188. Question Time: What the Covid Inquiry says about Britain

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1:20Welcome to the rest of Politex Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Rory, should we kick off with the Covid inquiry? Renee Swantzkel, watching Martin Reynolds at the Covid inquiry, I'd like to know exactly what the job of a PPS is. Also, is it credible for him to claim that in February to March 2020, he knew little of what was happening and didn't feel it was his job to speak to the PM about the worst thing situation in Italy. PPS means principle private secretary. That's a kind of very senior civil service position who tends to sit pretty close to the prime minister, sees all the papers that are going to the prime minister, decides what the prime minister should prioritize, etc, etc, etc.

2:05And what I think we're seeing at the Covid inquiry, Rory, it's even worse. I mean, during Covid, I was very manic. I now realize I was very manic. I was getting up at four, five o 'clock in the morning. I was writing thousands of blogs. I was publishing articles in magazines and newspapers around the world. And I was in a, I was absolutely horrified by the nature of what our government would become. But I actually realized watching this Covid inquiry, it was even worse than I thought it was. It's completely shocking. And before we get into the inquiry itself, my experience of this was because I'd been the section of state responsible for dealing with our Ebola response.

2:48I had dealt with Chris Whitty then and I had begun to get a sense of UK disaster preparedness. And I was very, very worried when Covid began that we were very ill equipped for a couple of reasons. One is that I was picking up that there was a very fatalistic attitude in British government that the way in which we had thought about influenza planning and other things was essentially that there was nothing we could do. A lot of the focus was essentially on body bags. The idea was that almost immediately we would get beyond the ability to control it. It would flood through the population and what we were then doing was thinking about how we'd get the bodies out of the hospitals.

3:28That was one thing. The second thing is there's this sort of public health mentality that I found really disturbing at the time, which was a tendency to say, well, yes, if you look at the mass, you know, maybe I don't know what it was, 150 ,000 old people will die, but a lot of those people are going to die in two years anyway. So does it make much difference? There was that kind of sort of statistical analysis. So I came out very, very early, very hard saying, look what's happening in Italy. I think we should lock down now. And my belief was that if we acted quickly, locked down quickly, we could lift the lock down earlier.

4:01I remember it was basically you and peers Morgan at the start, wasn't it? Yeah, that was pretty, pretty, pretty unhappily weird combination. And then I found myself under the most extraordinary attack. I mean, I had the the deputy chief medical officer out on the news saying, Rory Stewart is wrong to be suggesting that masks are any use. There's no evidence that masks do any good. It was out the woman who did those awful videos that Boris Johnson explaining why wearing a mask would probably make things worse because you'd you'd take it on and off and you'd leave germs everywhere and spread it all over the place.

4:32Yeah. Exactly. And as an I noticed how much for panic the government was in in those weeks in February because we ended up in a situation where I was getting very, very angry WhatsApp's from at Hancock attacking me. Then Chris Whitty, very kind of, and I've got a lot of admiration for Chris Whitty, but very kind. He spent nearly an hour trying to convince me of his position on the phone. And I was thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you've got better things to be doing than trying to convince me on the phone that you're right. And I'm wrong about this. You should be running this response.

5:03That's really interesting. But was he trying to convince you of what he thought, which I imagine was closer to what you were saying than what Johnson was saying, or was he trying to convince you of what the then government strategy was? So to be fair to Chris Whitty, what he said to me in the end of our conversation is listen Rory, if you were Prime Minister, I can get behind what you're saying here. My job, he kept saying, is to provide medical advice, but in the end, there has to be a political judgment call. Now, I don't think Chris Whitty at that stage and this was true of him and the chief scientific officer were really on my side, though.

5:41I think their instinct in the early stages of this is that it would not be possible or desirable to contain the flow of the virus. And that their initial instinct was that pushing for some kind of herd immunity was almost inevitable and that lockdowns would be too damaging to the economy. So I actually think that in those early days, Boris Johnson's instincts, which are basically kind of libertarian, take it on the chin stuff. And a lot of the conventional wisdom of public health in Britain were in the same place, which is they didn't think it would be possible to do the kind of lockdowns that we later did.

6:20They then changed and then we ended up, I think, in almost the worst of all worlds. And it's a very difficult thing to explain because people are either pro lockdown or anti lockdown. My view is that what we needed to do is lockdown quickly and then we could lift the lockdowns earlier instead of which I felt we did the worst of all worlds. We were very slow to react initially. And then we kept the lockdowns much longer into the summer than we needed to doing a lot of damage. Yeah, a lot of damage economically and also the schools and kids' education. But look, the bottom line on this, this is what emerged from the evidence from Martin Reynolds.

6:57We're recording this before Dominic Cummings gives his evidence. I suspect he will not hold back on the reality of the Johnson creature that he created. But the fact is, if you put in charge of country as important as the United Kingdom, somebody with the utter lack of seriousness and lack of moral compass that Boris Johnson has who literally doesn't give a damn about anything but himself, then the country's in trouble. And I did a tweet this morning listening to the evidence yesterday. I found myself, I try not to tweet about Boris Johnson because I did far too much of that when he was Prime Minister.

7:31But I actually do think that anyone, anyone who helped that man become Prime Minister, should not be allowed near a serious political media or think tank position ever again because he's done so much damage. And ultimately, when we elect Prime Ministers, we have to take into account who and what they are as people because unless they are basically decent human beings, they are never going to do a decent job. Well, it was amazing. Illustration wasn't of the problems of populism. So the basic problem of populism is that it's all about campaigning and it's about campaigning in very simple terms, laying out simple solutions being hyper confident.

8:15And of course, COVID is the other extreme as a governing challenge. It requires humility, listening to information. Expert. Yeah, exactly. And that's why in a sense, Angela Merkel was so strong. I mean, she was herself, you know, a research chemist. And she was really able to sit down for hours trying to get her head around this and also makes some difficult calls because of course, to be fed at Chris Whitty and others, there were many things we didn't know at that stage. You know, people like me were saying we need to mask, but there wasn't that much evidence on whether masks worked. Nobody really knew whether lockdowns worked.

8:52So it's not simply a question of as it were following the evidence. In fact, one of the problems is that populists often made one of two mistakes, either like Trump, they completely ignored the scientists. All like Johnson, in some ways, they didn't challenge them enough. They didn't ask difficult questions when they needed to. The other thing though that I think has been the most horrifying bit of this is the revelation of the complete contempt which the head of the senior civil service, the cabinet secretary Simon Case, was displaying for the prime minister through his WhatsApp. As it was coming, as it was Lee Kane, and they called him the trolley for having to say.

9:27Yeah, well, I mean, I think Cummings and Lee Kane, in a sense, we sort of knew about and they were political appointees and they were eccentric, strange disruptors that have been brought in. And there was no doubt, you know, we could see Cummings and the way that he behaved, that he behaved like that. But the cabinet secretary which is these sort of these figures like Jeremy Hayward or Richard Wilson, to see him sending WhatsApp, can I read out the latest one that's now being exposed? And just to explain to people once more, this is the head of the permanent civil service. This is the kind of Saham free of all Saham free's, who should be in every way whatever they think privately polite and differential to the prime minister.

10:06This is a functioning democracy and you are the head of the professional civil service. Well, I think I think respectful rather than differential, I think different, respectful, respectful. Okay, maybe not differential, but respect, maybe speak up, but respectful because if you begin to publicly express to other people your contempt and mock your boss, the effect on morale through the system is catastrophic. And this is what he was writing. After this morning's FT driven performance by BJ, I'm at the end of my tether. This is the cabinet secretary. He changes direction every day. Monday, we were all about fear of virus returning as per Europe March, etc.

10:43Today we're in a let it rip mode because the UK's pathetic needs a cold shower, etc. He cannot lead and we cannot support him in leading with this approach. The team captain cannot change the call on the big plays every day. The team can't deliver anything under these circumstances. A week team, as we've got Matt Hancock, Williamson, Gavin Williamson, Diedo, number 10, CEO, permanent secretaries definitely cannot succeed in these circumstances. It has to stop. Decide and set direction. Deliver, explain. Government isn't actually that hard, but this guy is really making it impossible. Now, let me just stop for a second here.

11:24Whatever one thinks of the prime minister, and I thought he was a terrible human being, a terrible prime minister, so I keep saying, he is the prime minister. You cannot have the cabinet secretary referring to him as this guy or saying we cannot support him in leading with this approach. But at the same time, what you're getting there is a sense of the utter res aspiration. Of course, he's now part of a little echo chamber inside number 10 because he was talking to Dominic Cummings who was feeding back exactly the same view that Johnson was utterly incapable of doing the job. My anger with Dominic Cummings is the fact that he knew that before he helped get him there.

11:59At least when I was trying to get Tony Blair and they helped Tony Blair get a little bit of his prime minister, I had a very strong suspicion that the guy would be pretty good at the job because I saw what he was as leader of the opposition. They all knew who and what Johnson was. Can I just interrupt for a second? Why on earth did Johnson not get rid of them? And how can you manage an organization where your three most senior people have complete undisguised contempt for and keep saying day and day out that you're not good enough to do the job and ignore what you say? Well, probably to his face, Simon Case would have been very different.

12:29He probably would have been quite differential. But I think that, I think it goes about to the point about Johnson not being a serious person. He probably didn't notice it. Don't forget at the start of Covid, this is one of the things that was being put to Martin Reynolds. Johnson wasn't even involved. He missed the first half, doesn't cope with meetings. He was busy writing his book on Shakespeare or sorting out his private life, whatever he was doing. We had as prime minister, this is something that must never, ever, ever happen again. Two things. We had as the choice of prime minister Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn.

13:04That's a failure of both the main parties. And we then had in Downey Street, somebody who was anyone who's known him for more than two minutes knows his utterly unfit for that job. I honestly think if we don't learn the lessons from that, then I think we're in big trouble. And let me put the next question, because it sort of relates to this and is maybe more one for you than for me. It's from Larry. Given Jordan Peterson as performing at the 02 this week, and Johnson is taking on a gig at GB news, can you talk about what conservatism actually is? I went to a burko lecture that's John Burk I assume, and he quoted Oakshot, that is not Isabel Oakshot I assume, quotes to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tries to the untried fact to mystery.

13:50That's not today's conservatives. No, I mean, I think something we talk about a loss, and it's Yovar when we interviewed him on leading, and people who haven't listened to that, I think so lovely. And if you points out that the right has ceased to be conservative. And so that's Michael Oakshot, who if you're trying to teach conservatism, but the strange thing about conservatism is it's very difficult to explain it as a political philosophy academics tear their hair out. It's easy to teach left wing philosophy, very difficult to teach right wing philosophy, because it's very difficult to find out what an earth it's about.

14:21But Oakshot's idea there, one of his big metaphors is he says, a tree growing in your garden has a beauty through familiarity, and you've seen it growing over the ages, and it doesn't make sense to say, is it objectively a beautiful tree or not, and start from scratch and rip it up, that there's something attached to tradition existence. So Jordan Peterson, well, most people I think on the pub will have heard of him, but he is the hero of not just the Canadian, but increasingly the US and European or right, he's a sort of somewhere between a psychologist philosopher and self -help writer, who has taken increasingly radical views, which are very exciting to people on the right.

15:07And these will be views, as you can imagine, on immigration, on climate change, on transgender, on all the hot blackness issues. And no surprise, his appearance is being funded by Paul Marshall, who's the man behind GB news, and a prominent supporter of Michael Gove, who's also funding some sort of university of the right as well. And they wrote an article, Paul Marshall read an article in the telegraph yesterday, talking about how conservatism needs to be all about virtue and the allegiance to the common good. And it really discussed me. Oh, sorry, is this why he's hiring Boris Johnson for GB news then?

15:46Exactly. This is all about virtue and moral good. These people are revolting. Completely disgusting. It's totally bizarre that on the one hand, they pontificate as though they're sort of the Pope and that they're standing for moral rectitude. And on the other hand, they endorse the most incredible group of kind of charlatans, cynics, political opportunists, and put them on platforms. It's bizarre. But they can only succeed if they have the normalising, conventionalising media platforms. And the reason GB Marshall funds something like GB news is he creates it for himself. The problem is the rest of our media treat them in the same way.

16:26And Marshall, I believe it's now bidding for the telegraph, is that right? Yeah, absolutely. So I know, I know Paul Marshall. I was actually invited to a dinner, which later turned out to be basically a sort of leadership bid for Michael Gove back in the day when we were all running a leadership against Boris Johnson. And I was very struck that Marshall really isn't a conservative in that Oak Shotty and Sense at all, nor is Michael Gove. They're sort of radicals. They would describe themselves as wigs in many ways. They sound like sort of Lib Dems. They're right wing economically. But they're not particularly interested in any of the things I'm interested in.

17:02They're not interested in the monarchy or landscape or traditional history or any of that sort of conservative stuff. Besides, in the interview with Orleeding Miss Aida Vasis, she gave a sense of of Gove has been very much in this braver than the space of trying to divide between peoples and between religions and between colors and between faiths. That's part of his politics as well. Is that unfair? I think that may be unfair to him. I don't think he's particularly in the business of dividing, but I think he's also very tribal. And I think for some reason, although I think he barely gets on planes.

17:38He doesn't like flying very early on. He developed a very tribal allegiance to Israel. And he also developed a very, very strong antipathy and anxiety towards Islam. You can see this on the right. Nick Timothy wrote another big article in the telegraph yesterday trying to say Islam is the problem and trying to draw direct links between jihadist ideology and Islam as a religion. My problem with them is that they're just the sort of political entity. They're not serious people is what gets me. And they, and they of course, what these conferences do. They've got another one, this arc, whatever it's called.

18:15And we had something else recently with that Danny Kruger making a bit of an idiot of himself and Miriam Kates and all these kind of new right people. But they only have the platform because they own so much of the media space. And of course, what Marshall is about is trying to expand that media space. And of course, they've now got on with Musk in charge of Twitter. And by the way, I don't know about you, Rory. I'm finally Twitter increasingly virtually impossible and useless to use because yesterday, I was, I don't know what I've been doing on the algorithm to feed the algorithm this, but yesterday, when I was scrolling through, I would say 50 % of the stuff that I was seeing were tributes to Mike Pence.

18:56Why is he log decided that I need to see endless tributes to Mike Pence? What is going on there? Yeah, yeah, exactly. How did they, I mean, well, that's one of the mysteries, isn't it, about machine learning? Yeah, they, they, I mean, on the one hand, we're all meant to be terrified because we're supposed to believe that these machines know us better than we do. And on the other hand, when I go on my Amazon account, I'm being sort of recommended kind of mills and boon novels written for 12 -year -old girls. So maybe that's because they've decided your own book is like a mills and boon novel to 12 -year -old girls.

19:30Well, this completely mysterious. They're in my thinking, I'm this really kind of serious highbrow person. But boy does Amazon not think that at all. Okay, we're reading lots more questions to come. Let's take a quick break.

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21:23What about we're mentioning the interview with Saidi. We had a very good week on leading last week, because we had, oh, we also had Arnold Schwarzenegger. And both of them to me, it felt their conservatives, they identified as conservatives in her case, Aturi, in his case, a Republican. But the way they talk about the world and about politics and about these people on the right, they're very, very far removed from what they're conservative party and the Republican party have become. Yes, I think that's right. And I was disappointed that I was amazing at Fuehler -D Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was really proud that we got to interview him.

21:56And I actually liked him a lot. But I was disappointed that he evaded criticizing Trump. One of the things you'll notice in the interview is he keeps saying, oh, well, it's just hypothetical. It's not going to happen. He's not going to win because he's got his legal problems. He didn't want to say he wouldn't vote from Diddy. Yeah. And I hope that what he's doing is holding his ammunition and that he doesn't want to alienate the Republican base at the moment, but that if Trump actually emerges as the candidate, then we desperately need Schwarzenegger to come out shortly before the election, coming strongly out against Trump.

22:28Because if anybody can appeal to that, kind of make America great again, Rump, and come across as a kind of spokesman for that, it would be Schwarzenegger. And you feel that right the way through the interview. I mean, his bluntness is extraordinary. He's sort of able to be blunt without being an asshole, but he's very, very straight, isn't he? I'm a say -er -o -y. I went to for a swim this morning. I came back via dawn's little cafe to get a coffee and Mick, her other half, was there. And he said two things. One, I loved your interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I wish he was president. Two, I really like Rory.

23:02Oh, what a sweetheart. That's fun. I know. I pay the money virtually every morning for coffee. It didn't say real of me. He really loved you. I think maybe he was taking that as red. Now, here we are. Coming out of our conversation yesterday on the pod about Kirsten Mistakens, about Britain's international influence. Mikey, does Britain's relationship with the USA prevent independent foreign policy decisions? Let me just put in here to be a bit provocative. When I joined the foreign office, even back in 1995, I asked an old diplomat what our policy should be on a particular issue around the world.

23:39I think it was Indonesia at the time. And his response was find out what the US are doing and do a little bit less. And Theresa May didn't like that at all, if you remember. No, I don't like that either. Tell us a little bit about how our relationship with the US does or doesn't prevent independent foreign policy decisions. How often do we make foreign policy decisions? Because of course, one of your understandable defenses of Kirsten Mistakens position on Israel Gaza is that he wants to remain a credible interlock to the US and doesn't want to differ from their position. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that when we did very long sessions on Iraq a while back, I think I made the point that when if Tony Blair was analyzing the decision making process for the UK, being close to the Americans on a strategic point for them was also a strategic point for us.