It is too easy to become obsessive in whole or partial lockdown. And my obsession for weeks now is why ministers and Whitehall failed to learn the big lesson of the 2007/8 banking crisis – namely that high impact, low probability risks wreak maximum damage, and if they have the potential to destroy your way of life, money and resource should be no object in warding them off.
To start on a more positive note, Boris Johnson seems belatedly to have found the appropriate gauge of risk versus reward. Because although the PM on Sunday conceded that a vaccine may never come to ‘fruition’, he has nonetheless committed £93 million of our money to helping AstraZeneca create a vaccine manufacturing plant that could make 30 million doses as soon as this September.
In normal circumstances, it would be the height of public-spending folly to commit £93 million on a venture knowing that there is a high probability it will be a white elephant.
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