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On Thursday, the Covid Inquiry released its second report, describing the shortcomings of the Johnson government’s handling of the pandemic. The Chairman of the enquiry, Baroness Hallett, suggested that lockdowns could have been ‘avoided entirely’ had ‘stringent restrictions’ been imposed earlier than in mid-March 2020. The report has been sharply criticised by Fraser Nelson for politicising science and by Lord Frost for not answering the ‘fundamental question’ of whether lockdowns were effective.
The report claims that the imposition of lockdown measures a week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives. Cummings, Sunak, Johnson and Hancock received criticism, presiding over a ‘toxic, sexist and chaotic culture’; and so did the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Chris Wormald, who had been Hancock’s permanent secretary during the pandemic, and has come under scrutiny.
Earlier in the week the Royal Navy identified a Russian spy ship (the Yantar) on the coast of Scotland. It was tracked from the 5th to the 11th November, and it is the second time this year that the ship has been spotted in British waters. John Healey, Defence Secretary, reported that the Yantar was using lasers to blind RAF pilots that were monitoring it.
A US peace deal to end the Russo-Ukraine war was leaked to the press this week. It has been approved by Trump and officials are looking to reach an agreement in a matter of weeks. The settlement has 28 points which include, notably, that the Donbas region would be leased to Russia for an undisclosed fee, as well as maintaining occupied territories (Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk) and Ukraine’s army would be halved. It has been criticised for being one-sided and forcing Ukraine into a corner. Nigel Farage has spoken against the deal, criticising the demand for a reduction in Ukraine’s army.
Lastly, Nathan Gill, the erstwhile leader of Reform’s Welsh party, has been sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in prison under the Bribery Act, having received £40,000 to promote Russian interests. Gill has been a long-term collaborator of Farage, having served in Brussels as MEPs together. This pressure on Reform comes following The Guardian’s allegations of racism against Farage when he was at Dulwich College. Keir Starmer has called Farage ‘spineless’ for not explaining himself.
Blog
There is no evidence that Brexit has damaged UK productivity growth
This analysis shows no evidence that Brexit harmed UK productivity. Trends since 2016 match post-financial-crisis norms, manufacturing outperforms the G7, UK openness remains unchanged, and investment stays historically strong. Claims of a Brexit-driven slowdown do not match the data.
Brexit & UK trade: economists and trade analysts need to work together – urgently by Phil Radford
The issue of Brexit’s impact on trade is re-emerging in UK politics. Until now, doppelganger models have provided a widely-accepted explanation of what happened to UK trade after 2020 – and why. But sector-by-sector analysis shows these models are unreliable. Today, our core trade challenges remain undiagnosed.
Media
David Frost in the Telegraph: This Covid inquiry report is a disgrace. Shame on those who produced it
Rod Liddle in the Spectator: It’s not Starmer’s fault that everyone loathes him
Key Points
Covid enquiry
Can we learn lessons from History? Many successful academic historians have sold books with this guarantee, or, at least, of informing present politics. Not for nothing did Norman Stone become a speech writer for Thatcher on Europe in the late eighties; and Niall Ferguson has in some ways succeeded him, traversing across the pond.
Other historians have been sceptical. A.J.P. Taylor remarked that men only learn how to make new mistakes from history: that history should have no purpose beyond understanding and, if one can write as well as Taylor, entertainment. Macaulay would have agreed; Gibbon was somewhere in between.
Almost £200m has been spent on the state enquiry into What Went Wrong With Covid. The enquiry assumes that, by extracting testimonies from key individuals under oath, it will yield a comprehensive history and guide for dealing with state malfunction.
In one sense this is the right thing to do. The need to reform the state feels immediate and pressing. A bloated bureaucracy, impotent ministers, a growing political consensus that the state needs reforming – it’s why Reform have put Danny Kruger in charge of ‘preparation for government’. To be sure, comparisons to Yes, Minister have become clichéd and tiresome. The first half of 2020 might have been a high-water mark of state incompetency, and the state inquiry confirms this view.
But there is a sense in which the inquiry is more interested in moralising than in historical understanding. Watch the testimony of Dominic Cummings from two years ago. Despite his usual rancour he was giving real answers – by which I mean complicated answers – to bland, one-eyed questions.
In fact, the KC interviewing him wasn’t at all interested in understanding why individuals made the decisions they did and how this impinged on the fluid situation inside No. 10 (crises often melt the hard structures of official power): instead, maybe because it was being filmed, his questions were boringly moralistic and the tone (‘slow down Mr. Cummings’) was condescending. Emphasis was placed on the profane language used privately by Cummings about (not to) other ministers and officials. Doubtless this was why the latest report described the atmosphere as ‘toxic, sexist and chaotic’.
Will lessons be learned? It’s highly improbable: in fact, well-nigh impossible. The hope is that this particular case study will yield universal crisis-handling lessons. (Rory Stewart, that dispossessed man of virtue, has made a fine career professing such sophistries.) If only politics was that simple!
The enquiry readily assumes that political actors will disclose the actual reasons for doing what they did. This is a naïve, pious assumption. The historian of British politics Maurice Cowling assumed that what a politician says publicly could be antithetical to what they’re saying privately (which is why he used private correspondence and diaries to write his political studies). It doesn’t take a genius to erase WhatsApp messages and email chains.
The nature of crises is that they’re unexpected and the uncertainty of the future becomes immediate. No amount of history can prepare a politician for such matters (Cummings knows his Thucydides (the Jowett version), after all). Decisions taken are done so in more darkness than light, and, more often than might be admitted, a recourse to primordial instinct is taken, for which ‘reasons’ cannot be offered.
In reality, the enquiry has only a superficial interest in understanding. In fact, it has so far succeeded – in generating headlines, in projecting virtue and in avoiding understanding anything whatever.
