The front page of the Telegraph draws on some grubby Sunak interview with the Spectator which indicates that Sunak is still rather proud to point out what an absolute pandemic disgrace he was. I dont like to contemplate how many more deaths there would have been if he had gotten his way, and his pathetic signalling about how we should have listened to scientific advice even less is an especially vulgar piece of revisionist pandemic history. The only good thing about the other, non-Sunak parts of the Johnson regime during the pandemic is how readily they u-turned on various key issues, since even they were not stupid enough to stick rigidly to Sunaks stance in the pre-vaccine era, there came a point in each of the first few waves where they blinked, thank fuck.
Sunak is surely a champion of the very worst establishment instincts and priorities in this country.
This shit also features the bogus claim that we could somehow have avoided causing a NHS backlog if we had avoided lockdowns. Delusional shit, disgusting double-think, nonsense of the worst kind.
Its also a complete lie for him to suggest they didnt acknowledge the trade-offs from the beginning - they actually shouted very loudly about the need for balance and those sorts of trade-offs, they used that sort of logic all the way through their doomed initial attempts to resist lockdowns and school closures till mid March 2020, and then again every subsequent time that they sought to delay the inevitable and ignore the scientific advice for as long as possible. And they got the scientific/medical figureheads like Whitty and Vallance to sing from that same hymn sheet in public during those early days. Whitty in particular was very keen to go on about the need for balance, the downsides of having to take very tough action. Ultimately none of them could make the 'keep things open' numbers add up though, the waves were too big, so in the pre-vaccine era they simply had to buckle, it was just a question of when. And actually, if you want to achieve the best possible balance, acting early is the best approach, so you dont have to do stuff for quite so hard and long as ends up being necessary once you've squandered the opportunity to reduce the levels of transmission well before the levels of infection reached a staggering extent.
To buy into this shitty narrative requires not just a certain set of beliefs, not just a rewriting of history, not just the removal of many inconvenient facts from the picture, but also requires us to forget what the realities were in many other comparable countries during that period. This drivel is the return of British exceptionalism in even more absurd form. If this shit persists then there will come a time when it rubs uneasily against the very different conclusions that the public inquiry should draw, even if that inquiry is watered down and manages to find a few things that dont always neatly fit with my version of basic pandemic reality.
I've not bothered to seek out the full story, this snippet from the front page is more than enough.
www.hsj.co.uk
