← The Rest Is Politics
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Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad Free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com this episode is powered by Fuse Energy, and.
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Welcome to an emergency episode of the Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.
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And me, Rory Stewart.
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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.
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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. It'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, and 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, departments 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.
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A
I think there's something about Even though people say they don't 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 our 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I know you're not 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.
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B
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. So government finally locked down, I think, in about 16th of March, and to make speeches on this, the 24th of February. So I guess three weeks in advance. I gave an interview to the Today programme, for example, I think, on the 25th of February. And that was when I really saw the extent of abuse you get if you start breaking line. Because the Today programme 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 whole a world health Organization. And 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 insight, and 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.
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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 MINISTER I remember saying to Tony get a grip of that fast. That could really be bad. And we have this situation where the, the then MAF 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. Whereas what you had from Johnson and this, 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, 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 seems just to be kind of enjoying the center of attention ness of it, you know and sadly another 157have died every day this happening and no real sense 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.
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B
To learn, we don't because some of the lessons are very fundamental things about the psychology of government. So optimism, bias, group think 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. And 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 Ho and Kirk or whatever, and you say to the system, are you sure you've got this right? You will often get people saying, no, no, it's all under control now. 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 Valance, who was the chief scientific officer, there were a lot of uncertainties, right? They 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 would it remain in your body before you infected, what the mortality rate was. So, you know, you could have a mortality rate saying, you know, 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 in quite early end of January, beginning of February, is the assumption in Britain is that you couldn't lock down. 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, the fact is we may have to just try to smooth the curve here, which meant, 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.
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A
Quite a hard thing to go out and say publicly.
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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 a few months or 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, but that isn't the judgment that our prime minister's 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 are you prepared 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.
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A
Yeah, so they kept saying they were following the science when in various places they clearly weren't. Because I think you. And you mentioned the role of the media. I think that because of the theater of the thing, and once we were all locked down and we're all sort of at home, 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 Whittier and Valance's body language, you could read them sort of essentially, they were sticking to facts, and alongside it was essentially political judgment, and in Johnson's case, often just downright nonsense. And, you know, the one thing I think this. This report surely does is put page to any of this crap that the Tories talk about. Maybe we need to bring back John, you know, the idea, this guy's legacy now, one Brexit and two people dying who shouldn't have died, and it's got to be on him.
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B
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. The point is that modern campaigning style, populist campaigning style, does it work in government? No, because it's 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. But this requires somebody like Angela Merkel, who is interested in science, serious, 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.
- [15:42]
A
No. And also what Johnson wanted to do constantly, this was during his weird 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 was sitting on the media point, though, I'm afraid I think I've told you before, Fiona and I, our first rav the day is usually about the fact she wants to listen to the Today program and I want to listen to some music. And 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 program because she'd written a piece in the Telegraph saying this is a terrible report like which she probably hasn't read. So, and then who do they have on as the voice of the government? Michael Gove. Michael Gove, who, 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. I 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.
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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 of that. Boris Johnson was a very, very poor appointment. Matt Hancock was consistently over promising and under delivering. So he 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 Leblo, 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 you know, it's understandable that he thought this. I 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, was out there on the 10th of March saying, Rory Stewart has no idea what he's talking about. There's no evidence that masks work. Worse than that.
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A
Yeah, worse than that, Worse than that. And this is worse than group thing. 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 message that he's been. He'd been putting out now, whether that was. And she cannot have believed that.
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I think she did. I Mean, this is where the groupthink comes in. I think Johnson was, in a sense following the scientific advice, but what he was not doing is being curious and challenging.
- [19:19]
A
But they were getting.
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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 was no point in lockdown.
- [19:26]
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She believed that there was no evidence that mask 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 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.
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People wearing masks.
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People wearing masks. And what's more, moving towards lockdown and.
- [19:57]
B
Days before, I mean, so that you could see Denmark was moving, South Korea was moving and we weren't. So let's just expand it out maybe 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. My 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 defence, 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 thousand dollar drones that could be updated 120 times a year on the software. No, 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. What it's very bad at is explaining how government systems get us wrong. The absence of what you call red teaming or challenge. How do you build into government systems? Somebody to say to the mod, oi, 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.
- [21:56]
A
I think part of the issue is that I can remember when we were in government that occasionally somebody would have a. Somebody had an idea to do kind of scenario planning. And most times I was, 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. So 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. I don't know, it was an away day or away half day or whatever, where they were looking at different military scenarios 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 is right. We do these things. And of course it was a different government. So now Keir 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, COVID 19 was not relatively mild, it was relatively mild. And then I guess the other thing that I did hear, that Chris Wormal, who was then at Health now the Cabinet Secretary, was getting a bit of kicking as well. And so I think what you have is we just. 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 consequences are going to be. Then you get into government, you talk to people in government and other. Those are specifically working on this. You don't have a sense that that's where the debate is?
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No.
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So 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. Will there really be much debate going forward? So then we're on to the next.
- [24:06]
B
Thing and about what. So I'm really struck by this, because of course the media will concentrate maybe on kicking Cummings or Johnson, but the media's not very interested in really getting into the weeds of why British government is really slow to react. And partly there's 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. I'm not very confident with this stuff. And it was quite clear what they were focusing on. Politics, 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 criticise. How easy is it for the government to say, this is a national emergency, it's disloyal to criticise. So I was then, 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 tweet saying, it's completely irresponsible of Rory Suet 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 now. 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.
- [25:50]
A
I had a version of the same thing because I was doing these. Fiona and I were taking the dog for a walk every morning and I was just getting my phone out and venting at Instagram. And a lot of it was about just feeling that Johnson, that Hancock, the way the whole thing was being presented to the public was just catastrophically bad. I remember I wrote a piece on my blog about 20 things that I would do to improve their communications. And as a result I then started to get lots of calls from media, television, radio, et cetera. And it was really interesting. I remember on one of them being described as one of the few voices criticizing the government's handling.
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B
Right.
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A
And I thought what everybody I talk to, this is a shambles. But of course what they meant was one of the few voices that was in that political bubble. And look, 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 buffoon, He's a player and he's an actor. And 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. 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 that you're talking about.
- [27:15]
B
To 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 with its 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 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.
- [27:57]
A
Much less damaging and possibly avoided the second one.
- [27:59]
B
And possibly avoided the second one and disobeyed 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, our 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, you know, 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 take it on the chin, nor did he do what people like me were pushing for, which was quick, early and decisive. He did the worst of all worlds, the most actually ultimately damaging in terms of death and the economy.
- [29:15]
A
My final point, I was in school this morning and it's really interesting how when you go into schools at the moment, how much they are still talking about the impact upon kids of the changes to their lives at that time and how a lot of kids are still struggling with that. And I think it's does partly explain the kind of seeming explosion in mental health issues amongst young people.
- [29:35]
B
Oh, it's terrifying. So I think, you know, whatever the rights or wrongs of it, policy aside, horrible in terms of the deaths, and there are some very, very moving victim statements at the beginning of this report about people losing both their mother and their father in a couple of days, the impact on children's education and mental health and then this massive impact on our economy.
- [29:59]
A
Well, we seem to be recovering more slowly than other comparable economies.
- [30:04]
B
But we really, I think need to try to learn a much more difficult lesson, which is how do you build a governmental system that isn't vulnerable to amateur ill informed ministers group think complacency. Because if we don't, Russia is worse. AI and the next pandemic will do much more damage. Again, good.
- [30:23]
A
Well done, Rory. Well done for being ahead of the curve at the time and for banging away in the way that you did. Let's hope that the next time there is a kind habit we do handle it better. Because one thing's for sure, there will be one. See you soon.
- [30:35]
B
Bye bye.
- [30:41]
E
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- [31:15]
B
As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division one, national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes.
- [31:27]
A
Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to the rest is politics.
- [31:42]
B
Plus, it's the thoughtful kind of present ad free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q&As, book discounts. And perhaps I think, most interesting it's our miniseries, available only to members, focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.
- [32:02]
A
So think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer?
- [32:12]
B
And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No cues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day.
- [32:21]
A
So spread a little political peace and goodwill, head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.