Why is Whitehall intent on burying the Covid lab leak theory?

Why does our government have so much trouble criticising China? It doesn’t seem to have had a problem calling out Vladimir Putin. But Downing Street – along with the rest of Whitehall – seems determined to do Xi Jinping’s regime’s dirty work.

Over the past ten days we have become used to seeing Matt Hancock as a mad, authoritarian figure determined to lock Britain down during Covid, even when scientific advice did not call for it. Yet it does seem that he was able to consider the prospect that Covid originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. The evidence is not conclusive or overwhelming, not least because the Chinese have used every tactic to prevent scientists finding the truth. The case for and against is put very succinctly in Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. But you would have to be very close-minded not to entertain the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a variant of the coronaviruses which scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were known to be engineering to further their work.