Just Who Was Running Britain’s Covid Policy?

U nlike the U.S., Britain has launched an independent public inquiry into the country’s response to Covid. It has been holding hearings and interviewing witnesses since June.

The initial evidence presents a disturbing picture of just how Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, made the decision to lock down the country on March 23, 2020.The United States was strongly influenced by Johnson’s move — six days later, President Donald Trump extended his own national guidelines recommending that people stay home and away from one another. Many blue states then went into lockdown mode — sometimes for months.

Britain’s Covid inquiry has shown that Johnson’s instincts were against the lockdown. But he was swayed by a highly flawed computer model by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London; it predicted that lockdowns would prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths in Britain and 1.7 to 2.1 million Covid deaths in the U.S.

What really ended up happening? A new working paper co-authored by Steve H. Hanke, co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins, has found that the actual reduction in Covid deaths associated with lockdowns was 4,300 to 15,600 people.

We now know many of the negative effects of lowdown: higher levels of depression and suicide, increased drug and alcohol use, a rise in spousal abuse, and delayed or canceled medical appointments that often prevented patients from receiving crucial treatments for cancer and heart disease.

Helen MacNamara, the second-most senior British civil servant during the pandemic, told the Covid-inquiry panel last week that the lockdown was rife with hypocrisy. She said she would struggle to “pick one day” when Covid regulations were followed properly inside No. 10 Downing Street. She criticized government officials for relying too heavily on the advice of scientists on lockdowns, with politicians treating their pronouncements as “the word of God.”

There were other unfortunate influences on Britain’s Covid policy.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports that the Covid inquiry has received a batch of WhatsApp messages between government ministers that sheds light on the decision process at No. 10 Downing Street. In one message, Simon Case, who has been the prime minister’s cabinet secretary (the top civil servant in the government) from August 2020 to the present day, described the Johnson government as looking like a “terrible, tragic joke” in its handling of Covid.

Case even lamented that Boris Johnson’s new wife, Carrie, appeared to be “the real person in charge” at Downing Street. The Telegraph, a paper that has supported Johnson throughout his career and once employed him as a columnist, concludes that the prime minister appeared to be “making decisions on Covid restrictions based solely on the wishes of his wife.”

Les Cain, who was Johnson’s director of communications during 2020, agreed and in a WhatsApp message said that Carrie “doesn’t know wtf she is talking about.” In a private diary he has given the Covid-inquiry panel, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to Britain’s government during the crisis, described Johnson’s decision-making during the pandemic as “bipolar.”

Johnson was finally forced to resign as prime minister in July 2022 after his own cabinet members concluded he had deceived them in a personnel scandal.

But British Conservatives who gave Boris a landslide vote to make him the prime minister in 2019 had ample warning that they were electing a man with character flaws and highly flexible principles. Recall that Boris famously told friends he backed Brexit in 2016 only after “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” After becoming PM, he told his cabinet he was the most “liberal” Conservative prime minister in decades and compared himself to Conservative politician Michael Heseltine, who led the coup that unseated Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1990.

The twists in Johnson’s governing style were such that my sources in London report that, far from “following the science,” the British government might as well have been making Covid decisions based on “a séance” held by Johnson’s informal advisers.

They note that Johnson’s dependency on unreliable advice isn’t news to those who have followed his career. Last month, it was reported that Marina Wheeler, who was Johnson’s wife until their divorce was finalized in February 2020, had switched parties to work with Britain’s opposition Labour Party.

Boris Johnson came into office after writing a book indirectly comparing himself to Winston Churchill, Britain’s greatest wartime leader. But when it came to the war on Covid, he appears to have been a much more tremulous leader — one who seemed to mostly have the courage of other people’s convictions.