Last week, on March 23, the UK marked the anniversary of its first lockdown. Its Covid-19 death rate per 100,000 people stood at 190, the highest among the G7 economies. The next highest rates were Italy (173) and the US (165). The UK has over 126,000 confirmed total Covid-19-related deaths, by far the highest in Europe (Italy’s toll is around 105,000; Germany’s around 75,000). The UK also experienced the largest economic contraction of any G7 economy last year.
The prime minister will try to squirm free from the grip of these numbers, and he may yet succeed. The Downing Street narrative is that the virus caught the entire world off-guard. Some countries did better at first, but the final analysis will show that those of a similar size and profile to the UK hold a similar record. Only authoritarian or isolated nations will have fared differently, and the UK led the planet in developing and delivering a “world-beating” vaccine. Buoyed by that triumph, the nation should sally forth into a new post-Brexit, post-coronavirus era of forgetful British exceptionalism. “Captain Hindsight” (Johnson’s nickname for the leader of the opposition) and his band of gloomsters may want to rake over the past, but where is the patriotism in that?
An urgent public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic is needed to establish the facts before they dissolve in this froth. In the meantime, Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s new book, Failures of State, provides a ferocious, rigorous case for the prosecution, or, rather, the people. After a gripping opening about the origins of the virus, which gives credence to the theory that it may have been cultured accidentally by Chinese virologists, the authors – both journalists at the Sunday Times – set out, week by week, how, where and when the UK government was urged to act earlier or differently but did not. Many of the biggest calls it made were simply and obviously wrong. But, despite Johnson’s belated admission last week that “in retrospect, there are probably many things that we wish … we’d done differently”, at no point has the government admitted to any specific mistakes. Indeed, the home secretary Priti Patel declared on the Today programme on December 22, 2020 that it “has consistently throughout the year been ahead of the curve in terms of proactive measures with regard to coronavirus”.
Here, then, is some of the voluminous evidence to the contrary. Between January and March 2020, approximately 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities, about 1,900 of whom would have been infected with the coronavirus. The government’s first emergency COBRA meeting took place on January 24, but no significant action to secure supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) was taken for a further thirty-eight days, with the government even agreeing to ship 279,000 items of PPE from the UK to China in mid-February as part of Johnson’s post-Brexit, trade-focused “charm offensive” towards the Indo-Pacific. This was in spite of the fact that the government’s last rehearsal for a pandemic, Operation Cygnus in 2016, had identified PPE as a crucial gap. In the intervening years, the national PPE stockpile had decayed and dwindled to the point that it did not even contain gowns, visors, swabs, or body bags. As the crisis developed, doctors and nurses repurposed binbags and goggles, or simply walked into wards unprotected. The health secretary Matt Hancock has argued repeatedly that there was “never” a national shortage of PPE. Even in Downing Street that claim was greeted with derision, as NHS whisteblowers took to the airwaves.
In the critical six weeks after that first COBRA meeting, the government failed to build a test and trace regime that might have contained the virus. This was due both to the fact that, unlike Germany, the UK simply lacked the basic capacity and to a short-lived flirtation with the idea of “herd immunity”, which was shared between the government and some of its scientists. In a televised address on May 10, Johnson claimed that in the early days of Covid-19 “we didn’t understand its effects”. The authors quote Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, in response: “The facts (in January) were utterly opposite to the message from Downing Street. There was international scientific consensus. The Government had simply chosen to ignore it”. On February 27 the government’s scientific advisory committee, SAGE, had outlined a “reasonable worst case scenario” in which over half a million people would die. The leaked confidential minutes of that meeting record that “modelling suggests that early and/or combined interventions will have a more significant impact”. The committee’s advice was not implemented in full for another four weeks.
Johnson infamously missed the first five COBRA meetings on Covid-19 (due to a holiday, the finalizing of his divorce, and other priorities), and chaired his first on March 2. He went on to substitute formal COBRA meetings for daily coronavirus strategy meetings in the Cabinet room, featuring a smaller cast list and less scrutiny. This exchanged the established decision-making architecture, with its crucial links to the rest of Whitehall and the devolved administrations, for a new apparatus at the height of the crisis that was then junked barely three months later. Many of those meetings involved Johnson trying and failing to get his head around the daily data and scientific advice that directly contradicted his libertarian instincts. He told journalists in March that the virus was “overwhelmingly a disease that is moderate in its effects” and that the country would “get through it in good shape”. SAGE took the opposite view.
When the UK finally locked down on March 23, it had a “higher number of infections than any other European country at the time they had taken the same emergency measures” (an estimated 1.5m infections to Italy’s 1.2m and Germany’s 270,000). Weeks earlier, SAGE had dismissed the government line that “not locking down too early” could be supported from an epidemiological perspective. By the time of that first lockdown, over 15,000 elderly people had been discharged from hospital into care homes in an effort to free up beds for Covid-19 patients, with no mandatory testing. Neil Ferguson, the government’s chief modeller, told a parliamentary select committee on June 10 that “had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final [first-wave] death toll by at least a half”. In other words, over 26,000 lives could have been saved by quicker action.
This excruciating litany of errors continued throughout last year: there was the premature reopening of the economy in June; the virus- bolstering Eat Out to Help Out scheme; the “will-they-won’t-they” delays in locking down a second and third time; the valuing of Christmas saved above lives lost; the catastrophic mismanagement of school openings and closures, culminating in the decision to send children back for a single day in January before locking down again. The comedian Matt Lucas skewered the prime minister’s dithering in an impersonation in which he urged the nation to “go to work, don’t go to work … go outside, don’t go outside”. As always with Johnson, disaster hid in plain sight.
The most crucial question for a public inquiry will not be whether the UK’s response to the pandemic was bad, but why it was so bad. Some of the key actors are keen to get their answers in early. Last fortnight the prime minister’s former adviser Dominic Cummings suggested that the Department of Health had been a “smoking ruin” at the start of the crisis in terms of PPE and procurement. He was right to blame structures, to a point. Three key culprits emerge from this important book. Firstly, there was insufficient capacity in the system: from PPE to ventilators to ICU beds, the UK had fallen significantly behind, due primarily to a lack of investment. Secondly, a “myopic” focus on Brexit had directed the government’s entire risk management apparatus in one direction. Thirdly, a hollowing out of institutions, and internecine squabbling between them, had reduced their capability. The NHS blamed Public Health England. The Health Secretary bickered with the operationally independent NHS, and Number 10 could not extract the data it wanted from either, often because that data did not even exist in easily available digital format.
But in the UK’s highly centralized system of government, the abilities and character of the prime minister dominate any crisis response. It is impossible to read these pages without bemoaning that, in the nation’s worst crisis since 1945, Britons are governed by someone so obviously unsuited to the job. Over the past year, the man who urged the nation to “take back control” refused to take decisions and sought to displace responsibility wherever possible (“we are following the science”). In his masterly recent portrait of Johnson in the Guardian, Edward Docx describes the prime minister as a clown whose rise to power was built on persuading the audience to collude in the secret that all human endeavour is no more than a complicated joke. Johnson, on receiving bad news in his daily meetings, tends to keep his head bowed. He then looks up quickly, his eyes darting around the room, to find someone to join him in a rueful smirk. The NHS needs more ventilators? Let’s call it “Operation Last Gasp”. The temperament behind that humour guided the country on its bleakly circular trajectory. Escaping from the vicious cycles of lockdown and release will require not just vaccines but a different, steadier approach; perhaps even a different leader. The pretenders to the throne – Sunak, Hancock and Gove – wait behind Johnson, cautiously for now. When the inquiry comes, the knives will be sharpened on all sides.
Jonathan Bak is a pseudonym. He works in the civil service
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