This week, Richard briefly reflects on the hot potato issue of lockdown in the Tory leadership race by way of the bleedin' obvious.
Back in July, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries revealed in an interview for GB News that, in the early days of the pandemic, Health and Social Care Select Committee chairman Jeremy Hunt proposed separating children from their parents and placing them in Covid quarantine 'hotels'. Now former Chancellor and leadership hopeful Rishi Sunak has claimed that he was always opposed to lockdown measures but, alas, his objections were expunged from the minutes of official meetings. I'm extremely skeptical of this (more so, in fact, than I am of Dorries' revelation), but the fact that two cabinet members have stuck their heads above the parapet and openly distanced themselves from the government's Covid policy is extremely interesting. Given a recent poll from YouGov tells us that the majority of the British public still support restrictions, on an electoral level it doesn't make a great deal of sense for them to adopt this position. Perhaps they know something we don't.
Despite politicians and mainstream media telling us that the global recession and cost of living crisis were caused by the war in Ukraine, the truth is the current economic spiral was on the cards long before Russian forces began moving west of the Dnipro River - directly attributable to unprecedented levels of government borrowing and spending as Covid coughed and spluttered its way through the population. Not only that, but the rise in mortality rates due to missed diagnoses and poor provision of treatments for cancer and heart disease during lockdown is now leading to a pandemic all of its own that looks set to eclipse Covid fatalities (to say nothing of the alarming rise in Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, which appears to be more prevalent in countries with greater vaccine roll-outs). With all this in mind, the government's proposed inquiry into its Covid response can't come quickly enough; not that I hold out much hope anyone will be held to account if it rules - as it surely must - suicidal mistakes were made, although I would like to see Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College London team get a sound kicking for making such fundamental errors of judgement in their original modelling.
But back to Sunak and co., all things considered, it makes sense to get ahead of the curve in anticipation of the anti-lockdown backlash. After all, who wants to be the stick-in-the-mud clinging to a government policy that's crippled the country for decades to come? Of course, if this is the game currently being played out, and I stress the 'if', then I'm not entirely sure how you can consider yourself Prime Minister material when political survival means more than your principles, but when has that ever stopped these bastards before? Either way, come winter and we're facing a choice between pneumonia and bankruptcy, I doubt Sunak's or arch rival Liz Truss' retroactive views on lockdown will be at the forefront of people's minds.
