As many hospitals struggle to cope with a surge of Covid-19 patients, the most important judgement yet to be made about 2020 is how much difference it would have made had England been pre-emptively locked down in September.
This is not an academic question. Because there were two separate occasions in September when the prime minister’s political and scientific advisers urged him to impose tough national restrictions and suppress the incidence of the virus back to low levels.
It is well known that on 21 September the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies recommended a short ‘circuit-breaking’ lockdown.
But I have learned that within Downing Street, it was at the beginning of September that Boris Johnson was urged by officials and colleagues – led by his former adviser Dominic Cummings – to impose tough new controls on our behaviour.
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