Can we trust Neil Ferguson’s computer code?

Newspapers aren’t the place to debate expert advice on a crisis. Advisors advise, ministers decide. We should keep politics out of science.

These three cries – and numerous variations upon them – have become common refrains as the UK’s increasingly fractious debate on the lockdown, the science behind it, and the best way to lift its various restrictions rolls on.

At first, they sound completely reasonable and unarguable: people are stepping up to the plate to help the government make life-or-death decisions in a time of crisis. That’s an admirable thing to do. What’s more, they’re doing it with years of expertise in their field behind them. Of course we should leave them to their work, and let them help guide our course.

The reality, of course, is messier.

Perhaps the most contentious of the government’s high-profile scientific advisors is professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, who heads up that university’s epidemiological modelling team, and whose model was credited as influential in sparking the lockdown.

Ferguson was the subject of surely unwelcome press attention this week when his lockdown liaisons with a married lover were splashed across the newspaper front pages.