interesting being in the UK at the tail end of the battle to be PM. Some Cabinet Ministers now starting to open up as to how decisions were taken. Most forthright has been the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunik on how he was muzzled when trying to argue against lockdowns. This from an Opinion piece in the Telegraph. You have to subscribe but a months free trial at the moment,
The pseudo-scientific sheen is finally being stripped off the decision to shut down Britain
www.telegraph.co.uk
Some excerpts if you don't want to subscribe.
His speaking out now confirms much of what many suspected. That the culture of fear, seen in the Orwellian advertising campaign that sought to terrify the country, applied inside Government. Questioning lockdown, even in ministerial meetings, was seen as an attack on the Prime Minister’s authority. To ask even basic questions – about how many extra cancer deaths there might be, for example – was to risk being portrayed as one the crackpots, the “Cov-idiots”, people who wanted to “let the virus rip”. Hysteria had taken hold in the heart of Whitehall.
Lockdown, Sunak says, was always a political decision but No 10 wanted to dress it up as “following the science”. This meant elevating the sprawling Sage committee to the status of a mini-government: don’t blame us, ministers wanted to say, we’re just following the best scientific advice. For that reason, there never was an economic or a social version of Sage: a see-no-evil policy applied. Which worked, until the aftershock of lockdown began – with the evil there for everyone to see.
This matters because this point shows how “the science” was, in fact, no such thing. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance began by advising ministers not to lock down, saying public events were fine, and that face masks were pointless. They were talking about herd immunity as the way out. Then they flipped entirely. But this reveals something crucial: lockdown never was backed by science. It was about models and suppositions, educated guesswork. It was driven by moods, emotion, fear – and, worst of all, politics masquerading as science.