Matt Hancock is just one from an entire system of government that failed the country
To some, the 'revelations' in the Daily Telegraph last week relating to their so-called Lockdown Files they may be shocking.
To most, they remain as shocking as the first time they learned about them.
In relation to care homes, you should have known about it as early as March 2020. That is, after all, when it was first being discussed in Parliament by Labour MP for Hove Peter Kyle alongside the matter of testing facility, and was one of the first to draw attention to the problem in care homes.
I’ve written about it extensively since and as such this article half-revisits a much earlier piece I wrote on the ‘Lessons Learnt’ report courtesy of both the House of Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees.
You can read their report here
As we bear witness to the baby steps of the Covid Inquiry, the outcry over the Telegraph story proves that the matter still resonates to so many.
And rightly so.
Since March 2020, official records state that over 200,000 people have sadly died as a result of coronavirus. Of those, and up to April 2021, 41,675 had passed away in care homes. Many of them in the early days of the pandemic.
It was and is, for all intents and purposes, a human tragedy that - in tandem with the government policy on austerity - provides long-lasting implications that affect quality of care in the NHS to this day.
Two of the more important questions that remain unanswered - least of all by those in government at the time - is whether or not the tragedy could have been prevented; or at least to what extent, and how did the political decision-making contribute to the human tragedy.
When it comes to the particular tragedy over care homes, what we know for certain is that the government’s advice on addressing the matter was constantly evolving and being streamlined.
Chaotic or not, care providers only had at their disposal what the DHSC could provide and though many care homes operated privately - and therefore autonomously - all still fell within the oversight of the CQC, which is tied to the DHSC.
As early as February 10 2020, care homes were applying advice given to them by the DHSC that it was, “very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected.”
This position didn’t shift until March 13 2020.
Policy at the time - which has subsequently vanished - dictated that it was acceptable to send hospital patients back into care homes and without making it mandatory for them to be tested for Covid-19. Doing this did not begin until April 15.
Indeed, this is supported by the National Audit Office who, on June 12 2020, released a report called ‘Readying the NHS and adult social care in England for COVID-19’ - you can read it here
It states quite clearly:
“Between 17 March and 15 April, around 25,000 people were discharged from hospitals into care homes… Due to government policy at the time, not all patients were tested for COVID-19 before discharge. On 15 April, the policy was changed to test all those being discharged into care homes.”
To this day, the government response to this is inconsistent.
On Wednesday last week it was care minister Helen Whately who stood in Parliament and defended the government’s shifting advice by reminding people what was and was not known about the virus in the early days of the pandemic.
Whately claimed, for example, that we did not know that asymptomatic transmission was a significant factor in the spread. This is not true, and the government did know this.
As early as March 2020, Chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty was saying:
“...there is a large iceberg of people who have asymptomatic infection - so a very large number of people have been infected in Hubei without being detected.”
Even prior to this in January 2020, Public Health England - at the behest of SAGE - provided further evidence. This was around the time that Matt Hancock had been given a “planning assumption for 820,000 deaths”
Even Matt Hancock knew of the risk of asymptomatic transmission. He told the Health & Social Care in April 2020:
“The asymptomatic transmission of covid-19 is one of the novel features of it. It is not typical among coronaviruses, and is one of the single most difficult things that has caused this pandemic to be so severe across the world.”
According to Whately, it “was not known who would be most vulnerable to it.”
This is also not true.
The government knew the risks particularly among elderly people and the government explicitly said so based on information provided to them by medical journal The Lancet from January 2020.
“...the data we have suggest that the risk of severe disease and death increases among elderly people.”
The idea that the government was limited in its understanding of the risks of its policy - especially among elderly and vulnerable groups, and that it was not aware of the risk of asymptomatic transmission - is, at best, in 2023, revisionism.
Indeed, one of the most striking accounts of the care homes tragedy that I read in the early days of the pandemic was also featured in the Telegraph in May 2020 where journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard related a story told to him by a cardiologist from a London hospital.
“Basically, every mistake that could have been made [on care homes], was made. He likened the care home policy to the Siege of Caffa in 1346, that grim chapter of the Black Death when a Mongol army catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls.”
Much of what is reflected in many of the subsequent accounts given on the government’s care home policy was shared in the oral evidence provided by Dominic Cummings during his Health & Social Care Committee testimony.
One particular moment that stands out (among many) is where Cummings disputes the ‘protective ring’ statements purported by the government at the time where he notes:
“We were told categorically in March that people would be tested before they went back to care homes. We only subsequently found out that that had not happened. Now, all the Government rhetoric was, “We have put a shield around care homes” and blah, blah, blah. It was complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with covid back to the care homes.”
Incidentally, up to June 2021, Cummings had not provided evidence to support many of the claims made during his HSC Committee testimony.
However -
There is no suggestion from this page that I doubt Cummings’ statement [particularly on care homes] - indeed, I’ve provided some evidence above to support his claims in line with the government’s inconsistency - but one has always remained suspicious of his intent, especially when you recall later statements that indicate as early as January 2020 Cummings wanted to oust Johnson, and also his own foibles relating to his trip to Barnard Castle.
Cummings is, it seems, an unreliable narrator. On certain issues though, this does not mean that he is wrong. A broken clock can be right twice a day.
Like Cummings, however, I’m suspicious of the Telegraph’s intent - altruism does not appear to be at the heart of their coverage.
For a start, Isabel Oakeshott, the source of the Telegraph’s coverage on this, has campaigned quite consistently against lockdown measures. For example, this was said at the height of the more disastrous second wave in January 2021:
This serves largely as the basis for her apparent ‘public interest’ defence on why she released these private text messages.
The crime, in Oakeshott's eyes, isn't so much that so many people died; it's the impact that lockdown measures had contra to scientific guidance, and their necessity. It is a marginal view and deeply unpopular despite ironically being purported by ‘populist voices.’
The second reason I’m suspicious of the Telegraph’s coverage is because of the inconsistency in their editorial policy.
Throughout this article I’ve pointed at moments during the Telegraph’s coverage where they appear to be ‘on the side’ of the majority of us in Britain that desired to gain clarity and understanding of events as they occurred - and without bias.
For example, one of the key findings in understanding whether or not government negligence was at the heart of this crisis is considering if any of the recommendations made following ‘Exercise Cygnus’ - the 2016 NHS war-game designed to highlight some of the deficiencies for when something like COVID-19 occurred - were actually adhered to and implemented. It was the Telegraph that first pointed out the existence of ‘Exercise Cygnus’.
In short - ‘good Telegraph; well done.’
This, as I noted previously in my ‘Lessons Learnt’ report analysis was highlighted extensively as part of the HSC Committee’s understanding of ‘Pandemic Preparedness’ in Chapter 2 of the report, which also draws on a similar exercise that took place in 2007 under the name ‘Winter Willow.’
BUT -
Where the Telegraph becomes an ‘unreliable narrator’ itself [or for all intents and purposes, ‘bad Telegraph’] is that on Friday morning, they gave voice to lockdown sceptic, discredited scientist and herd immunity proponent Carl Heneghan - who claims that he was shut out of discussions by Downing St. prior to the Autumn lockdown 2020.
Their editorial policy continued this way throughout much of the weekend, too.
What Heneghan said, by the way [re: “shut out”] is not true, according to The Sunday Times and p50/.127 of the ‘Lessons Learnt’ report, that indicates Heneghan was not ‘shut out’ at all - and actually, the delays contributed to more infections and would set the stage for what would become the more disastrous second wave which Heneghan, as early as September 2020, was denying was taking place.
Why these discussions hold particular relevance to this day is because Boris Johnson was reported to have entertained Heneghan’s views at the behest of then-Chancellor and now-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Indeed, Sunak argued against the circuit breaker at the time - and against scientific advice.
It was on the basis of those opposing views that Sunak would introduce his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme which, according to University of Warwick studies, drove COVID-19 infections up by between 8 and 17%.
Of all people that corroborate this is Matt Hancock who not only mocked the scheme in one of the WhatsApp messages that has been leaked but attempted to bury the fact that it was becoming somewhat of a public health disaster - and all for the sake of optics.
Why I mention the University of Warwick study beforehand is to highlight once again that we knew this - and thus, it is not a revelation. Hancock's words are stark, yes, and his actions in covering up the impact of the scheme are incriminating, but those who wrote about it [including myself], or the families of those who describe how the scheme affected them directly, cannot say that we were not aware.
At the time, its worth pointing out that Sunak actually denied that the scheme had any material impact on the spread of this virus.
Sunak told Sky News:
"With regard to Eat Out to Help Out actually I think there are many different studies and I don't agree with that... almost all other major countries have had rises over the autumn and winter and they didn’t have Eat Out to Help Out so I think it’s a bit odd to ascribe causality in that way.”
More to the point - what the Telegraph might defend in the way of ‘opening up the economy’ [as was the intention of the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme for the hospitality industry] - rather than benefit the economy in any meaningful way, it was one of the several schemes created by Sunak that actually opened the door for fraud. Over £4.5 Billion lost, in fact, of public money over several schemes created by the Treasury, and this is before we even go into PPE contracts or indeed, the ubiquitous Test & Trace scheme.
This is, to some extent, the political decision-making element that played a significant part in what would become a full-scale tragedy - many times, that the Telegraph would attempt to minimise throughout the pandemic.
Sympathising with the government briefly, the crisis was undeniably unprecedented as they claim, and many countries around the world were simply: a) not adequately prepared to deal with something of this magnitude, and b) there was no consensus on the ‘right way’ to approach it in spite of WHO guidance.
Indeed, one of the commonly asked questions from those sceptical of the criticism is, ‘what other government would have done any better?’
This question is irrelevant. We can only determine a judgment based on what actually happened rather than hypotheticals of what did not. The government’s response - and furthermore, inquiries - will not examine alternate histories. It should [and likely will] assess facts.
One such question will be over our tardiness. They will determine, as the HSC Committee report on ‘Lessons Learnt’ determined [in their executive summary on p.32/77] that:
“A comprehensive lockdown was not ordered until 23 March 2020—two months after SAGE first met to consider the national response to covid-19. This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between Ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy… it is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy.”
What we know is that the UK government appeared to completely under-estimate the virus; again, providing insight into this is Dominic Cummings who illustrated the hubris [and at times, complete stupidity] over their approach during his HSC Committee hearing but also, as the Telegraph shows, in a fundamental maths error committed by Johnson himself - on fractions.
Mistakes like this were forgiven by many - at the time - and for no other reason than because any criticism of the government was immediately greeted with scepticism [and many times, incredulity] by a significant proportion of society that voted for them only several months prior.
Contrary to those who rightly said that the matter was not political, the basis for their judgment - and quick-fire absolution - was often political.
Excerpts from The Lockdown Files are shocking, yes, but they only remain as shocking as they were at the time they were first coming to the fore - I wrote about it, I catalogued it, and many of you read it.
The ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ “cover-up” highlighted in the Telegraph is an example of this.
A recent story in Huffington Post words it by saying that the link between an increase in positive coronavirus cases and the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme was ‘buried’ by Hancock. In fact, it was not buried.
Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University Devi Sridhar raises a very pertinent issue on the supposed ‘cover-up’ too:
In response to Prof. Sridhar’s point - it was the leading story on the news - for a time.
As noted, Sunak was literally being asked about the link between an increase in cases of coronavirus and the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme by Sky News’ Sophy Ridge in October 2020. So it was no Hancock, or the media, that buried the story.
The view among the majority of people that voted for them at the time was that the Conservatives could essentially do no wrong, and so the story regarding the consequences of the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme fell mostly on deaf ears.
Politically, the nadir for the Conservative Party was in 2021 following the ‘vaccine bounce’ that saw them achieve victory in the Hartlepool by-election. Many of those critical - that witnessed events unfold throughout the pandemic - were shocked by this result.
Over time however, with the scandal over Owen Paterson in tandem with the cost-of-living crisis as it began to emerge in the form of fuel shortages, public opinion began to wane some time around September into October 2021.
What we see - particularly following ‘Partygate’ but also with revelations [new and old] as per The Lockdown Files is a shift in public consciousness towards this government that will, I feel, come to the fore with any public inquiry.
To this day, the government has been buoyed by their approach to the pandemic according to polls - it, alongside events in Ukraine, has been one of the few consistent things that Conservative voters still give them credit for.
Yet reflecting on those events at the time - as this page has historically and consistently maintained - the reality is and always was quite the opposite, as a public inquiry will inevitably find.
In conclusion though, I strongly suspect the agenda of the Telegraph with these ‘revelations’ [which are not, as I say, revelations].
But - what they do is provide us with an insight into highlighting how potentially damaging any Covid inquiry may eventually be - which in turn will help to provide some semblance of closure to those who need it the most.
Many Conservatives are terrified of the outcome of any future inquiry.
The Lockdown Files, as nefarious as the Telegraph’s agenda appears, proves that they have every right to be - though not necessarily for the reasons the Telegraph wants you to believe.