What Sunak really said about lockdown

In the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaign, he gave an interview to The Spectator about lockdown which he was grilled on today at the Covid Inquiry. At the time he was speaking candidly as he had nothing to lose: it was clear that Liz Truss would win the Tory leadership contest. Now, he is Prime Minister and has to defend the record of the Conservative government, including decisions he argued against. So he was in a difficult position when the inquiry asked him about he had told me in that interview.

When lockdown struck, Sunak had just been made Chancellor and was relatively new to government. There was an aspect of Mr Smith Goes to Washington about his disbelief at the way lockdown was implemented without any recognition about the harm it would cause. He thought government had a duty to level with people, and say that it would have the following risks but they thought it was worthwhile. Why, he asked, should people not be told the truth? Isn’t it basic ethics to run a cost-benefit analysis in any public health question?

The common cost-benefit exercise in public health is called a QALY exercise: counting the pros and cons not in just crude lives lost or saved but ‘quality-adjusted life year.’ So the death of a 20-year-old is weighted higher than that of a 90-year-old. But this was not conducted as the government wanted no recognition of side-effects or tradeoffs. Lockdown was, at most, to be presented as “frustrating” the damage it would inflict upon society and the economy was never to be referenced. It was a see-no-evil policy.

As Sunak told me in that interview…

The general sense was: no trade-offs. The general sense was: over-index for fear. I was very nervous because my analytical side of me was saying: “Clearly we should be having a QALY analysis… Any health economist would do this analytically with a QALY analysis, because that’s how you do it. That’s how NICE do clinical things. It may sound a bit, you know, kind of robotic..

And later…

I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off.. The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy

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Sunak was not just worried not just about coming across as a “robotic” bean counter. As he knew, to defy the see-no-evil policy meant making himself a target. The Matt Hancock WhatsApp files show any minister seen to ask questions of Neil Ferguson’s newly-concocted theory was disparaged as pro-virus or swivel-eyed. Even Simon Case, the civil service chief, would join in the name-calling.

The debate descended not because these are bad or stupid people, but because this is political psychology at work. In a crisis, a tribal instinct kicks in. All of a sudden, you were either pro-life lockdown or wanted to “let it rip”. And anyone who wanted to critically evaluate the effect of lockdown was also suspect. The most absurd playground insult came from Angela Mclean, now the government’s chief medical adviser, who called Sunak “Dr Death”. His Eat Out to Help Out scheme was dismissed by Chris Whitty as ‘Eat Out To Help Out The Virus’ – even though, as is now known, it did no such thing.

Politicians and scientists alike went tribal. Any sense of objectivity or professional detachment had quickly melted in the furnace of crisis.

Sunak sensed all of this. To ask questions was to be seen to be disloyal (and to be briefed against by No10) so he had to be careful. I wrote in my interview that Sunak…

tried not to challenge the prime minister in public, or leave a paper trail.

Sunak was asked about this by Hugo Keith QC in the Inquiry: what did these words mean? Why not leave a paper trail? He dismissed this point by saying these were my words, not his. That’s true. But I was summarising his words. Here’s what he said:

‘So I was indexing for loyalty as well. I’d say a lot of stuff to him in private. This is me being new to it.  So I don’t put 50 things in the system so there’s some written record of everything. Because generally, people leak it. And it causes problems.’

By “indexing for loyalty” (Sunak says ‘indexing’ a lot) he means he felt his words and actions were being assessed for signs that he was distancing himself from the PM.

The inquiry is supposed to find lessons to be learned, so we get it right next time. Here is the lesson. Previous pandemic plans did not factor in political psychology and the effect of tribalism. Covid showed us that in a pandemic, a challenge to the PM’s chosen response is regarded as treachery. Such an environment is quite obviously unsuitable for guiding a country through crisis. Difficult decisions were not properly challenged; even the Chancellor felt he could not use the Whitehall system to do so.

And if questions had been asked? Some might have earlier spotted some of the glaring flaws in Neil Ferguson’s lockdown theory: that it ignored the massive spontaneous behavioural response and it focused on community spread (ie, in the country at large) rather than care homes and hospitals where deaths were concentrated.

A Sage member recognised that bringing down R in all areas had a ‘huge economic cost, but sorting out R in hospitals and care homes should be possible at much lower economic cost’. On reflection, I am not sure whether this aspect was as rigorously understood, emphasised, or explored as much as it might have been.

But how could anything be rigorously understood or explored in the paranoid, accusatory climate that Sunak describes?

We know, now, that independent inquiry is the first casualty of a pandemic. This is the human-nature political response clear from the name-calling and ganging-up that we see from the WhatsApps and emails.

That’s why a special red-team is needed next time: an awkward-squad whose job it is to throw every possible challenge at whatever the PM decides. The political apparatus is too easily paralysed by paranoia and tribalism: as we saw. Let’s hope the Inquiry doesn’t suffer the same fate.

PS – A note on Sunak’s political evolution

At the time, Sunak would come across a bit Martin Luther (“Here I stand, I can do no other”). A financier whose career had been built on working hard than the other guy, finding better facts and acting upon them. An evidence-based more than ideological politician who was finding it ever-harder to go with Boris Johnson’s more bombastic style. A guy who thought achievement would speak for itself. But when you’re PM and you have a dodgy record to dress up as a good one, notions of truth and conscience become a bit more elastic. Right now, Sunak knows he will soon fight an election defending the record of a government elected in December 2019. Realistically, there’s a limit to how much he is going to be able to say to the Inquiry about how the Johnson government fell short.