The government’s response to criticism of its approach to this pandemic is that it has been ‘guided by the science’ throughout. When Keir Starmer accused the government of being slow to introduce a lockdown at PMQs yesterday, Dominic Raab shot back to ask whether Starmer was really saying that he knew better than the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser.
The government’s defence is a reasonable one: just imagine the row if it turned out that the Prime Minister had been overruling the advice of his top medical and scientific advisers. But, as I say in the magazine this week, in private, there is an admission that there was, perhaps, a belief early on that the science was more definitive than it actually is. One Johnson ally accepts that the inquiry will criticise them for not interrogating the evidence enough in the early months of the year, of accepting the expert advice too readily.
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