The Covid Inquiry is a case study in how not to learn lessons

Two years ago, a new strain of Covid emerged and with it came calls for a Christmas lockdown. The Omicron variant was said to spread far faster than previous iterations of the virus and Imperial’s Neil Ferguson warned that it was no less deadly. The call for lockdown began and Britain came very close to implementing it. A press conference was called and Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, returned from a trip to California to try to stop what he thought would be another needless social and economic calamity.

In the end, another lockdown was avoided. Cabinet members had come to realise that the Sage ‘scenario’ graphs were indefensibly misleading. The data from South Africa showed this Covid variant was far less deadly than anyone would have predicted from the hysterical forecasts from the likes of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Analysts from a bank, JP Morgan, used the South Africa data to predict a scenario far more accurate than the one Chris Whitty had presented to cabinet.

Why, after a year and more of learning about Covid, were the cabinet served junk forecasts by Whitty and Sage? Why had the government apparatus failed to learn lessons and why was the Chief Medical Officer, a professor of public health, giving such duff advice? Mistakes were inevitable when the pandemic began. Failure to learn from these mistakes was not inevitable. The urgent question is why this failure took place – and how to correct it.

Boris Johnson looked miserable at his appearance at Baroness Hallett’s Covid hearing this week, and deservedly so. This inquiry is his creation, a sprawling monster whose costs are likely to be upwards of £250 million. It has been set up in such a way that seems designed to conclude the main error was to not lock down earlier.