The confusion in government goes beyond face masks

When Michael Gove delivered the Ditchley Annual Lecture last month he spoke about why citizens feel that the political system has failed them. ‘The compact leaders offered — trust that we are the best, trust that we have your best interests at heart, and trust that we will deliver — was broken.’ It was a powerful message. Voters have a right to expect honesty and competence from their leaders, not just decisiveness.

So Mr Gove will have thought carefully before saying on television last weekend that face masks should not be mandatory, and people should instead be left to use their own judgment. No one, it seems, told him that the Prime Minister was hours away from asking the police to enforce the wearing of masks in shops with a £100 fine for failure to comply. Polls suggest 60 per cent of the public support this move, but the proportion of government scientific advisers who agree is harder to ascertain.

‘Our advice is clear,’ said Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, in March. ‘Wearing a mask, if you don’t have an infection, really reduces the risk almost not at all. We do not advise that.’ His deputy, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, was also emphatic. There is ‘no evidence’, he said, that the wearing of face masks by healthy members of the public slows the spread of the virus. At one stage, companies who advertised masks as a tool against the virus were prosecuted by the Advertising Standards Authority for making misleading claims.

Dr Jenny Harries, another of Mr Whitty’s deputies, argued that masks can make things worse because they can be stored in dirty places and become containers for infection. ‘You can actually trap the virus in the mask and then start breathing in,’ she said in March.