Evidence of evil among us

The UK's ex-health secretary's publicised WhattApp chats on the lockdowns

Writes Brendan O’Neill:

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph’s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: ‘Hilarious.’

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We now know that sections of the political elite relished the power lockdown gave them. At points they seemed almost drunk on tyranny.

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A few months later, Hancock was increasingly irate about the Sweden issue, the possibility that this nation that didn’t enforce a sweeping lockdown might be doing quite well. I am sick of the ‘fucking Sweden argument’, he said. ‘Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong’, he demanded of his aides.

That is extraordinary, no? […] Hancock notably did not ask whether Sweden was wrong but why it was wrong. He wasn’t interested in openly discussing pandemic policy, but rather in insulating his own lockdown ideology from contrasting or contradictory ideas and data. 

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Hancock was resisting advice from chief medical officer Chris Whitty to test everyone entering care homes. According to the leaked texts, Hancock was seemingly concerned that such an endeavour would ‘muddy the waters’ of lockdown messaging. The leaked WhatsApps have led many to conclude that Hancock was especially worried that care-home testing would distract attention from his big, virtuous, legacy-defining effort to ensure that there would be 100,000 Covid tests a day in the broader community. A reminder: 45,000 care-home residents in England and Wales perished from Covid.

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Nothing speaks better to the warped moralism of the Covid era than the fact that sceptics like Heneghan who argued for the elderly and frail to be protected have been demonised as dangerous ‘Covid deniers’, while government officials whose policies had a direct and catastrophic impact on the health of the elderly and frail were, for a period of time at least, treated as unimpeachable voices of moral authority. We need a complete reversal of the Covid narrative. If I see one more angry article in the supposedly liberal media railing against Heneghan or Gupta or any of the others who said ‘Let’s plough our resources into protecting the vulnerable’, now that we know our lockdown elites failed to protect the vulnerable, I will lose it.

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Ms Oakeshott is a backstabber and a money-grubber for revealing these WhatsApp messages, some are saying. Oh stop it. Nothing could be more in the public interest than knowing the thinking behind an ideology and a policy that wrecked civil liberty, suspended democracy, sickened the elderly, hurt the working classes, quarantined the developing world, and led to a suspension of that most key of civilised endeavours: the education of children. A pandemic hit, and the political elite, and the media elite, opted for social tyranny, censorship, non-debate, classism and fearmongering over taking a more rational, liberal, focused approach to the risk of disease. We need to know all about this, so that we might guard against it in the future.