Why I admire Isabel Oakeshott

I’ve been gripped by the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. The 100,000 WhatsApp messages on Matt Hancock’s phone, handed to the paper by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, contain an embarrassment of riches. For those who thought the curtailment of our liberties between March 2020 and July 2021 was justified by ‘the science’, these exchanges will be an eye-opener.

The former health secretary and others were not so much ‘following the science’ as doing their best to milk the crisis for favourable press coverage and career advancement, often with no attempt to conceal their indifference to the suffering that their ‘containment measures’ were causing.

Not a day passes without the Telegraph publishing what hacks refer to as a ‘marmalade dropper’ – a story in the morning paper so sensational it causes the reader to drop their toast on the floor. For my money, it’s the scoop of the decade.