tough year for so many people,” he sobs, rubbing his waterless, unreddened eyes.

The Government spends £12 billion on vaccines. Total pandemic spending is estimated to reach £372 billion. Research finds that under-30s will be disproportionately forced to bear the brunt of these costs. They are described as the “packhorse generation”. The median age of death from Covid is 83 years old. There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.

William Shakespeare dies naturally within a few months of taking the vaccine.

***

In January 2021, a week after the virus death toll tops 100,000, a focus group asks some ordinary people questions about the Health Secretary. A man called Jason compares Hancock to Ian Beale from Eastenders — “He wants people to feel sorry for him.” Asked what sort of car he would be, mother of two Donna suggests that he would be “something that breaks down.”

***

During a committee hearing Dominic Cummings says that Hancock should “have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly”. Cummings then puts a WhatsApp screenshot on his blog that shows the Prime Minister describing Matt as both “hopeless” and “fucking hopeless”.  When he is interviewed about the message, Hancock says: “Boris has apologised for the way that came over.”

***

The story and the footage and the photo are exquisitely simple. After nearly 18 months of tiers, colour-codes, R-numbers, powerpoint slides, and graphs, here is something everyone could understand: a hand on an arse.

Yes, Hancock’s downfall was exquisitely simple. His affair with Gina Coladangelo was unambiguous. It made sense like fairy tales make sense. The Princess in the tower must let her hair down. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothing. The apple offered by the witch is poisoned. The politician who spent the pandemic agitating for the harshest restrictions, who would describe Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown sex fiasco as a “matter for the police”, who ensured that the public could be fined for sitting on park benches, who threatened them with 10-year prison sentences for breaking quarantines, this ogre of the new common sense, would — of course! — be breaking all his rules.

The press is devastating, and relentless. With a deep understanding of public humiliation, the Queen describes Matthew as a “poor man”. He resigns, his only consolation being one of the most Googled news stories of 2021.

***

Hancock keeps coming back, like Covid. His head pops out of the ground. Phillip Schofield asks him: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing guidelines?” The nation laughs, bitterly. It is reported that, off air, Hancock “almost seemed euphoric… He didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the joke.” He has returned to his student days, but made them the business of the entire country. He buys stonewashed jeans, and new turtlenecks. He does podcast interviews, and goes to the BRIT awards. He says he is writing a book for Harper Collins. Harper Collins says he is not writing a book for Harper Collins, and Hancock never mentions it again. A role with the UN is torpedoed, and a comeback video — unanimously described as “cringe” — is swiftly deleted. It is impossible to tell, as with England’s experience of three lockdowns, whether he is enjoying all this, or if he is the saddest man in the world.

***

Everybody wanted a lesson from the last 24 months. Neat, comprehensible wisdom. An intelligible narrative. They wanted to say that it finally proved that Germany was a better country than England, or they wanted to say that our vaccine programme proved the EU was useless. They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character, the flaws in our state, or otherwise be used to justify every kind of pet project, ideological hang-up, or personal vendetta. There was no narrative line. All that the pandemic proved was that what happened a hundred times before in history could happen to us too.

***

The number of children referred for specialist mental health help rises above one million for the first time in 2021. Cases involving those 18 and under increase by 26% during the pandemic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns it is “becoming an impossible situation to manage”.

People, including Hancock, like to talk about learning the lessons of the pandemic. So we can prepare better for the next one. They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.

26 March 2020 — 26 March 2022

The complex relationship between leaders and satirists is as old as politics itself. Aristophanes attacks Socrates in his comedies, Plato accuses Aristophanes of misrepresentation and whipping up the mob. Nearly two and a half thousand years before the invention of the internet, the same issues surface again and again: hypocritical public figures, comedic put-downs, public anger, the manipulation of public anger. But have satirists ever had this much of the upper hand? Those who would expose political deceit have so many more means of detecting hypocrisy — cameras in Government offices, for heaven’s sake — and increasing access to audiences to expose it to.

The jester used to sit in the corner of the royal court, occasionally telling the truth about the king in the apparently innocuous form of comedic banter. Now the jester has a court of his own. Sometimes he is better paid than his targets. He may have a larger public profile, perhaps even more political clout that those he mocks. As the satirist Steve Punt joked on Private Passions, there are some young people who watch Have I Got News For You but won’t watch the news itself. Comedians have real power in holding politicians to account; but how do we hold them to account?

Part of the trouble is to be found in the complex eddies of truth that swirl around the notion of hypocrisy. The exposure of hypocrisy is the satirist’s stock in trade. The danger however is that the satirist can all too easily presume that he or she is above it. As R. Jay Magill writes in his fascinating little book on Sincerity, “satirists mean sincere things by saying them insincerely, hypocrites say sincere things but actually mean them insincerely.” In other words, despite their superficially self-deprecating irony, the purpose of the satirist is one of deep sincerity and moral seriousness. They possess the true heart, so beloved of religious Puritans since the sixteenth century.

And this may be part of the problem: the mocker becomes the moral hero. Those who would cast our political life as a parade of stupidity and hypocrisy understand themselves to be above the very things they point to in others. Often, we don’t even know who they are. Who produced all those Hancock memes? I have no idea. And no idea whether their own lives match up to the moral seriousness they see lacking in their target.

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Something similar is also produced by the way our relationships are now so mediated by technology. Where there is a screen between you and me, I no longer feel I have access to the social cues that can reassure me of your sincerity. In such a context, we often insist upon our own sincerity by signalling it to others in increasingly deliberate ways. Ironically, there then becomes something increasingly artificial about the profession of sincerity – which only intensifies the cycle of distrust and the need for a more genuine expression of sincerity. With so much work, and even socialising, done on Zoom, the whole of our lives seem to resemble a kind of demonic Turing Test, an attempt to work out the truth of the other at some impossibly digital distance.

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Matt Hancock's casual cruelty

By Sarah Ditum

There are many echoes of the past here. The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the fear that others did not sincerely hold to the faith that they professed. Was the conversion of others genuine? Or was it mere outward performance? How could you tell? It is no coincidence that with this Puritan anxiety came a new proliferation of testimonies and autobiographies, all attempts to show the inner self to the outside world, proving sincerity.

Much has been made of the idea that we are now in an age of New Puritanism, a new era of moral intensity. Some call it woke, but I wonder if the more interesting comparison is with the anxiety about sincerity. As our lives are more mediated by technology, and as the wearing of masks has become standard practice, the question of the truthfulness of the other is once again intensified. The very word hypocrisy derives etymologically from the Greek for play acting, referencing actors who wore masks on stage. Now we all wear masks. And so now the question of hypocrisy has intensified, generating renewed social anxiety.

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This is where the satirists come in, and why they are the crack troops of the New Puritanism. Imbued with a sense of moral righteousness, they set about trying to unmask the deceivers. And politicians make for a ready and easy target. Don’t get me wrong, they often deserve it. And satire is a vital component of a society saturated with bullshit, political and otherwise. But the rise in the importance of, and our need for, satire is also a consequence of the weakening of the social bonds that used to form the basis for our mutual understanding. Increasingly, is is also a consequence of the kind of mediated and distanced lives we are being forced to live through technology.

Like the Puritans of old, we are obsessed with the fact that others might not be as they seem, with hypocrisy, with transparency. And like the Puritans, we are obsessed with parading our inner righteousness in moral testimonies for all to see, making public demonstrations of sincerity. We now call this virtue signalling — which is not about younger people being more self-righteous, but more about the need to demonstrate moral sincerity in a context where so many of the traditional mechanisms for establishing it have collapsed.

In the end, however, the old-style Puritans had God to settle the matter. He alone would know the secrets of your heart, He alone would unmask the truth. The new-style Puritans give this role to The Now Show and Mock the Week.

Anyway, the usual boring straitlaced prudes on Twitter got on her case about it. And the poor woman became that day’s Twitter sacrificial lamb, or foal. “Yup, that bestiality tweet was a mistake,” she tweeted later on, sadly, having deleted the original. “I’ll never talk about it again.”

It was interesting, because at one point she made a pretty unanswerable point: unless you’re a vegetarian, you haven’t really got a leg to stand on here. “The fact is,” she said, “you’re being inconsistent if you’re fine with killing and eating non-human animals while opposing sex with non-human animals. They didn’t consent to being killed and eaten yet you’re perfectly fine with it.”

Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, talks about a phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding”. That is: when something is disgusting, and you want to say that it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So you end up simply saying it just is. One example he gives is of a man going to the shops and buying an oven-ready chicken. That evening, before cooking it, he has sex with it. Then he cooks it and eats it. Is that immoral? Apologies if you’re having chicken for dinner, by the way.

Most of us want to say yes, it is immoral. But most of us – especially those of us in the West, and on the left-liberal side of politics – think of morality in terms of whether someone is harmed, oppressed or cheated. And when you’re making love to a dead chicken and then eating it – who is harmed? The chicken? You feel that as far as the chicken is concerned, the worst has already happened. The man eats the chicken himself, so he’s not inflicting violated chicken on anyone – and it’s properly cooked, so no risk of diseases! Who is the victim here?

Disgust is a moral emotion. (I can feel my wife’s moral disapproval when I put mayonnaise on pizza.) But we have, in the West, somewhat separated our sense of morality from our sense of disgust. It is not enough to say “that is wrong because it is disgusting”: you have to say “it is wrong because of [these reasons], and the fact that I am also disgusted by it is an entirely separate and coincidental thing.” 

In the case of the woman fantasising about the horse, the responders were saying things like “It’s wrong because of a lack of consent” or “we evolved to eat other animals”. They were trying to find reasons other than that is disgusting. But those reasons don’t stand up: she had already stipulated that the horse was willing – the horse had consented. That’s right there in the premise of the thought experiment. It’s a fantasy: if horses can’t consent, then she won’t shag one. (Philosophers need to live in the Least Convenient Possible World!)

And the “we evolved to eat them” argument is a straightforward case of the naturalistic fallacy. You can’t get an ought from an is – just because something is natural doesn’t make it right. However you look at it, one suspects that the horse would rather be allowed to have sex with a woman if it chose to, than be chopped up and put in Tesco beefburgers. 

The trouble is that following our moral reasoning all the way through is often extremely uncomfortable. In the case of a woman tweeting fantasies about sex with a horse, it’s merely funny; but in other cases, it leads us into genuinely difficult areas.

For instance, Richard Dawkins recently got in trouble for saying on a radio programme that aborting foetuses at risk of various disabilities, including Down’s syndrome, was morally acceptable: he said that it might plausibly “increase the amount of happiness in the world”.

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I should specify that he was rowing back an earlier comment, from 2014, that it was immoral not to terminate those pregnancies; but again, it hits some deeply uncomfortable note, and we want to say this is immoral. We picture a real child with learning disabilities; we hear from parents of children with those disabilities. We are outraged and disgusted.

But if we are pro-choice, as I am, then Dawkins’ position is implicit. Abortion is already legal in cases of likely foetal abnormality, and 90% of prenatal diagnoses of Down’s lead to termination. It is the woman’s choice, of course: but their choice is presumably made on the basis that either they expect the child would not lead a fulfilling life, or that they expect the cost to their own wellbeing and happiness would be too great. And we (those of us who are pro-choice, anyway) already agree with that. Dawkins merely said the quiet part out loud.

Our visceral reactions drive our moral decisions far more than we might want to admit: for Haidt, the reasoning part of us is usually just coming up with socially acceptable justifications for our emotional gut reactions, a presidential press secretary rather than a policymaker. (As the Matt Hancock scandal was breaking, a friend got in touch to say that he thought a lot of the reason why people were so appalled was because they were sexually disgusted at the idea of being kissed by Matt Hancock, and the rest of it flowed from there.)

According to Haidt, many non-Western or non-liberal people find it easier to say why things that disgust them are immoral: they have a wider sense of what is moral than just “does it harm people?” or “is it fair?” They might appeal to traditions (“not shagging horses was good enough for my father, and his father before him!”) or the disapproval of the community, or simply say this is not what is done. 

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But Western liberals – or more accurately, members of the group known as Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic, WEIRD – need to rationalise out their disgust. Leon Kass, the philosopher, argued in 1997 that we have lost something as a result: that disgust should guide our moral judgments. People getting disgusted at the cloning of Dolly the Sheep or other technological efforts to play god, he says, are “warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound … Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” 

And remember, Haidt says that WEIRD liberals tend to think of morality in terms of whether someone is harmed, and in terms of fairness, while non-WEIRD people and non-liberals are more likely to care about other concerns — authority, sanctity and loyalty. And he thinks that liberals should be willing to adopt those broader moral “tastes”: that if, for instance, liberal politicians want to win more votes, they will need to be able to talk to voters in those terms. For instance, they might want to appeal to the moral tastes of authority and loyalty by talking about patriotism; or they might want to appeal to a moral taste of sanctity by imposing strict penalties on sex offenders.

Haidt may be right on the practical aspect, but Kass is wrong on the moral front. We are sometimes disgusted by things that are immoral – but often we are not. People used to be disgusted by same-sex relationships or interracial marriage; most of us are now not. The disgust response was, in some sense, wrong. The work of moral philosophy is to work out, as dispassionately as possible, what is wrong and what is right: it is a difficult task, but not a completely fruitless one, in that most of us would agree that we have made moral progress in some sense over the last few millennia. 

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Emotions like disgust can call our attention to things — we feel disgusted when someone laughs at a homeless person – but they are not reliable guides to what is and isn’t moral. It is worth understanding what drives moral decisions – to understand that some people are disgusted or outraged by things that we don’t, intellectually, think are immoral – but that doesn’t make those moral decisions correct. I can have mayonnaise on my god-damn pizza. You can shag that oven-ready chicken, if you want, although I wouldn’t tell the neighbours. 

And the fact that we are usually not disgusted by the systematic breeding and killing of animals for our food, and yet we are disgusted by the idea of a woman having sex with a consenting horse, is not necessarily a useful way of finding out which is actually more immoral. 

In fact, I will go on record here and say that, yes, morally, it is worse to have animals tortured and eaten than it is to allow them to have sex with you. I’m a hypocrite on this — I do the former most weeks, and the latter only at birthdays and Christmases — but still, I think it is true.

Nothing about Matt Hancock has previously suggested a man of untrammelled sensuality. And yet there he is, getting deeply into a clinch with his aide Gina Coladangelo during office hours. Is this really the same Matt Hancock we once saw clumsily attempting parkour, jumping over small obstacles with an expression of fierce determination? The Matt Hancock who appeared, inexplicably, to conduct his early-pandemic video interviews from a small, red cupboard? Matt Hancock, the objectively ridiculous person, destroyed by passion?

Even his scandals had a vibe of hapless enthusiasm rather than malice. Buying £30m of PPE from a man with no prior experience making medical equipment who used to run his local? Breaking the ministerial code by giving an NHS contract to his family (and failing to declare his own interest in the firm)? Official business done from his private email? You can imagine Hancock sealing the deals with the same nod of unguarded satisfaction that he gives after vaulting a very low wall: another problem surmounted by Matt Hancock!

When Dominic Cummings published a text from Boris Johnson calling Hancock “totally fucking hopeless”, no one really cared because it’s what most people thought anyway.

Bafflingly, he survived it all. And it seems possible that he might even have survived this latest humiliation if it hadn’t seemed so disconcertingly off-brand: Hancock, after all, was the sex stasi of the pandemic. When Professor Neil Fergusson was busted in an assignation with a woman during lockdown, Hancock primly commented that the social distancing rules “are there for everyone”, and called for Ferguson to be investigated by police. And while families were missing the funerals of their loved ones, Hancock was having his knee-trembler against an office door.

Boris would have let him off. How could he do otherwise? The Prime Minister’s uncounted children and multiple acts of callousness to wives and lovers leave no mark with the public because this is what we expect: no matter what he promised his women, he never promised us that he would be anything other than a cad. But the public didn’t feel the same about the Health Secretary; Hancock’s hypocrisy couldn’t be borne.

The affair itself is another matter. There is a current culture of increasing permissiveness which led even the Bishop of Manchester, to say that he was “more worried about the fact that he failed to keep the social distancing than I am about the fact that here was a middle aged bloke having a bit of a fling.” Clearly, it’s something a lot of people do. And despite reigning stereotypes of hapless horndog husbands, the data increasingly suggests that adultery is committed just as regularly by women as it is for men. (Hancock’s affair partner is married too.)

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Women might actually be the ones with the greatest incentive to cheat: in her 2018 book Untrue, the writer Wednesday Martin pointed out that it’s women who experience the greatest dissatisfaction in long-term relationships, and women whose libidos are most likely to tank within monogamy. (Hence the rumoured condition of “Lesbian Bed Death” in long-term relationships between women.)

This makes an obvious kind of sense if you think about it for any amount of time at all. The legal and social structures that govern our relationships are, after all, patriarchal: products of male power, and so unlikely to reflect women’s own interests. In Martin’s argument, when straight relationships have an imbalance between a male partner who wants more sex and a female partner who wants to be left alone, it’s not because the woman is innately less frisky. She’s just bored off her tits.

This current upswing of tolerance for adultery is probably partly a result of feminism successfully unpicking some of the double standards against female sexuality, and partly a result of the internet eroding the distinction between “thinking” and “doing”. Thanks to Facebook messenger, you don’t even need to bother to book a hotel room to put on the scarlet letter in your own lunch hour.

More importantly, there’s not that much to be afraid of these days. (Or at least, there wasn’t until early 2020.) Antiretrovirals mean AIDs is no longer a hateful reaper scything after desire, and antibiotics are holding out — just about, for now — against the rest of the STDs. Modern contraception is a reliable guard against pregnancy.

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Advice columnist Dan Savage advances a “monogamish” approach, where each partner makes room for each other’s foibles rather than enforcing a doctrinaire version of absolute fidelity; the psychotherapist Esther Perel, in her book The State of Affairs, eloquently argues that unfaithfulness isn’t always a comment on the relationship itself. People in “good” relationships cheat, and sometimes “good” people become cheaters. “The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage,” she has written.

Still, affairs do have victims, as Savage and Perel would agree. In Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, published in 1983, narrator Rachel has discovered that her husband is having an affair. “When something like this happens,” she explains, “you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to be different from what you thought it was.”

The pain of being cheated on is the pain of realising your most intimate life has been a fiction authored on someone else’s terms. A friend of mine, currently writing a memoir about being married to a serially unfaithful man, sees the propensity to cheat as a matter of character: “Surely that’s the most important context in which you’re truthful — to the person that you lie nose-to-nose with in bed. If you can’t be truthful to them, then you’re absolutely not going to be truthful in any other context.”

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But besides the deceit, what runs through the account of Hancock’s actions is the casual carelessness about his wife’s feelings. It’s reported that he woke their eight-year-old child to say he was leaving the family home — and then, presumably, left his wife Martha to deal with the children’s distress as well as her own shock. In his letter of resignation, he says sorry to his “family and loved ones”, but never directly to Martha, who surely after 15 years of marriage deserved a personal apology for the public devastation of her life.

There are even “friends” of Hancock briefing that the relationship with Coladengelo is a “love match”. It’s one kind of lapse to cheat, and perhaps it’s another to get caught, but to lack even the belated discretion to grant some dignity to the person you hurt — the person who in this case had your children, supported your career, and who you once promised to forsake all others for — seems a gratuitous kind of cruelty. Hancock may well be besotted with Coladengelo, but he seems to have fallen at least as hard for the myth of his own romantic exceptionalism.

There is nothing special about adulterers. All hearts are messy implements, all desire is untidy, all people are capable of hurting those who love them and being hurt in turn. One of the unedifying things about the orgy of moralism towards MPs in the Nineties was that the journalists indulging in it belonged to an industry that was hardly known for its sexual rectitude. But coronavirus made private lives into a matter of policy, and Hancock was the most enthusiastic advocate of all for this. His failure to apply that to himself is, in the end, the thing that makes him most ridiculous of all.

What is it, you might wonder, that makes Mr Osborne the best qualified person to do this job? Does he spend his idle hours thinking about the best way to facilitate the curation of valuable collections and the ethics of repatriating plundered antiquities? Is he a scholar of archaeology and an expert on the way museums are run around the world? Does he have outstanding contacts in the arts world? Or is he, rather, The Right Sort Of Chap?

This appointment reminds us that the economy in this country is essentially divided in two. There’s a very big bit of it, involving most people, where you are expected to develop skills in a particular job. You train as a doctor or a lawyer, or you apprentice as a stacker of shelves or a maker of widgets. If things go well, you steadily ascend the ladder of your chosen career, becoming more senior and better paid. If things go badly — say, they invent a robot that can do the same job more cheaply, or people cease to want coal dug out of the ground — you are stuffed. You have to “retrain”, to move into another sector.

Then there’s this small other part of the economy — which is, incidentally, the part in charge — where you need no specific skills at all. It is about being, like George, The Right Sort Of Chap. You have ascended to a level of seniority by sucking up to the right people and getting in the right gang — and once you’ve made it, you’ve made it. Being The Right Sort Of Chap trumps any domain-specific knowledge or experience. You will swan into one board-level job or consulting gig after another. What they want is your contacts in the corridors of power and your name on the letterhead.

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The Right Sort of Chap is a part of the nepotistic, private-school-dominated establishment, in which your path is eased by knowing the right people and projecting the right front (as a public-school educated brat myself I check my privilege in that department); but they’re what you might think of as the god-tier version. Public school chutzpah can help get you to the top of a profession; Right Sort Of Chapness, once you’ve got there, renders your specific profession irrelevant. You can run companies, newspapers, universities, cultural institutions or countries with equal confidence.

Sometimes people make it to this stage by toiling up through the first section of the economy and reaching escape velocity: they are at board level in their chosen industry and find themselves, in the silver back end of their career, accumulating seats in the Lords, directorships and chairs here there and everywhere. There’s the assumption, perhaps not always wrong, that corporate governance is a transferable skill. And there’s the agreeable sense that if you sit on each other’s remuneration committees everyone can be accommodated in a civilised way.

But some, like our George, get there with no very concrete sign of prior achievement at all. Having struggled to get anywhere in journalism (turned down for this trainee scheme; turned down for that job; reduced to freelance shifts on the Telegraph diary — and some of us know what that’s like) he plunged into Conservative Central Office as a young thing and ended up scooting up the political ladder with the Notting Hill Tory chumocracy. Right place, right time, right pals. He was now The Right Sort Of Chap.

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He had a golden few years in Cabinet and then, having bished up the Brexit campaign and seen his main patron throw in the towel, he started rampaging through the private sector, where former Chancellors of the Exchequer command a premium. Adviser to a handful of venture capital outfits; chair of a think-tank; honorary professor here; visiting fellow there. Why wouldn’t he end up editing the Evening Standard or chairing the BM as a sideline?

Propriety requires me to make a declaration of interest here: George fired me as a columnist from the Evening Standard. I don’t spend a lot of time plotting his downfall, but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t smirk if I read that he’d fallen down an open manhole. Still, the evidence that he was a poor editor of that paper is abundant even if, in firing me, he showed he was capable of making the odd sensible decision.

Having never been a proper journalist, he didn’t seem to get the idea that you’re not supposed to compromise editorial independence to suck up to friends, political allies and other employers of the editor. The coverage of Uber and Google and various other concerns was, we can say, suboptimal. But the Standard’s editorship, for George, was not so much a job as an influence-peddling sideline in any case; the main gig was a £650,000, three-day a week consultancy for the fund manager BlackRock, along with a by then uncountable number of other jobs whose highish salaries and lowish actual-work requirements were the main thing they had in common. And in this, he was not an outlier but a representative.

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The Right Sort Of Chap principle runs through British public life like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock. It starts early: once you’ve finagled your way into one of the great universities, you can often make a quick change of course. I remember watching contemporaries do so with something like awe. You got into Oxford to do, say, Theology against less than stiff competition — but now you’ve decided you’d prefer to study PPE, so you switch. Tough luck on the suckers who applied to that vastly oversubscribed course in the first place and didn’t get in.

At the end of it you get a milk-round job in a big five consultancy where — nice suit, middling degree from a good university — you’re sent out to advise professional businesspeople on how to run businesses. Consultancy, as a burgeoning profession in public and business life, more or less enshrines the principle that Right-Sort-Of-Chapness trumps actual knowledge or experience. By then, you’re on your way — set up for a sideways jump into politics.

After all, the principle continues at the most senior levels of governance — and is, on the face of it, an extremely odd one. Once you’re in the cabinet (and don’t let’s get started on the track records that gave us the likes of Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock and Priti Patel in their current seniority), you can be reshuffled to any portfolio at all. The quite absurd assumption is that the skills that outfit you to get in with the right gang in politics will outfit you to take any role in government. There will be first-year undergraduates who have a better grasp of economics than you — but the PM owes you one and you didn’t shit the bed as minister for fun, so boom: you’re Chancellor of the Exchequer.

These moves are not made on the basis of the candidate’s suitability for a given role but for reasons of Prime Ministerial patronage (it was a happy accident that when he became Chancellor, Gordon Brown was the sort of fellow who read books about post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory). And it’s for the same reasons that, rather than keep cabinet ministers in one department for many years so they actually learn something, they’re often as not bounced into a new one after a couple of years. That’s why we get Welsh Secretaries who don’t know the Welsh national anthem, trade ministers who haven’t grasped the importance of the Dover to Calais route and Northern Ireland ministers who haven’t quite got round to reading the Good Friday Agreement.

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This government has been even keener than most on the Right Sort Of Chap principle, even extending it to the awarding of public contracts during the pandemic. Companies with no experience of making PPE, or in some cases no experience of making anything at all, were awarded multi-million pound contracts to have a bash at it on the apparent basis that they drank in the same pub as a cabinet minister, or were mates with Dominic Cummings, or had the PM’s mobile number. And failure — as everyone from Serco or G4S to Matt (“totally fucking hopeless”) Hancock knows — is no obstacle to continuing in post.

Dido Harding is perhaps the outstanding example of the Right Sort Of Chap. She, too, made the right friends at university. She did her apprenticeship in consultancy, and there followed a merry-go-round of board-level appointments at which she was, mostly, heroically useless (notoriously presiding over the TalkTalk data loss fiasco). She failed upwards to become a Tory peer and, again with no domain-specific experience, was put in charge of Test and Trace — which had the distinction of being one of the most spectacular failures in the long catalogue of governmental failures during the pandemic. Not, apparently, troubled by self-reflection, she’s now campaigning to be put in charge of the whole NHS. She’ll probably get the job. And if she doesn’t, perhaps George will see her right with a senior role at the British Museum.

After all, he is part of an establishment that operates on the blithe assumption that all skills are transferable, that an aptitude for political schmoozing magically confers any number of lesser competences on its owner — and that the Right Sort of Chap is the right person for the job, even if they’ve proved otherwise, time and again.

It’s inconvenient timing, given that England has just relaxed restrictions, and the Health Secretary didn’t seem overly keen to talk about the Government’s failure to impose restrictions on travel from India for several weeks after the new variant was known to be causing havoc in south Asia. But he made one interesting point: the majority of people in Bolton and Blackburn who are in hospital with the new variant are of an age who are eligible to have the vaccine, but who have chosen not to. 

That is true. And apparently there are “growing concerns” in Downing Street that even a small number of people refusing Covid vaccines could delay the final restrictions in June. Hancock didn’t say it, but there does seem to be an attitude among some people, not just in Government, that vaccine-hesitant people have made their bed and now they need to lie in it. They’ve been offered the jab, they’ve turned it down, and it’s now their own problem.

That’s understandable. After all, the most prominent vaccine sceptics are crankish academics and Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, Piers — although Jeremy himself doesn’t seem completely on board the vaccine train either.

But while the middle-class dinner-party sceptics get the most attention, vaccine hesitancy is actually highest in other demographic groups — notably, ethnic minorities and the most deprived. While more than 90% of Britons over 50 have had at least one jab — and the British are the least vaccine-sceptical nation in the world — coverage varies widely by ethnicity. By April, people of white British or Indian heritage had over 90% take up; but people of Pakistani origin had just 78%, and black African and black Caribbean groups were down at 71% and 67% respectively.

There’s a socioeconomic difference, as well, although it’s not so pronounced. Only 87% of people in the most deprived 20% of the population were vaccinated, compared to 95% of the richest 20%.

And while it’s tempting to say that if people aren’t getting vaccinated, it’s their own fault and their own problem, it’s not entirely true. People don’t usually choose the communities they grow up in, and if you live in one where lots of people don’t trust the British establishment for whatever reason, I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s your own fault.

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And it’s certainly not just their problem, either. Most of the population has been vaccinated, meaning that it will be increasingly hard for the virus to spread and even harder for it to kill people. But the coverage is highly uneven. People tend to live in communities full of people roughly like themselves — with similar socioeconomic and ethnic status. That means there will be lots of places in the UK with large numbers of unvaccinated people of vulnerable age.

According to Dr Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the future of the pandemic in the UK is likely not to be huge national outbreaks, but more localised. “It’s worth getting away from the average national coverage,” he says. “It won’t come averaged across the whole UK; it’ll be clusters.” 

And if there’s a cluster, local healthcare systems can be overwhelmed, even if the UK system as a whole has plenty of spare capacity. As we know, when Covid overwhelms healthcare systems, people die who wouldn’t otherwise have had to, and it’s not jot just Covid patients: “People who are in car accidents can’t get the care they would otherwise have had,” says  Dr Duncan Robertson, a policy researcher focusing on Covid modelling at Loughborough University. Or cancer patients, or people having heart attacks, or whatever. Plus, while the vaccines are very good, they’re not perfect: some vaccinated people will still die as a result of other people’s refusal to take the vaccine. If a very large number of people get the vaccine, a small percentage of them will die, and a small percentage of a very large number is still a large number. 

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Have we seen the end of Covid?

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The new variant seems to be about 50% more transmissible even than the Kent variant, which means that we need to vaccinate many more people than we would have done to achieve herd immunity, and that it will spread much more quickly around susceptible people than earlier variants did.

It’s worth remembering that, on one level, this is a good problem to have, and the UK is still in an amazingly strong situation. And although the Indian variant has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works, it’s still time to start thinking seriously about when we start donating vaccines in large numbers to the rest of the world — not just pledging them but actually giving them. The Novavax factory in Middlesbrough should come online soon and that might be a good time to start offering them around.

Obviously the British Government has a responsibility to UK citizens, but even from a purely self-interested point of view, quite soon there will come a point at which a vaccine dose will do more good for the UK if it’s in the arm of an Indian citizen than a British one. We live in an interconnected world: variants can get here easily from anywhere, and a crippled world economy is bad for us, too. We are still doing amazingly well with our vaccination programme, and it may be that we can soon start to afford to be generous.

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But also, this is a huge reason to really push on with the vaccination campaign, and to especially focus on ethnic-minority groups. One senior scientist I spoke to said that some of the things we can do are pretty obvious, like finding healthcare providers who can speak the predominant minority language in affected areas. They’re not necessarily easy — Urdu-speaking health professionals don’t grow on trees — but we ought to try.

Most importantly: while I understand Hancock’s eagerness to say that most of the people who are in hospital have chosen not to get the vaccine in the end, vaccine scepticism is everyone’s problem, not just the sceptics themselves. Britain is ending lockdown — that’s great — but even a relatively small number of vaccine sceptics, if they’re clustered enough, could make the opening-up go very badly wrong.

Three days after Christmas, at around 7pm, President Cyril Ramaphosa performed his version of Boris Johnson’s code red speeches: the ornate briefing room, the national flag, the fatherly tone of a GP proffering a late stage cancer diagnosis.

The situation had devolved, he announced. Rates were rising. Hospitals were filling up. Effective immediately, bars would close. There would be a national curfew of 9pm, and all the beaches would be closed. Alcohol, it almost went without saying, would be banned again. Only this time, to beat the bootleggers, the transportation of alcohol would be banned along with it.

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By Ian Birrell

South Africans largely shrugged. Every country wraps Covid around its national character, and here there is little of that John Bull spirit, of Magna Carta and “on whose authority”. In a perverse sense, it makes the whole experience much more doable — without the grinding cognitive dissonance of Brits begrudging every fresh filing down of their liberties.

Here, recent memory is more of the Native Beer Act, of dry Sundays and the rolling curfews of the 1980s State Of Emergency. Freedom may be hymned publicly, but the reigning ANC is at heart merely a different kind of corporatist state to the National Party that preceded it, with the same fetish for public ownership, the same centralising tendencies. What it lacked, till now, was the same cold steel of authoritarianism. Covid may have decisively changed that.

In March, the country had the luxury of a few weeks’ notice as to what was about to hit. Back then, it seemed obvious that Africa would be the hindmost that the devil took. Countries that were a virtual fiefdom of health NGOs, with the globe’s highest HIV rates, would be the driest tinder. The world wished the continent luck, and waved it goodbye.

Only, it didn’t turn out that way.

For a start, Ramaphosa was decisive and bold, as were many of the continent’s leaders. Nigeria was already screening airport passengers in February. Rwanda closed its frontiers on 19 March. South Africa would be put into strict lockdown, and the response would be overseen by a panel of medical advisers: SAGE, but with some direct authority.

A big gamble, for a place where there were no Rishi Bucks falling from heaven. Britain’s AAA credit rating means it can still defer its debt reckoning. But since South Africa was downgraded to junk in 2019, it has had to balance its books carefully. Eventually, a relief grant was settled upon for those left unemployed. It would be R350 a month. That’s £17. Not a typo.

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But what had seemed like a Western luxury good, lockdown, did seem to work. By 20 June, only 1,877 deaths had been recorded, in a country of 57 million. And despite comprising a billion people, the continent as a whole made up only 4% of global fatalities. Even now, 195 million-strong Nigeria sits at just 1,324 deaths. Back then, people began talking about “the African Paradox”. In township slums that made real distancing impossible, the question became: why weren’t people dying?

“A young population” was one obvious answer. It’s hard to reach the average age of a fatality — 82 — when life expectancy is 63. But even infection rates remained persistently low.

In part, it seemed that this was because of early and forceful government action. In South Africa, borders were shut totally until October, and even now, entry is provisional on a PCR test, special travel insurance, and notification of abode. Britain did none of this. The same strictures also apply internally. Right now, key roads between the nine provinces are subject to police roadblocks. Passengers are temperature checked. The hot ones are immediately PCR tested.

In a land of cheap labour, many shops have employed staff to spritz every patron’s hands as they enter. Outdoor masks are compulsory: a measure about as scientifically useful as throwing your shoes at the sky to dislodge the clouds, but one that sets a tone, constantly drawing the bead of danger back to the front of the public mind.

This fit of decisiveness has come with some positive consequences. Hotheaded Police Minister Bheki Cele was mighty impressed, back in April, at how endemic burglary rates had tumbled thanks to the simple expedient of imprisoning everyone in their homes. On New Year’s Eve, the southern hemisphere’s biggest hospital, Chris Hani Baragwanath, received precisely zero trauma patients. A minor miracle.

Sometimes it seems as though South Africans themselves have been stunned by their sheer compliance. The long arm of the law has always felt stunted here. Without the dense norms of Europe, people tend to just do what they feel. Yet now, a full hour before curfew, the suburbs are tumbleweed. Could it be that this country is suddenly falling into a mesmerism of law abiding? That something coltish is being tamed?

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Deep down, the rule of law is nothing written down so much as a feeling: the uneasy sense that you will be made to answer, somewhere, somehow. Covid has demanded an unprecedented degree of surveillance. In the same way that Peter Hitchens is right when he argues that masks are symbols of assent to government policy, the pandemic has served to re-frame the kinds of people who have lived entire lives beyond the aegis of bureaucracy as being subjects of the state. This year, even the goatherds of KwaZulu have had to interact with the man from the ministry of mask-face-space.

As Aris Roussinos points out, state infrastructure and state competence are seldom correlated: the UK has all the gear and no idea. South African infrastructure is patchy, state competence is positively holey. But there is another quality beyond that, which comes into play in rare moments like these, when all the pieces are chucked up anew. It’s the question of what ordinary citizens actually perceive “common sense” to be — how the national character reacts to setbacks.

With far fewer resources, South Africa kept its exam system going through lockdown. In November, school leavers wrote their finals. The marking emphasis has been on maintaining standards, so that learners will have an equally valid qualification. Compare that to the quivering heap of cancellations and grade inflations that has slithered through British schooling like The Blob.

But all good things must pass. This week, the African Paradox resolved itself via an infection spike that is almost double that of the previous mid-year peak, and still climbing. Ambulance drivers are waiting eight hours to discharge their cargo. There are rumours of an oxygen shortage.

As it happens, our new wave also blows up what you might call the Ivor Cummins theory — that, as a respiratory disease, Covid-19 tracks winter very closely — which was sort of borne out by Covid’s return in the Northern hemisphere. Here it’s braai weather every day, yet the bug rolls remorselessly on. Increasingly, it feels as though Covid’s favourite victim is master-narratives. As we stagger into year two, it’s as if we now know less about the nature of our enemy.

Yet still almost none of the chatter here is about the “Mutant Strain”. In England, so far as I can gather, the Mutant Strain practically has its own talk show, Matt Hancock’s constant companion. But in SA, the government still has a measure of trust on the issue of the pandemic, and a huge majority in Parliament. The need to soft-soap each fresh lockdown to the public is absent. Mutancy or otherwise remains only a footnote to what’s playing out.

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After all, why worry about an incrementally different transmission rate when there is still no finishing line in sight? In the vaccine bidding wars, Ramaphosa’s administration was reluctant to put multiple chips on the roulette table by laying down non-refundable deposits for various pharmaceutical trials. So it now finds itself at the back of the queue. For 2021, the aim is to vaccinate 67% of the population (to reach “herd immunity”). Even that can feel optimistic. An ANC administration that coined its own word for a crooked procurement contractor — tenderpreneur — will have to deploy all of its decisive authoritarianism to get that long-awaited vaccine distributed, and none of its talents at graft.

Of course, if there isn’t a more rapid vaccine rollout, then there will be time enough for the appearance of The Mutant Son Of The Mutant Strain, and so it could roll endlessly on, into 2022 and beyond in a kind of poverty trap.

In another sense, the finishing line was only ever the starting line to a new set of dominoes tumbling. In October, as economic activity finally surged back to life, so too did the rolling blackouts that have plagued the country for a decade. Once, we exported electricity to the continent. Now, years of chronic under-investment have crippled the power grid.

It was a reminder that, in fact, South Africa teeters between twin abysses. No one could really forget that, with a 28% unemployment rate going into the crisis — a worse figure than under Apartheid —  it has effectively added a nose dive to a nose dive. Through the pandemic, every state has had to find a pax between the economy and public health. Few others illustrate that dilemma quite so well, of how the two can become locked in a downward spiral.

Published in October, A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear is subtitled The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). In it, Matthew Hongolz-Hetling describes the real-life story of a group of libertarians who plotted to take over the town of Grafton in New Hampshire. They put their idea into action by moving there en masse, in 2004, and campaigning (in some ways successfully) to liberate the community from statism, taxes, intrusive regulation and all constraints on individual freedom.

Full-bore libertarians are more an American than an English thing; the English national temperament is perhaps better-suited to libertarianism’s more understated cousin, ‘classical liberalism’. But America’s talent for being extra, for super-sizing everything from burgers to limousines, shouldn’t blind us to the overlap between our individualistic, freedom-loving Anglo cultures.

Hongolz-Hetling’s characters, and their adventures, take many forms: the cultist, the gun-toting granny, the advocate of bum fighting, the bear-hunting gubernatorial candidate, the inaudible hilltop preacher, even an unexpectedly aggressive llama. The chapter on the compulsive goat-collector alone is a gothic masterpiece:

Police, following a trail of dead goats that spanned four states, finally caught up with Goat Man in West Virginia. When he was arrested, he had sixteen goats in his possession (including one in the freezer).

But along with being a joyous romp through American weirdness, the book is also about the flipside of the West’s individualism: virtue and common values. Both tend to be overlooked nowadays, in our freedom-loving cultures either side of the pond; and yet both have were increasingly bandied about this year, as Covid-19 cases ascended to crisis levels.

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The Founding Fathers drew a direct line between virtue and the healthy functioning of a nation as the guarantor of freedom. As James Madison put it in 1788:

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

That is, in order for government to support a free and flourishing society, everyone needs to share at least a general idea of what a good person looks like. For as the English political theorist Edmund Burke pointed out around the same time: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” That is, the less virtue you have, the more official rules you’ll need.

In 2018, Matt Hancock was calling for everyone to take more personal responsibility for managing their own health; in 2020, the health secretary has been forced to view coronavirus case numbers as the state’s problem. And in pivoting from promoting controls within to those without, in the form of compulsory lockdown, Hancock tacitly conceded the moral vacuum at the heart of the modern Conservative Party.

That is, the Tory Party may pay lip service to freedom and personal responsibility. But when it came to a crisis where collective action was needed at speed, that same party has proved (probably rightly) unwilling to gamble on the British public’s commitment to doing the right thing.

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Hancock ought to read A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear. It would help him to justify his policies — if only to himself. Take the story of John Babiarz, one of the first libertarians to settle in Grafton and subsequently its one-man volunteer fire service. After extinguishing a fire on someone else’s property, Babiarz is ostracised by other libertarians for ‘statism’ — which is to say, taking any sort of coercive action in the public interest. But these obsessive opponents of state authority seem unable to address the question of how to protect the public interest if no ‘statism’ is allowed. They have no framework for considering those consequences of individual actions that ricochet far beyond one individual.

And for the Graftonites, the chief spanner in the works of self-organising freedom wasn’t even the risk of wildfires. It was another force of nature, one hungry not for flammable matter but garbage: bears. One Grafton resident wishes to feed doughnuts to the neighbourhood’s bears, but her next-door neighbour is terrified of being attacked by them. Should they both be left to do their thing? The instinctive libertarian answer to this is ‘yes’.

The libertarians apply their anti-statist principles to the growing problem of bears raiding bins, loitering around houses and eating cats, resisting any gesture at public bear management, because such things imply taxes. And their conception of liberty goes further still: they resist even socially-enforced bear management efforts such as rules about bear-proof rubbish bins. The consequences become increasingly, er, grisly as the book goes on.

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In effect, then, they dream of a society that needs no ‘controlling power on will and appetite’, as Burke put it, either within or without. Albeit in slightly more constrained form, this was also the Cameron-era Tory stance: economic liberalism plus an aversion to giving people moral lectures of any kind.

But for Grafton at least, it transpires that the outcome of this maximal freedom is not a flourishing community of self-organising individuals. Instead, it’s one in which neighbour disputes triple over the six years following the libertarians’ arrival, while public infrastructure crumbles and bears grow bolder and more numerous. Anyone who has lived in the increasingly shabby and rancorous UK over recent years may be seeing certain resonances by now.

2020 has raised some pointed questions for us, about the political scope within our individualistic culture for coordinated public response to a force of nature. For us this has taken place on a scale more horrifying even than a plague of bears. But in one respect our dilemma echoes Grafton’s: one ‘side’ calls for ‘personal responsibility’, ignoring the fact that in the absence of strong shared values this will not produce enough cooperation to rein infections in. The other ‘side’ calls for more stringent top-down controls, raising alarms about whether basic freedoms we took for granted only a few months ago will ever find their way back.

If we’ve had enough of state micromanagement, but it also turns out that, in the absence of shared values, ‘personal responsibility’ is just code for ‘I’m alright Jack’, then it may be time to reflect on the piece that’s missing for us as much as it was for Grafton’s libertarians: civic virtue. As the vaccine is rolled out into 2021, we might consider the question Hongolz-Hetling leaves hanging: is it even possible to rebuild a shared moral framework?

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If we don’t, we could continue along the road toward the total state we lived under in lockdown. Such a state would follow the Chinese template, assuming maximal responsibility not just for infrastructure, security, healthcare, law and justice but also our wellbeing, moral choices, even our happiness — and therefore claim the intrusive powers necessary to execute those duties.

Inasmuch as this vision is resisted, it tends to be by ‘classical liberals’ or libertarians who are less keen to make positive pronouncements on the nature and obligations of the good life than they are to defend our freedom to pursue it. But this isn’t enough. For Grafton’s church serves as metaphor for what will happen if we claw our way out of the Covid-era’s maximalist state, toward a polity with scope for personal autonomy, only to slump back into the indifferent embrace of an individualism without virtue.

Already declining due to the fading of Christian belief, Grafton’s church was in disrepair before the libertarians arrived. Purchased by a libertarian and subsequently the focus of a years-long dispute over its tax status, the building grows more dilapidated before catching fire. Because the fire service in Grafton is by then so underfunded, the fire cannot be extinguished. What was originally built as architectural expression of the community’s shared religious views declines first to white elephant, then political football, then death-trap. At last it’s left a charred and collapsing hulk, emptied of use as gathering-point for anything larger than nesting birds.

Hence the drama of the post-election reshuffle, back in February. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, was told to sack his advisors and make room for a team of Downing Street heavies. Honourably, he refused — and so he was forced out too.

The message was unambiguous: the whole Cabinet, from the Chancellor down, would have to submit to central control — or else. Henceforth, the relationship between Number 10 and every minister, no matter how senior, would be modelled on that between Matthew Corbett and Sooty.

And yet the puppet show has not gone to plan.

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Last month, the chief puppeteer — Dominic Cummings — lost the battle for Downing Street. While he’d eliminated all resistance in the Cabinet room, he hadn’t accounted for the upstairs flat. Big mistake.

And then there’s the Prime Minister himself — who these days looks like a ghost at his own feast. All leaders fade away eventually, but the pace of events has accelerated his career trajectory. To sink from conquering hero to yesterday’s man in a space of a year is going some.

Finally, and most tellingly, there are the puppets. The supposedly synchronised Cabinet is all over the place. Their individual performances range from stellar to abysmal. So, as it turns out, who you appoint to the top jobs still matters, no matter how centralised your style of government. Eight examples prove the point:

1. Rishi Sunak

Two years ago, Rishi Sunak was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Government — just about the most junior of junior ministers. Now, he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the favourite to succeed his boss. There was never any doubting his potential, but he owes his meteoric rise to Boris Johnson’s model of government.

It’s an age-old trick: ensure loyalty by promoting those who haven’t earned it. Appointees are indebted to their patrons; and the principle of ‘easy come, easy go’ means it’s straightforward to dispense with them. Look down the list of Secretaries of State and you’ll find one example after another.

With Sunak, however, the cipher turned out to be a star. Which is just as well, given events. As a competent manager and reassuring communicator, he’s implemented crisis socialism without freaking out the markets, the public or his own party.

We’ve also seen some hints of creativity. He’ll need more, though, because you can’t recover from an unprecedented crisis without new ideas. His proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank is a key test. If it can raise and lend money like a real bank (instead of just being glorified government fund), we might just be able to ‘build back better’.

2. Dominic Raab

The idea of a politician ‘rising without trace’ has become a cliché, but it’s a fitting description of Raab’s CV. As Foreign Secretary (and, before that, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), Brexit should have been the making or breaking of him. But Brexit policy consists of two kinds of decision — the really big ones made by the Prime Minister and the excruciatingly fine detail handled by the negotiating team. There’s nothing much in between for the Cabinet minister.

The fact is that Raab is in the wrong job — appointed to the FCO not for what he can do, but for what he represents (i.e. the Eurosceptic Right of his party). For the Cabinet’s tough guy it’s a mismatch — like putting Chuck Norris in charge of a Swiss finishing school. Raab needs a big spending department to run; and though that would technically be a demotion, it would be the best thing that could happen to him.

3. Priti Patel

The Home Secretary was also appointed to make a point. A hardliner on both Brexit and immigration, her elevation from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state was a clear signal of the government’s intention to get Brexit done and control our borders.

Of course, she was only on the backbenches because she’d resigned from the Cabinet in 2017 after unauthorised meetings with the Israeli government came to light. Few people expected her to return to office so soon, or indeed at all; but salvaging a capsized career is another way in which Downing Street can ensure the loyalty of its appointees.

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Since her return, Patel has again fallen foul of the ministerial code — this time in regard to bullying allegations. Despite the official enquiry into the matter, she escaped unscathed. Two things protected her: first, the self-defeating nastiness of the Left — which loves to target women and people of colour who dare to have the ‘wrong’ opinions; and, second, the fact that Patel, despite her obvious limitations, is stubbornly pushing forward on the immigration reforms that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.

Of course, it’s one thing to tighten border control in theory, another to maintain it in practice. As with all Home Secretaries, Patel’s fate ultimately depends on upholding the law as it stands.

4. Matt Hancock

The Secretary of State for Health gives every impression of being another rapid riser. In fact, he had five years in junior ministerial roles before making it to Cabinet — which is an eternity these days. This year, he’s had to draw on every scrap of his experience.

It’s unclear how Hancock will be judged by history (and the inevitable public enquiries) — because the record is so mixed. Will he be remembered for the various test-and-trace fiascos or the triumphs of vaccine policy? How does one balance the failure to protect our care homes from Covid with the fact that the NHS has not been overwhelmed by the greatest challenge in its history?

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Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is a big job at the best of times. But in 2020 it grew too big for any one incumbent. A Government that understood the importance of ministers would have carved out special Covid-related roles at Cabinet level (a test-and-trace minister, for instance) — leaving the Health Secretary to focus exclusively on the core issues.

Churchill’s wartime Cabinet was reshaped around the demands of the war effort — and something similar should have happened in this war too.

5. Michael Gove

Michael Gove is by far the most experienced member of the Cabinet. Apart from a brief period of exile following the Brexit referendum, he’s been a senior figure since 2010 — serving three Prime Ministers.

Paradoxically, he’s survived for so long by embracing unpopularity. He’s the political equivalent of a sin-eater: the outcasts who were once paid to take on the sins of others through the consumption of a ritual meal. Of late, these meals have been substantial — with Gove sent out to defend the Government through its imperfect improvisations of lockdown policy.

Allied to his knowledge of the inner workings of the Whitehall machine, Gove has become indispensable. And yet his talents could be better deployed. He is, at heart, a radical — willing to pursue reform in the face of entrenched opposition. As soon as the Covid crisis is over, he should be put in charge of solving another problem that’s been left unsolved for the last decade or more: housing.

6. Robert Jenrick

This would be a good point at which to examine the record of the latest Secretary of State who hasn’t solved the housing crisis. Robert Jenrick is the sixth Cabinet minister in this role since 2010. Some have been real talents, others not so much, and none has been left in post long enough to sort out Britain’s single greatest structural problem.

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Indeed, none has been allowed to state the obvious, which is that rampant house price inflation is a bad thing. If the Conservatives want to rescue Generation Rent and revive their vision of a property-owning democracy, then house prices must fall relative to wages.

A generic placeman such as Jenrick is incapable of true reform. His atrocious planning white paper maintains the fiction that the planning system is to blame for the housing crisis — instead of the land bankers. If Boris is serious about building back better then he needs to set Gove loose on the vested interests standing in the way.

7. Gavin Williamson

Oh dear, what can one say? Any politician capable of a media performance like this one has no business being a minister, let alone a Cabinet minister.

In any case, Williamson is unlikely to survive the next reshuffle — not after the results debacle earlier this year. He wasn’t to blame for the closure of schools during lockdown and the cancellation of exams. However, he did oversee the grade allocation algorithm that caused such upset and fury.

His department made the classic mistake of targeting one objective — i.e. the prevention of grade inflation — without considering the wider ramifications. In particular, the downward adjustment of grades based on the past performance not only of the pupil but also the school could not have been more contrary to the principle of levelling up. If you want to succeed as a government’s minister, then best not to drive a coach-and-horses through its domestic agenda.

Robert Jenrick’s housing target algorithm is a similar fiasco — and a further lesson in the foolishness of entrusting policy to mindless robots.

8. Liz Truss

Liz Truss isn’t exactly my kind of conservative. Her infamous tribute to a generation of “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters” didn’t just make me cringe, but evoked a soul-crushing void.

But, fair’s fair, she’s done a decent job as Secretary of State for International Trade. It’s still early days, but to rebuild a long-abandoned function of sovereign government (i.e. trade diplomacy) is a painstaking task that she’s diligently got on with.

It remains to be seen what purpose this new capacity will be put to — especially when it comes to the looming trade deal with America. The fate of the British countryside hangs in the balance and I hope that Truss makes a stand for the things that matter more than the bottom line. You wouldn’t want to feed chlorine chicken to those Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, would you Liz?

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Nevertheless, she’s had a good year. While she bombed at DEFRA and as Lord Chancellor, she’s undoubtedly found her niche. Which goes to show that getting the right people into Cabinet is only half the struggle. The other half is getting them into the right positions.

Perhaps Downing Street should stop appointing people to roles that they haven’t actually asked for. Instead they should invite applications from candidates who actually want to do each job. They’d thus be able to prepare for the position, think about what they want to do with it and then present their case to the appropriate decision-makers.

I know, it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to work for well-run organisations.

When Michael Gove sought to shore up support for the Government’s polices on lockdown, he invoked the most sacred idol in the land by daring his party sceptics to defy the deity they must all worship. “We had to act,” he wrote at the weekend. “Because if we did not our health service would have been overwhelmed.” The bespectacled cabinet office minister, who once acted in a film as a priest, went on to deliver a chilling sermon about a broken health service filled with overflowing wards, struggling staff, cancelled operations and dying patients if his blasphemous critics did not bow down in faithful obedience to his pious demands.

Gove’s hellfire and brimstone warning was overheated guff. Yet his ploy was clear: few things strike more terror into a Tory politician than being seen as unsympathetic to doctors and nurses. Perhaps he deserves some credit for at least setting out clearly the Government’s stance, something that seems beyond his boss. Yet note how once again this Conservative administration demands complicity from citizens in its efforts to control Covid-19 on the grounds of protecting the National Health Service, just as when the pandemic’s first wave hit the country. The legacy of this obsession was the relegation of social care to secondary importance, which led to thousands of needless deaths in a sector already shattered going into this crisis.

The Government seems to have learned nothing from the carnage in care homes. Gove’s intervention followed a spending review that saw another £6bn bunged to the NHS while social care — starved of cash over the past decade despite surging demand — was swept aside. One Tory bigwig boasted on Twitter how real term spending on the NHS would have risen next year by an astonishing £56.4bn since his party took office in 2010.

He failed to mention, of course, that chancellor Rishi Sunak handed social care a pitiful £300m, plus access to a further £700m through local tax rises that will be soaked up in rising wages. This may, however, finally nudge spending on adult care over the £22.4bn high water mark seen in the year David Cameron became prime minister.

If councils cannot support old folks with dementia and other citizens with complex needs, extra pressure lands on health services, showing the hollow hypocrisy of those ceaseless chants of devotion to the NHS. That fall in social care spending occurred during a decade of rising demand in a growing and ageing population, with additional need coming especially from disabled adults who account now for almost half the spending. “It is hard to believe this level of underfunding could have been tolerated yet it was — at least in part because social care is used by far fewer people than the NHS and does not enjoy the same degree of public recognition,” said Simon Bottery, a Senior Fellow at the King’s Fund think tank.

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Spot on. Yet there is no sign still of the chimeric plan to salvage social care that Boris Johnson promised he had in his pocket when he entered Downing Street last year. Part of the problem is under-funding, which leaves desperate people abandoned in their time of immense need and overburdened staff paid insulting sums. And Brexit has made the staffing shortages more acute.

Yet there is also stealthy profiteering by secretive firms based in tax havens and laden with debt that needs sorting, not least since they shift provision away from poorer parts of the country while their economies of scale lead to bigger “homes”. No other part of the state is more in need of reform, no other public service so failing the citizenry, yet no other sector is treated with such dismissive contempt by politicians.

The only public sector workers handed a pay rise by Sunak were those secular saints slaving away on the NHS frontline. Yes, many of them have performed heroically during this pandemic and deserve our gratitude — but so have other public servants. It is hard to see why a general practitioner pocketing a six-figure salary in Devon is more deserving than a junior police officer spending her days pounding the streets of Bolton or Birmingham to enforce the Government’s byzantine Covid rules.

Behind this distorted policy lies sentimental worship of a public service that was corrosive even before a pandemic inflamed the problem. I watched a re-run of the London Olympic opening ceremony during the first lockdown; that chunk filled with dancing doctors, nurses in old-fashioned uniforms and kids bouncing on hospital beds looks even more absurd now.

Despite the intensity of Britain’s devotion to the NHS, there is nothing unique about universal healthcare in a rich European nation; every country in western Europe has it, as does almost every country in eastern Europe. And like it or not, our health service often has worse outcomes than its neighbours on key indicators such as amenable mortality (when people die from potentially preventable conditions), brain strokes, many cancers, even infant mortality. For all the impressive efficiency and improved productivity, it is naïve to think that the NHS’s problems are all down to money, whatever medical trade unions may claim.

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This blinkered veneration ends up not just overshadowing the unloved social care sector but harming patients. It might sound sacrilegious but not every health worker is a hero, however dedicated the majority. Consecration of a public service that instills such fear of criticism in politicians impedes proper focus on profound issues of fairness, outcomes and patient safety. Yet there are systemic flaws that tend with sickening inevitability to injure — and sometimes kill — those most in need of help, such as the very old, the very young and those with disabilities.

Ask yourself why Matt Hancock, the flailing health and social care secretary, allows thousands of people with autism and learning disabilities to be locked up in abusive hellholes where they are routinely sedated and stuffed into solitary cells, even fed through hatches like wild animals? Why do we have a psychiatric system so reliant on pharmaceutical and physical restraint? Why is so little done about profiteering private firms earning vast sums while delivering dismal services? Why is diagnosis of autism in girls so dire, despite the devastating consequences when they develop eating disorders or slash their bodies as their mental health deteriorates?

Last week I spoke to another frightened mother trying to stop her daughter being destroyed; this woman was a medic, yet felt powerless against a cruel system that left a traumatised teenager with autism and special needs asking why she was being punished in a secure hospital for the “crime” of being sick? Yet again, it showed to me how Britain has moved on less than it likes to think from the days of Bedlam. Yet where is the outcry as lives are devastated due to the deficiencies in care and inhumane denial of human rights that lies deep in the heart of our beloved health service?

Then there are the mistakes. These are, sadly, inevitable in a huge and highly-pressurised institution that is reliant on human endeavour. Yet look at every major patient safety scandal in recent years and they all have a common narrative of bereaved families and/or brave whistleblowers having to fight against a system that sought to close ranks, cover-up lethal bungles and crush those seeking the truth to protect others from heartache.

There is a lengthening list of these shameful sagas: hundreds of haemophiliacs dying from contaminated blood; elderly patients dying in squalor in mid-Staffordshire hospitals; babies dying during cardiac surgery due to lax safety measures in Bristol; more paediatric deaths amid a cover-up in Morecambe Bay.

We learned that hundreds of people with learning disabilities die annually in the health service even before the pandemic due to mistakes and prejudice, thanks to the campaigning zeal of a mother whose teenage son drowned in horrific circumstances in a supposed place of sanctuary.

Earlier this year there was a devastating report into three separate health scandals that exposed a series of blunders by the NHS, regulators and private hospitals. It followed a superb investigation by Baroness Cumberlege, who talked to 700 people about pelvic mesh implants that led to agony for thousands of female patients after childbirth and two drugs that left children with disabilities. She spoke in stark terms about the suffering of these medically-injured families, pointing out that many of the horrific problems could have been avoided. Instead a defensive, disjointed and badly-regulated system was shown to lack leadership, ignore patient concerns and perpetuate mistakes. It was chilling to see how complaints from wounded women were brushed aside by patronising men in positions of power.

The same embedded issues in a “culture of avoidance and denial” were seen again when another inquiry this year disclosed how a rogue breast surgeon subjected more than 1,000 patients to unnecessary and damaging procedures over 14 years before he was stopped and jailed. Lethal maternity failings are being investigated in Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, which may turn out to be the worst patient safety scandal in NHS history, with dozens of deaths and brain-damaged babies. A probe has been launched into infant deaths in two Kent hospitals that only emerged thanks to the extraordinary tenacity of another traumatised family.

This is the flip side of sanctifying the NHS. We see again and again the dangers of placing this vital public service on a pedestal that calcifies its defences against accountability, criticism or dissent. Compare how a less hallowed institution like the airline industry demands a safety culture while the health service, impervious to criticism, leaves a trail of wrecked lives behind its culture of denial and cover-up. Soaring costs of compensation are a factor — but legal bills would fall sharply if medics and managers stopped seeking to silence those raising concerns and politicians ensured aggrieved parties had less need to spend years in weary battles for justice.

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Let's be honest, the NHS is awful

By Henry Jeffreys

Last week another horror story emerged when Anne and Graeme Dixon were vindicated by a damning report after 19 long and lonely years struggling to get answers over the avoidable death of their infant daughter in the face of obfuscation. The couple were let down by every arm of the state meant to help them: the local health commissioners, the coroner, the police, the NHS chief executive, the parliamentary ombudsman. Then another inquiry was launched on Monday into a series of deaths involving care failures by Essex Partnership University Trust; once again, this is only taking place thanks to the courage of another bereaved parent called Melanie Leahy whose son died aged 20 in a secure mental health unit.

These people are unheralded heroes, fighting through their pain to help others avoid similar trauma. We need to protect patients, not sanctify the institution and place halos on all the staff. As the Dixons said, families should not “have to suffer the hell we’ve been through to learn the truth”. Instead politicians keep ordering inquiries, issuing reports and saying they have learned lessons each time there is another tragedy.

Then they speedily return to spouting their complacent platitudes and praising the NHS while doing nothing to tackle lethal systemic flaws and toxic power imbalances that riddle the health and care systems. It is so much easier to applaud, emote and spew out hollow words than to take any real action that might actually stop suffering and save lives. No wonder they make so many people sick.

But this sense of an ending doesn’t seem to have done much to shore up discipline. If anything, it seems to be going the other way: anti-lockdown protests this weekend led to over 150 arrests, people are moving around much more in lockdown 2 than lockdown 1, and the political rebellion among Conservative MPs has gathered, rather than lost, momentum since the vaccine news. It looks like keeping up restrictions is going to become more difficult, not easier, as the end comes into view.

You can see why Tory MPs are worried. The map of areas still stuck in ‘tier 3’ lockdown restrictions, with pubs and restaurants shut, has echoes of the most Brexit-voting parts of the country: a new ‘red wall’ stretching from Lancashire in the North West across to Lincolnshire and the Wash, with a separate pocket of red in the Thames estuary and Kent. These are the voters most precious to the Government — fear of getting on the wrong side of them runs deep.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

By Sir Graham Brady

What’s more, the latest polls are not offering much reassurance. We’ve become used to surveys showing overwhelming support for more restrictions, leading to the general assumption that ‘lockdown sceptics’ are little more than a small but vocal group on social media; Nigel Farage’s attempt to launch a new political party on the back of that passion has so far fallen flat.

But on the post-lockdown tier system, opinion is more divided — of four options offered by YouGov, the most popular at 33% is the view that too many areas are now being held in top tiers. More disconcertingly for the Tories, the dissenting group rises to 37% of Brexit voters (compared to 28% of Remainers) and 44% of voters in the all-important Midlands (compared to just 21% of Londoners). The voters who propelled them into office are the least happy.

What Tory MPs know (and not only the 70-odd rebels lined up by Steven Baker and Sir Graham Brady) is that there’s something about this whole approach that goes directly against what they were elected to do. As Editor of the Sheffield Star, Nancy Fielder, told Andrew Marr on Sunday, Tory MPs in the North “were elected around Brexit, which was all about freedom — we want to be able to do what we want to do ourselves without being dictated to — and look where we are now.” Brexit was a rebellion against control from the centre, against remote regulations set by faraway people in Whitehall or Brussels who aren’t interested in the details of your area — the Covid tiers have an unhappy whiff of the same hauteur.

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Don't stereotype Red Wall Tories, Boris

By David Jeffrey

The aggravation doesn’t stem from people being selfish or from behavioural fatigue so much as from the bluntness of the regulation. Even among those who are concerned about the virus and keen to be responsible, rules that are arbitrary and insensitive to local conditions quickly start feeling pointless and sinister; from there it is a short step to them feeling tyrannical.

Notes of absurdity are even more potent at destroying support. Think of how much energy the Brexit movement got from reports of EU regulations on “bendy bananas” — today’s elaborate one-way systems around half-empty garden centres and tiny designer Perspex vizers covering only the chins of waiters in restaurants are surely the new equivalents. You can imagine the mixture of hilarity and fury in the Kent village that has been divided down the middle between two tiers, so one of its pubs has to close but the other can remain open.

At heart, the flaw in the system is the continued adherence to a one-size-fits-all approach. A “traffic light” system of regional tiers may sound targeted and human at a No 10 press conference, but it doesn’t feel that way to the millions of people lumped together in Manchester or Kent, or to the 99% of the population still forbidden from seeing anybody inside during an English winter. As each MP knows, within each constituency, let alone county, there is a variety of urban and rural areas, and a range of different demographics — it’s a whole world, not a dot on a map. This is the central shortcoming of the lockdown movement — that you can force everyone in a hugely varied society to behave in the same way, by diktat.

This was never true, and particularly not for a threat like Covid that is so unusually targeted at a certain subset of the population: we all know people who are more- or less- cautious about Covid and have been all along for perfectly good reasons. Wise regulation would acknowledge this reality, and provide principles that people can apply to their unique circumstances. The Government will win their vote in parliament, but the anger will start to subside only when we move beyond universal life-rules controlled by the centre. The principle of different advice for different groups is already established: the proposal to ‘protect the vulnerable’ in the Great Barrington Declaration may have been rejected on the grounds of practical difficulty, but different ‘shielding’ advice was given early on to the particularly vulnerable and ministers insist that as soon as the most vulnerable are vaccinated, restrictions can begin to ease.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

By Tom Chivers

So as we move through this difficult winter, with the new promise of a sunset clause on the Tiers system, perhaps the Government needs to switch up its metaphors: instead of traffic lights, which are notoriously frustrating and treat everyone the same, it might be better to start thinking about traffic lanes, which when functioning well on a motorway are a remarkably effective way for society to move safely along together.

A nationwide traffic lane system would allow people to choose at an individual or household level how to live: amber means you carry on as now, respecting regulations to a normal degree, red means you are additionally cautious because either you or your regular contacts are highly vulnerable, and green means either you have decided that the risk of contracting Covid is acceptable to you and you are personally not worried, or that you are now immune via prior infection or vaccination. Information about local virus levels and your own risk profile can help you choose your lane, and you can quarantine between lanes (which is already what the Government recommends to students coming home for Christmas). As long as you aren’t a threat to others, everyone can decide for themselves.

Rather than attempting to micro-manage the entire public square as a single space, which is the source of so much unhappiness, individual venues and events could be allowed to cater to different risk levels. Care homes and hospitals will obviously continue to operate on ‘red lane’ principles with the highest care, but supermarkets and shops could return to the excellent system where the first hour of the day is reserved for ‘red lane’ customers. Which system would you prefer, as a vulnerable elderly person — to be forced in, as now, among the noisy young people being cavalier about masks and bumping into you, or to be able to know that the newly-cleaned shop was open at limited capacity only to people taking proper care?

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By Matthew Crawford

Pubs and restaurants could start to operate similarly — red lane on one day, amber for most of the week and green on Fridays and Saturdays when young people and the increasing number of immune and vaccinated can do as they please without being accused of being selfish. Transport could work on similar rush-hour principles, and even schools would be safer than they are now with a class or stream reserved for students who had genuinely vulnerable people at home, rather than pretending all schoolchildren obey distancing guidelines when quite obviously they don’t. If a venue or service cannot be modified safely in this way, it can remain in the amber lane — no change.

A post-lockdown regime along these lines could provide a route for the whole UK to offer better protection to the vulnerable as discipline starts to collapse, while providing safe outlets for the people who will break the rules anyway to live their lives without censure. Most of all it would reacquaint people with the ability to make decisions for themselves, and move beyond the local colouring-in exercise that is causing so much political tension.

Thinking along these lines will become only more important as vaccines start to be administered: if people are frustrated now, imagine how they will feel if they or their loved ones have had the vaccine and are still being asked to lead a half-life of distancing and not seeing anyone for months afterwards. There must eventually be a mechanism to release the vaccinated and the less vulnerable, while providing proper support for people who need to continue avoiding exposure. The sooner it gets moving, the better.

“Many diseases never reach herd immunity – including measles, malaria, AIDS and flu…” he said. “Herd immunity is a flawed goal – even if we could get to it, which we can’t.”

"The Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims, and both are emphatically false."

Health secretary Matt Hancock tells the House of Commons that "herd immunity is a flawed goal without a vaccine."@MattHancock | @HouseofCommons pic.twitter.com/znCZTOF9jX

— Talk (@TalkTV) October 13, 2020

Let’s have a look at the diseases he mentions. Measles, if it arrives on ‘virgin soil’, can devastate a population. In Tahiti and Moorea and the South-east and North-west Marquesas, between 20% and 70% of the population was lost to the first epidemic. Natural infection with measles provides lifelong immunity, and we now have a vaccine which provides similar solid, durable protection. We have not been able to eliminate the disease, but those who rather selfishly choose not to vaccinate their children are only able make that choice because the risks of infection are kept low by those who are immune — currently, a combination of those, like me, who caught it and recovered and many others for whom it is vaccine induced. The vaccine does not work in babies, which is why you have to wait till they are a year old before they get it. We can do this because herd immunity keeps the risk of infection down, so they are are unlikely to be infected in their first year of life. Without this herd protection, many under ones would die (as they regularly do in sub-Saharan Africa) despite a vaccine being available.

Malaria (a primary focus of my research) is caused by a parasite which carries at least 60 different outfits with which to disguise itself from immune attack. We, nonetheless, typically acquire sufficient immunity upon first infection so as not to suffer severe disease and death upon further attacks. This is a feature it probably has in common with Covid-19. But that is where the similarity ends. It has been difficult to make a malaria vaccine that covers all of its diversity, but fortunately that should not be a problem for Covid-19.

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When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?

By Saloni Dattani

AIDS is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus which also has an extraordinary capacity to change outfits during the course of infection. This, and other mechanisms of subverting the immune response, allow it to persist indefinitely in an infected person. Even so, rates of infection will slow down as the virus runs out of people to infect.

Fortunately, Covid-19 does not possess such an array of immune evasion mechanisms that could seriously compromise any possibility of vaccine development in the next few years. Like HIV, influenza also has the ability to change its outfit, and periodically a new strain emerges requiring a new vaccine. It is because sufficient immunity accumulates in the population that a radical change of outfit becomes worthwhile. What Mr Hancock means when he says we do not reach herd immunity to flu is that it finds ways around it; it is unlikely, given the nature of coronaviruses that the SARS Cov-2 virus would be capable of doing the same thing.

In a nutshell, the development of immunity through natural infection is a common feature of many pathogens, and it is reasonable to assume that Covid-19 does not have any tricks up its sleeve to prevent this from happening — it would pose a very serious problem for the development of a vaccine if it did. Having said this, the Covid-19 virus belongs to a family of viruses which do not typically give you lifelong immunity against infection. Most of us will never have heard of these other four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that are currently circulating in our communities. And yet surveys indicate that at least 3% of the population is infected by any single one of these corona cousins during the winter months. These viruses can cause deaths in high risk groups or require them to receive ICU care or ventilator support, so it is not necessarily true that they are intrinsically milder than the novel Covid-19 virus. And like the Covid-19 virus, they are much less virulent in the healthy elderly and younger people than influenza.

One important reason why these corona cousins do not kill large numbers of people is because even though we lose immunity and can be reinfected, there is still always a decent enough proportion of immune people in the population to keep the risk of infection low to those who might die upon contracting it. Also, all the coronaviruses in circulation — including the Covid-19 virus— have some features in common which means that getting one coronavirus will probably offer some protection against other coronaviruses. This is becoming increasingly clear from work in many labs, including my lab in Oxford. It is against this background of immunity from itself and its close relations that Covid-19 virus has to operate.

So what does Mr Hancock mean by “reaching” herd immunity? Herd immunity is a continuous variable which increases as people become immune and decreases as they lose immunity or die. He is perhaps referring to the threshold of herd immunity at which the rate of new infections starts to decrease. We do not yet have a very clear idea of what this threshold is for Covid-19 as the landscape in which it spreads includes people who are susceptible to it, people who have built up immunity to it, and people who have immunity to other coronaviruses.

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Has Covid become less dangerous?

By Tom Chivers

Unfortunately, we do not have a good way of telling how many people have actually been exposed to the new virus, or how many people were resistant to start with. We are able to test for antibodies – and my lab in Oxford has been doing so since early April – but, as with other coronaviruses, Covid-19 antibody levels decline after recovery, and some people do not make them at all, and so antibody levels will not give us the answer. More and more evidence is accumulating that other arms of immunity, like T cells, play an important role.

Indications of the herd immunity threshold having been reached are available from the time signatures of epidemics in various parts of the world where death and infection curves tend to “bend” in the absence of intervention or to stay down when interventions were relaxed (in comparison with other locations where the opposite happened). But we do not know how far we are from it in most parts of the UK. It is important to bear in mind that the attainment of the herd immunity threshold does not lead to disease eradication. Instead it corresponds to an equilibrium state in which the infections lingers at low levels in the community. This is the situation we tolerate for most infectious diseases (like flu which kills 650K people every year globally). The situation can be vastly improved through vaccination, but it is very difficult to eliminate the disease even with a good vaccine.

We are of course also able to test for presence of the virus, and there is much attention on this with ‘test and trace’ strategies. However this test, known as the PCR test, is of limited value as it cannot tell us whether someone is infectious and can pass on the disease, whether they have the virus but cannot pass it on, or indeed whether the virus has been destroyed by the immune system and only fragments remain. This means that we need to make public health decisions based on only partial information, and in a changing environment, and is why assumptions of how many people have been infected and are immune are so important.

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Covid experts: there is another way

By Sunetra Gupta

The Great Barrington Declaration proposes a solution for how we may proceed in the face of such uncertainty. It suggests that we exploit the feature of this virus that it does not cause much harm to the large majority of the population to allow them to resume their normal lives, while shielding those who are vulnerable to severe disease and death.

Under these circumstances, immunity will build up in the general population to a level that poses a low enough risk of infection to the vulnerable population that they may resume their normal lives. All of this can happen over a period of six months, and so this Focused Protection plan does not involve the permanent segregation of the vulnerable from the rest of the population.

It is important that any new proposal should receive close scrutiny and constructive criticism. I’ve addressed the short duration of immunity; but another worry is the ‘occult damage‘, or secondary effects sustained by those who are not obviously vulnerable. It is not at all unexpected that some people would suffer post-viral symptoms for extended periods of time (I believe I did!) and that it may be quite debilitating for some. Among the lessons we could learn from this crisis could be a wider recognition of the frequency and intensity of post-viral syndromes and an investment in support (leave of absence from jobs, help with daily activities) of those unfortunate enough to suffer in this way. But it is not a new phenomenon and cannot be a good enough reason to stop the world and potentially let tens of millions of people starve to death.

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How such a plan may be put into place is obviously the next step to detail, and it is natural that some people might view with scepticism that it can be achieved other than in theory. Many components of protecting the vulnerable have already been enacted in the process of locking down so we should be discussing how these can be improved rather than dismissing them. Directing efforts at hospitals and care homes is one obvious priority. Other parts of the problem – such as the protection of vulnerable people within family settings – require careful discussion and thought, but it must always be borne in mind that these are temporary measures and in the long run could save more lives than cycling in and out of destructive lockdowns.

One colleague likened the GBD plan to “putting all your antiques in a room while your house is burning and fanning the flames”. A better analogy for the build up of herd immunity would rather be to douse the rest of the house with water (which could damage the Chippendale commode) — but it is hard to see how these could be the terms of a serious discussion.

Since the declaration last week, the Great Barrington Declaration has come under attack across the media, online (including Wikipedia and Google) from fellow academics as being part of a Libertarian conspiracy (my politics are not remotely libertarian) or being based in “pseudoscience”; others attempting to be less defamatory say that our views are “fringe”. The large number of serious scientists from top institutions taking part suggest otherwise. There are genuine good faith disagreements that must be aired and discussed — the impact on the world is too significant for us to fail to have this discussion in a serious way.

But on the front page of the Washington Post, and in media outlets around the world, it was seen as proof positive of the President’s deceitful and dangerous instinct to lie to his own people for political or economic ends. To the contemporary liberal technocrat, this kind of paternalistic obfuscation is the worst crime, the very opposite of good leadership. It is the hallmark of populists and demagogues — Bolsonaro, Duterte, Putin, Trump — for whom projecting strength is the only goal, with scant regard for truth, evidence, or transparency.

But while the coronavirus crisis has undoubtedly exposed the shortcomings of the populist approach, it has been an equally gruesome period for the technocratic leadership style. Many Western governments, Britain’s in particular, have moved from making responsible attempts at passing on information about Covid-19, to actively trying to generate fear in their populations. An overabundance of data, a desire to be seen to be proactive, and a fear of political repercussions if they are not, has led us to the weird place where a British Health Secretary thinks “Don’t Kill Your Gran” is a clever slogan to encourage better adherence to Covid-19 regulations.

So how did we get here?

As an example of the opposite philosophy of leadership to Donald Trump, Matt Hancock is a reasonable place to start. Although nominally part of a radical populist government, like most members of the current Tory cabinet Mr Hancock is really a child of Tony Blair. He came of age learning from the man many in David Cameron’s team referred to as ‘the Master,’ and then received his professional apprenticeship from George Osborne, who deployed the Blairite toolkit with brazen glee.

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By Freddie Sayers

The central tension in this type of politician-technocrat is between a theoretical veneration of “transparency,” sharing data and basing decisions on available scientific evidence, and a deep respect for “messaging” and techniques of influencing the media and voters with compelling communications. These two instincts came together in the Cameron years with the creation of the “Nudge unit” of behavioural insights experts, and the hero-worship of political campaigners like Lynton Crosby.

According to this theory of leadership, convictions don’t count for much: politics is a science, and leaders are little more than vectors, conveying carefully calibrated versions of externally-validated truths to the masses in order to secure maximum support and compliance. Reports from the cabinet subgrouping in charge of Covid policy suggest that the new ‘rule of six’ was chosen instead of eight not for epidemiological reasons, but for purposes of “messaging clarity”. It was thought that, since the number six was already out there, it should be retained for simplicity’s sake; eight would only complicate things. And so the lives of England’s 55 million citizens are to be drastically altered “for the forseeable future” according to the principles of campaign science.

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By Timandra Harkness

Every one of Matt Hancock’s public statements on Covid-19 is shaped by this way of thinking, ticking all the boxes of good “messaging” (with occasional admissions of failure, plenty of “data”, lots of rationale behind decisions, a reasonable, dull tone), while simultaneously managing to seem entirely disingenuous. He assumes an unbroken posture of confidence about everything connected to the pandemic — causes and effects, outcomes, the centrality of government “interventions” in every movement of the virus — when everybody knows there can be no such confidence. Every datapoint is carefully selected to make it look like the politicians have been in control all along, and that they know exactly how to manage the problem: the rock-solid claim that local lockdowns are working a treat when they may well make no difference; no mention of the significant decoupling of case numbers and hospitalisations that has been witnessed across the world, or what the risks of over-reaction might be; the endless references to — of all places — Belgium as the new model for the UK, despite it having had the highest death rate of any country in Europe.

More generous souls will conclude that he’s doing his best but is out of his depth; others will simply feel they are being gaslighted.

Against this background, a flourish like “Don’t Kill Your Gran” may not sound technocratic, in its sheer callousness and its low register. But really it is fully in line with the method: attempt to ‘nudge’ the population with a carefully-chosen attention-grabbing phrase. It’s the opposite of Donald Trump’s strategy, designed to increase fear rather than prevent it, but it ends up coming full circle and sounding almost Trumpian.

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By Justin Webb

Ultimately, the Hancock approach fails on human grounds. Any notion that leaders should be reassuring does not enter the equation, nor any concern that fear is inherently dangerous, nor the unknown wider consequences for those millions of “grans” separated from their families and denied their own agency in this way. According to the utilitarian calculus of the contemporary technocrat, a phrase like ‘don’t kill your gran’ will be deemed a success if it positively impacts the metrics: the Health Secretary is reduced to a company departmental manager who has been incentivised on a single Key Performance Indicator (Covid-19 infections) and so ends up distorting the entire business to maximise his bonus.

But ‘nudging’ is not leading. The net effect in the population of adding a little fear here, a little scolding there, a little optimism there, is not loyalty, only alienation and mistrust. Feeling they are being expertly (or in-expertly) prodded by government only makes people more suspicious. The conspiracy theories that have flourished during Covid-19 (5G, the “plandemic”, Bill Gates masterminding the whole thing to sell vaccines, etc) are to no small extent the result of this leadership philosophy gone wrong.

So what would good leadership look like during this period? Neither extremes of quixotic strongman Trump, nor politician-technocrat Hancock, that’s for sure. It would involve respecting, but putting firm boundaries around, the contributions of scientists; being clear what your bigger-picture values are and how society should best mitigate the risks without being overwhelmed by them; admitting what you don’t know and yes, offering reassurance even when you’re not sure. Sadly, examples of this combination are hard to come by, and the Covid-19 era is a lot more frightening for that absence.