471. Rory Stewart: How the Government Tried to Silence Me on Lockdowns

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3:04Welcome to an emergency episode of The Rest is Politic. I'm me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Roy Stewart. And it's an emergency about an issue that we have talked about many, many, many times before, COVID-19. And on the back of the official inquiry report, which has revealed something we definitely knew, chaotic, incoherent leadership of Boris Johnson. But maybe even deeper than that, a sense of an entire system that wasn't properly equipped to deal with this. and as a result of which many people died who otherwise might not have done it. And we're tackling this because firstly, it's a reminder of the incredible harm that this imposed, the deaths, people who lost loved ones unnecessarily.

3:52It's now clear from this report, the incredible impact that COVID turned out to have on our economy, on education, on mental health. And more than that, I think we're talking about this because this is huge lessons for the British government. We did not respond well. And by we, I mean politicians, civil servants, expert advisory panels, the media, the opposition. And if we don't sort it out, we're going to face other existential crises in the future, conflict, technology, other pandemics, and we won't respond well to them either. I mean, the headline is that the government did too little too late.

4:30And that if Boris Johnson's government had acted even a week more rapidly, they could potentially have made the lockdown even shorter, even avoided the necessity of a lockdown at all if they'd got there early enough, and potentially saved 23 ,000 lives. So this is really big news. And it's interesting sort of getting a sense of how much people are concentrating and whether we're really drawing the big lessons. Because the big lessons are, in my experience, the whole system failed. Boris Johnson, definitely, who was an obvious buffoon who wasn't competent to do this. But actually, I'm afraid in the end, a lot of the medical establishment, particularly around the chief medical officers, the chief scientific advisors got key calls wrong.

5:23Departments got key calls wrong. Devolved administrations were slow. And actually, I'm afraid other political parties and other journalists were not quick enough to start sounding the alarm bell. We were very, very deferential and smug. I think there's something about, even though people say they don't look like politicians, they don't listen to politicians. I think there's something about when there is a sense of a real crisis they actually maybe listen too much if you remember those briefings that johnson and hancock matt hancock did most days for quite a while and this is pre-art uh meeting up to do the podcast rory i was in my instagram daily rant mode and i was ranting about the the extent to which the media weren't holding them properly to account that they were saying things which were clearly borderline untrue, etc, etc, etc.

6:15But I know you're a sort of blow your own trumpet sort of person, but you actually were one of the very, very, very small number of people who publicly, and I think as I remember, I could be wrong, but the only parliamentarian I remember actually going out there very, very strongly, much earlier saying the only way to deal with this now is lockdown. It is patently clear from all the way around the world that we need to act today, today, today, today. And it was an amazing experience because what you suddenly realize is if you break with a consensus, you are attacked from a lot of very different directions.

6:47So government finally locked down, I think, on about 16th of March. And I was beginning to make speeches on this 24th February. So I guess three weeks in advance. I gave an interview to the Today program, for example, I think on 25th of February. And that was when I really saw the extent of abuse you get if you start breaking line because the Today program was then getting calls from the government saying, how dare you interview Rory Stewart. I'd said, look, I'd been the Secretary of State responsible for the response to Ebola. And therefore, I was very much in touch with the WHO, a World Health Organization.

7:22And I had a very strong sense that we were too complacent. In fact, I'd worked with Chris Whitty, who went on to be the Chief Medical Officer over Ebola. and I was very very worried that the plans we had in place were old they were 2011 plans for a flu and that they were making all the wrong assumptions about this disease and my general and I don't know whether this is something that you found in government is that the tendency of government is to be too slow and indecisive we tend to think let's just wait the costs of action are very high you know the scientists maybe are disagreeing why don't we just give it a new few more weeks commission another report well the one that that makes me think of is foot and mouth you know way back in the day but i remember we were in canada when we got the first report of a case jean chretien canadian prime ministers i remember saying saying to tony get a grip of that fast that could really be bad and we have this situation where the the then math ministry of agriculture fisheries and food felt they would be undermined if number 10 took it over and the truth is we should have taken over straight away and and that i would say is i mean people can have whatever criticisms they want of Tony Blair, but when something like that happened, he wanted to grip everything.

8:34Whereas what you had from Johnson, and this was obvious to us all at the time, and yesterday I was listening to one of the radio shows where they were playing all the clips of him at those press conferences. You know, I've been out and I've been shaking hands with people in the hospital and, you know, carry on, and of course we should go to Cheltenham, of course we should carry on with our football and all the rest of it, just sort of thinking that his sort of ridiculous boosterism would get us through this then you had matt hancock who seemed just to be kind of enjoying the center of attention-ness of it um you know and sadly another 157 have died every day this happening and no real sense of a of grip and strategy but what do you what do you i always get a bit depressed and maybe this is back to too many such experiences when you have these reports and say you know and we'll learn the lessons and make sure this never happens again but we never do seem to learn that many lessons.

9:24No, we don't, because some of the lessons are very fundamental things about the psychology of government. So, optimism bias, groupthink, I mean, all the various things. In fact, actually, Jonathan Evans, the ex-head of MI5, has talked quite powerfully about this in other contexts. We have a real tendency in general in government to assume that this is the British government, we're very professional, we've got it all fixed up. And you can see in the text going back and forth that when Hancock and Johnson and Cummings are asking questions, often the answer is, we've got the best preparedness plan in the country.

9:58And there's a real smugness in British government. We have it, I'm afraid, in the British military often too. Best army in the world, et cetera. And the general view was that we had the best public health system in the world and everybody else was learning from us. And sure enough, we were going around the world telling other people how to do their job. We find it very, very difficult to think. And actually, I think, to be fair to the ministers, when you challenge, if you're Matt Hohenkuk or whatever, and you say to the system, are you sure you've got this right? You will often get people saying, no, no, no, it's all under control.

10:32Now, that leads to a different problem, which is amateurism in government. I mean, we talk about endless reshuffles. We talk about the lack of qualifications. The reason that Angela Merkel was much better than Boris Johnson, partly she had a scientific training, partly in personality, she was prepared to spend six, seven hours sitting around a table being honest about what she didn't know and learning about these quite complicated things. I mean, it wasn't obvious at all. And to be fair to Chris Whitty, who was the chief medical officer, or Patrick Balance, who was the chief scientific officer, there were a lot of uncertainties.

11:07They were disagreeing about very technical issues, how many people would get infected from one person, how long the incubation rate was, how long the virus would remain in your body, how long it would remain in your body before you're infected, what the mortality rate was. So you could have a mortality rate saying 3 % of people who get it will die, but then it will turn out that actually it's 9 % of people over 90 and less than 1 % under 21. You're trying to work out what you can do. Is it even possible to lock down the country? So one of the things I picked up when I started digging into this, and I was digging quite early, end of January, beginning of February, is the assumption in Britain is that you couldn't lock down.

11:48The assumption was China can lock down, but we're a liberal democratic country and they'll never put up with it. And then there were other real problems, which is when I was talking to the people right at the top of Public Health England. And I remember because they were calling me to tell me essentially to shut up and stop causing trouble. one of them said to me look rory um the fact is we may have to just try to smooth the curve here which meant uh let's allow more people maybe to die earlier and that might lead to fewer people dying later because we will land the peak of the virus during the summer not in the winter i said what do you mean by this i mean this is in a sense where ministers come in and in the end it turned out what it meant is we're going to allow quite a lot of old people in practice to die now rather than more people dying later.

12:37Quite a hard thing to go and say publicly. And that's exactly what I said. So I said, well, what do you mean by this? And he said, well, I mean, statistically, a lot of these old people are going to die in the next couple of years anyway. So it doesn't make much difference whether they die in the few months or the next couple of years. And it was at that point I said, you have a moral problem here. I can't hear that. the public can't hear that. You can't explain that publicly. And I think you need to have a very, very serious conversation by government about this kind of reasoning. Which point this professional said to me, okay, Rory, maybe if you were prime minister, we could follow that lead.

13:10But that isn't the judgment that our prime minister has made. Anyway, what I'm trying to say, I suppose, in a very complicated way is we think about it as following the science, but it isn't really about following the science. It's how much economic costs you prepare to bear. Are you prepared to shut down schools. Are you prepared for lots of old people to die earlier, potentially to save more younger people later? These aren't things the scientists can decide. These are things only a prime minister can decide. So they kept saying they were following the science, when in various places they clearly weren't.

13:41And you mentioned the role of the media. I think that because of the theatre of the thing, and once we were all locked down and we're all sort of at home, and it became one of the highlights of the day, you know, watch the briefing. I don't know what the figures were, but I'm pretty sure they were quite high. And watch the briefing partly because you want to know the news, you want to know what's going on. You also want to know if there's anything that we, the people, are meant to be doing. And I think what happens in those circumstances, and you could read this sometimes in Witty and Valance's body language, you could read them sort of essentially, they were sticking to facts.

14:14And alongside it was essentially political judgment. And in Johnson's case, often just downright nonsense. And the one thing I think this report surely does is put a page to any of this crap that the Tories talk about, maybe we need to bring back Johnson. The idea that this guy's legacy now, one, Brexit, and two, people dying who shouldn't have died, and it's got to be on him. Yeah. So the Johnson point, I think, is important because I think it also applies to Donald Trump, who was a very, very bad COVID leader. And I think it would apply to someone like Nigel Farage or God forbid, Tommy Robinson or somebody taking over.

14:50The point is that modern campaigning style, populist campaigning style, is all about simplification. It's all about easy answers. And when you're dealing with COVID, you need a prime minister who's going to say, well, what is the latest data from Wuhan? Is it different from yesterday? What exactly are the Danes doing? Why are they doing that? What are the Swedes doing. Wait a sec, Italy has just gone under with all its hospitals. How come we've got seven flights a day coming in from Milan if the infection's there? What do you mean that we're going to have to build extra freezing and mortuary facilities at the hospitals, right?

15:27But this requires somebody like Angela Merkel, who is interested in science, understands disagreement, understands that scientists don't have all the answers, is prepared to take a curious interest in other countries. And that's not what's helped by modern styles of governing. No, and also what Johnson wanted to do constantly, this was during his we're world-beating phase post-Brexit. So he wanted to be saying the whole time, we're doing better. He still does it with his nonsense about, you know, we did the vaccine faster than everybody else. And I also think on the media point, though, I'm afraid, I think I've told you before, Fiona and I, our first row of the day is usually about the fact she wants to listen to the Today programme and I want to listen to some music.

16:06and so today David Frost Lord David Frost who is a total buffoon who is only a known figure because Johnson appointed him to be his Brexit negotiator which he did a catastrophically bad job he was twice in the first hour discussed on the Today programme because he's written a piece in the Telegraph saying this is a terrible report like which he probably hasn't read so and then who do they have on as the voice of the government? Michael Gove. Michael Gove, who had this extraordinary line about, you know, the thing is, when you get into the crisis, you can't expect it to run like a Jane Austen novel.

16:43I don't even know what that means. And this was in response to the stuff about a toxic culture. And the other thing, I think it'd be a good thing if we stopped and parts of the media stopped platforming Cummings as well as some great sage. He was a massive part of what went wrong. They should all just bugger off, shut up, and stay out of public life. Final thing, maybe to transition to the bigger point about how we run our government and why we're bad at crises. You're right about all that. Boris Johnson was a very, very poor appointment. Matt Hancock was consistently over-promising and under-livering.

17:16He was consistently saying, we've got this, we've got the best plan, we're going to do this, and it just wouldn't happen. Cummings eventually noticed a problem. In some ways, I was on his side when it came to calling out how slow people were being. But the way in which he did it was unbelievably abusive and disruptive and undermined the system and included briefing against the Prime Minister continually through it. But there's also the problem of the layer below, because I've talked about the fact that Patrick Vallance was saying he thought that a lockdown was neither necessary nor desirable. You had Chris Whitty essentially saying that he didn't think, and it's understandable that he thought this.

18:03I mean, I remember a conversation again on the 13th of March where I said, surely we should try to slow the spread, suppress this because a vaccine might become available. And the answer then was, no, no, no, a vaccine's not going to become available. We know this for two, three years. And actually, of course, credit to Johnson, credit to the government. They got vaccines in place and there was amazing scientific change vaccines. But there's also the stuff we don't talk about because it's easier to attack these buffoons like Johnson. The deputy chief medical officer of England, Jenny Harris. Yeah, it was out there on the 10th of March saying, Rory Stewart has no idea what he's talking about.

18:37There's no evidence. Worse than that, Rory. Worse than that. And this is worse than groupthink. I remember one of my rants was about the fact that do you remember this she did an interview with boris johnson in one of the big rooms in downing street which was a conversation which they put out got massive coverage at the time where he was sort of asking her about you know whether we had to do things like wash our hands every five minutes whether we should be doing cheltenham whether we should be doing this and she absolutely was just playing back to him the messages that he's been he'd been putting out now whether that was and she cannot have believed that no i think she did i mean this is where the group think comes in i think johnson was in a sense following the scientific advice but what he was not doing is being curious and challenging so she she genuinely believed and i think she said this in the attack on me she said there was no point in masks and there's no point in lockdown there's no there's no evidence that masks would slow it down yeah i mean no i mean but but if look i'm not remotely scientific but if i can remember at the time thinking this is just a sort of propaganda exercise to tell us something that may or may not be true what they're not providing is any data that tells you where they're making those judgments and of course we were surrounded by in other countries people people wearing masks people wearing masks and what's more moving towards lockdown and and and days before i mean so that you could see denmark was moving south korea was moving and we went um so let's just expand it out maybe to to bring this to probably what matters most now, which is the future, future pandemics, but other things, the threat from Russia, who knows, threat from Trump's US, threat from AI.

20:16My general sense is British government, that's probably true of most European governments, are too slow and too complacent. So let's look at Ukraine. I mean, you have raised Radek Sikorsky saying to us, Poland genuinely believes Russia has a very significant chance of at least invading the Baltic or coming into Poland, that firebombs are going off in our premises, private residence. We're doing nothing about it. What is actually happening, my guess is the government increased the spending on defense, but we're not ready for war. There's no real sense of urgency. There's no real sense that somebody's actually saying to BAE Systems, oi, start building$1 ,000 drones that could be updated 120 times a year on the software.

20:55No, probably we're doing some slow risk-averse procurement contract for a$20 ,000 drone with five updates a year. And if you really worked backwards from what would happen if Putin went into the Baltic, broke the NATO Article 5 guarantees, countries like Britain and Germany are critically irresponsibly not responding. Just so with AI. If AI is literally about to completely transform our employment landscape, could pose an existential threat to us, could make us completely dependent on Trump's America for security and economy. We're not responding with that degree of urgency. And so I think this COVID thing, I think it's a very good report as usual at describing what went wrong.

21:35What it's very bad at is explaining how government systems get us wrong, the absence of what you call red team or challenge. How do you build into government systems somebody to say to the MOD, this is not quick enough. This is ridiculous. We can't do this in five years, 10 years. We've got to do that this week. I think part of the issue is that I can remember when we were in government that occasionally somebody would have an idea to do scenario planning. And most times I was like, oh God, I really cannot take a day out to do this, let alone tell Tony he should. And I think there's a lot of that goes on.

22:14So you send junior people to go and sort of plan. I did actually talk to a minister recently who told me they'd had a uh i don't know it was an away day or away half day or whatever where they were looking at different military scenarios and and planning a response on a what-if basis and actually what because and what they said was that actually it was amazing how real it felt once you got into it so you can do those things but look i think the complacency point is the one that that is right we we do these things and of course it was a different governments and our like here starmer can stand up and say i welcome the report and thank you for this and very good points and we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do that added to which i was with somebody last night who knows quite a lot about this pandemic world so that in terms of what might happen in a pandemic covid19 was was not relatively mild it was relatively mild and then i guess the other thing that i did hear that chris wormall the who was then a health now the cabinet secretary was getting a bit of kicking as well.

23:13And so I think what you have is we're just not dynamic enough in our systems and our planning and our appointments and our recruitments. So you mentioned AI there. We talked about this on the main podcast last week, that everywhere you go outside government, into business, into academia, wherever it might be, people are just sort of saying, this thing is happening now. It is massive. It is changing this. It is changing that. we don't know what the consensus is going to be then you get into government and you talk to people in government and other those who are specifically working on this you don't have a sense that that's where the debate is no so that's your point about government being day-to-day short-term let's get through tomorrow and of course when you have a media that covers it in the way that our media does so like yesterday it was big news the covid inquiry yeah will there really be much debate going forward.

24:05So then we're on to the next thing. And about what? So I'm really struck by this, because of course, the media will concentrate, you know, maybe on kicking Cummings or Johnson. But the media is not very interested in really getting into the weeds of why British government is really slow to react. And partly, there's a lack of expertise. I was completely shocked during this. I was called by one of the most senior BBC journalists right at the middle of this when I was calling for lockdown before the lockdown. And I tried to argue. And they said, to be honest, Rory, I didn't do much science at school.

24:40I'm not very confident with this stuff. And it was quite clear what they were focusing on was the number 10 politics. They were not actually interested in my saying, this is what's happening in Denmark. This is the transmission rate. This is what Dr. Ferguson is saying in terms of his modeling. As soon as he said that, they were switching off. And the parties, I again in Parliament often felt, I felt this on Afghanistan, I felt this on COVID. It's remarkable sometimes how the opposition doesn't criticize, how easy as it is for the government to say, this is a national emergency, you know, it's disloyal to criticize.

25:14So I was then, I just, when this was happening, I just left Parliament, I was running to be an independent mayor of London. And my Lib Dem opponent, presumably pressured by people, put out a big tweets saying it's completely irresponsible of rory suitt to be questioning boris johnson's covid policy at this period we all need to sit together i got daily mail journalists ringing me saying you know you really can't do this this would be like criticizing the british government during the second world war you can't sow doubts and discord of course it's ridiculous in fact what churchill was doing during the second world war was exactly pointing out the chamberlain wasn't doing the right thing and if he hadn't done that we would have been in a much worse situation i i had a version of the same thing because i was doing these i was going fiona and i were taking the dog for a walk every morning i was just getting my phone out and venting at instagram and a lot of it was about just feeling that the that johnson that hancock the way the whole thing was being presented to the public was just catastrophically bad i remember a piece on my blog about 20 things that i would do to improve their communications and and as a result i then started to get lots of calls from media, television, radio, etc.

26:21And it was really interesting. I remember one of them being described as one of the few voices criticizing the government's handling. Right. And I thought, what? Everybody I talk to thinks it's a shambles. But of course, what they meant was one of the few voices that was in that political bubble. And maybe I was sometimes over the top about johnson but i think this report shows up why we should never ever have unserious people at the top of government he's not a serious person he's a he's a he's a buffoon he's a player and he's an actor um and i i think that the other thing i thought was interesting as well by she was very tough on rishi's eat out to help out um basically said that was you know not borne out by the scientific evidence that that was a good idea to do clashed with the then public messaging So it just adds to that sense that even the ones that you think are a bit more serious were actually falling victim to exactly the same phenomenon you're talking about.

27:16To finish, clearly, there are still a huge debate about lockdown, about when it was done, how it was done, the incredible damage to the economy and children's education. So almost certainly hundreds of billions of pounds worth of debt came out of that. In fact, one of the reasons why the government is in such trouble that's borrowing is because of our COVID response. Sweden didn't follow this compulsory lockdown, and its economic performance was better. So a lot is resting on people like me and the authors of this report saying, if we had locked down earlier, I think three weeks earlier, they say even a week earlier, we actually could have made the lockdowns much shorter and much less damaging.

27:59And possibly avoided the second one. And possibly avoided the second one. And ditto with the second one, if we put a circuit breaker in very quickly, we could have opened up much more quickly. So we've got to get out of the black and white. As usual, there's a sort of pro-lockdown, anti-lockdown world. What I'm arguing, the report's arguing, is that actually, if you're decisive and you're quick and you're clear and you act early, actually you don't need to have quite as long a lockdown. But my goodness, we needed to do it because all the evidence was there. We had no testing facilities in place.

28:30Our hospitals were not ready. Our care centers were not ready. Our vaccines were not ready. Obviously, in that situation, safety first, lockdown quick and early to buy yourself a bit of time and try to work out what on earth's happening. And then, by all means, reopen schools, reopen the economy in a thoughtful way. Johnson consistently did the very worst thing. He blithered around. He said, I've seen these oriental style viruses before. and they've usually turned out to be nonsense, right? And then actually kept the lockdowns in for too long, brought them in too late. He neither went Sweden taken on the chin, nor did he do what people like me were pushing for, which was quick, early, and decisive.