Suppose you are Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and you are having a quiet Saturday in the Kremlin, or maybe at one of the huge palaces that you have looted from the Russian people – down on the Black Sea.
You are lounging on your white leatherette sofa and watching the TV news, and you can’t help smirking at the incompetence of your adversaries, the staggering weakness of the West.
You have lost more than a million soldiers, dead and injured, in your efforts to subdue Ukraine. You still haven’t succeeded in gaining more than 20 per cent of the country. Your economy is reeling. And yet now they are talking about some new 28-point plan to end the war – and it could be entirely written by the Kremlin!
It’s hilarious. The so-called peace plan calls for the military castration of Ukraine. It demands a Russian veto over Ukrainian membership of Nato, and Russian control over the admission of any foreign troops on Ukrainian soil.
The document suggests that the Ukrainians should not only abandon any attempt to reclaim the Crimea or the Donbas, but hand over huge chunks of territory, including about 250,000 Ukrainian civilians, that the Russians do not even control.
Of course, you knew that your negotiators would try something like this. But you never believed that anyone would take it seriously.
You can’t believe that President Trump would endorse this plan either, because it is a complete betrayal of Ukraine.
If they were so mad in Kyiv as to accept these terms, you know they would become the cat’s paw of Moscow, perpetually exposed to a third invasion. You can see that this is a total capitulation by the so-called friends of Ukraine. It’s Munich.
Boris Johnson as Prime Minister with chief medical officer Chris Whitty, left, and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, right, in March 2020
What is in the news in Britain, asks the former PM. What are they talking about? You rub your eyes in sheer amazement. Covid!
And yet, as you watch the global TV news, you notice that the protests from other Western countries have been oddly muffled.
The Ukrainians have been handed an ultimatum to begin talks on these disgraceful terms. Where are their allies? Their friends? What about the Brits, for instance, who used to be such implacable foes of Russian expansionism?
The Brits were always the ones who tried to lead Europe against Putin’s aggression. They were the ones who used to marshal support and weapons for Ukraine. So why – you wonder idly – are we not hearing from London? What’s got into the British, these days?
Get me the zapiska, you say to your staff. Right away Vladimir Vladimirovich, says the liveried huissier and scoots off to get the latest despatch from the Russian Ambassador in London.
So you read the news from the UK and a thin smile crosses your Gollum-like lips. It is the story of a country that seems to have lost its way.
Britain seems to be suffering from a mixture of an identity crisis and a slow-motion economic car crash. They have unemployment rising, and interest rates and inflation way too high – and someone called Reeves keeps having to threaten ever higher taxes because they have lost control of public spending.
And they are making matters worse with ever more job-destroying legislation on workers’ rights so that British business and investors are becoming exhausted.
They have hundreds of thousands of people now actually fleeing the country for the first time since the 1970s. The place seems to be dominated by wokery. Their citizens get arrested for a politically incorrect tweet.
At a time when you – Putin – are perfectly happy to invade other countries, and to rebuild the Russian empire, the British have become so pathetic that they are actually giving away their own sovereign territory, like the Chagos Islands, and cravenly paying Mauritius billions to take it off them. They are weak!
And what is in the news in Britain? What are they talking about? You rub your eyes in sheer amazement. Covid!
More than three years after the end of the pandemic, they are still wrangling about what went wrong – when as far as you can remember they had one of the fastest vaccine programmes anywhere in the world and came out of Covid restrictions quicker than virtually any comparable country.
Have these people lost their minds?
Some judge has just spent the thick end of £200million on an inquiry, and what is the upshot?
She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough – just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone.
Bozhe moi, you say, wiping away tears of laughter. My goodness, these Britskis!
An idea occurs to you, fleetingly, that in future you could easily plunge the whole of the UK into state-enforced paralysis just by convincing them that they had to take precautions against a new Russian-originated virus.
That is the logic of the report by Baroness Hallett, and I am afraid it’s not just in Moscow that people are tapping their heads, but around the world.
To the best of my knowledge all other countries have long since concluded their official investigations into Covid.
It might be a matter of pride, I suppose, that we have spent the longest on an inquiry and interviewed the most people, and spent the largest sums of public money if we had answered any important questions about the pandemic or, indeed, brought a single new or interesting fact into the public domain.
We have not.
I am of course grateful to Lady Hallett for her labours, which have clearly been extensive, and I repeat that I remain full of regret for the things the government I led got wrong and full of sympathy for all those who suffered – whether from the disease or from the steps we took to protect the population.
All I can say is that everyone involved was doing our level best, under pretty difficult circumstances, to get it right and to save lives.
To the best of my knowledge all other countries have long since concluded their official investigations into Covid, writes Boris Johnson
Shelves sit empty in a Tesco supermarket at the start of the pandemic, amid reports of Covid outbreaks in Manchester
Looking at this report, I think that among the criticisms that could be fairly made of me is that I failed to be clear enough with Lady Hallett when I commissioned this inquiry about what I thought future governments really needed to know and what questions she really needed to address.
In my defence I would say that is the problem with independent judge-led inquiries – they are meant to be independent, and there were limits to my ability to frame the inquiry, or to restrict its time and budget.
There are and remain only two big questions that need a proper answer if we are to prevent a disaster like Covid from happening again, and they are: how did it really emerge?
And to what extent did the non-pharmaceutical interventions – the lockdowns, social distancing etc – make enough of a difference to the epicurve to justify the huge social, economic, educational and psychological damage that these measures inflicted?
On the first question, the origins, of Covid, the report is silent.
On the second great question – which is of real strategic importance for this country – Lady Hallett is hopelessly incoherent.
On the one hand she says, without any real evidence, that there were three occasions when we should have locked down harder and earlier: in March 2020, in the autumn of that year, and, incredibly, during the Omicron variant scare of 2021 when we ended up – entirely sensibly – not locking down at all.
Lady Hallett also says – with breathtaking inconsistency – that we could have avoided lockdown altogether if we had somehow enacted tougher non-mandatory measures a week earlier than we did in March 2020.
It was this delay, she claims, that led to an unnecessary increase in the number of deaths – and she cites various speculative and unsubstantiated figures from the legendary Professor Neil Ferguson, the ‘modeller’ from Imperial College London whose hysterical predictions were largely discredited at the time.
That seems to be the biggest, and of course the most painful, charge against the then government.
We need to go over this with care because, I am afraid, the inquiry seems to be totally muddled.
This country went into full mandatory stay-at-home lockdown on March 23, 2020, but you will recall that this was the climax of a series of measures – non-mandatory advice to the public – that began on March 4 when we talked about the need to wash your hands.
On March 12, I told people to self-isolate if they had symptoms, and on March 16, a week before lockdown, we went much further. The public was told to work from home; to avoid inessential social contact; to avoid pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants; to avoid visiting other households, especially those containing elderly people; and to self-isolate at home if a member of the household displayed symptoms of Covid.
As you can see, we imposed exactly what Lady Hallett says we should have done – a tough package of non-mandatory measures – exactly a week before we went into full lockdown, by which time it now looks as though the infection rate was already starting to turn down. She must know this. It’s there in the evidence.
So, what does she mean? Does she mean we should have imposed the package of non-mandatory measures a week before that? On March 9? Or perhaps on March 2?
In either case we are in the realms of absolute fantasy. This was a new disease. We didn’t know how it was transmitted. We didn’t know the extent to which it was present, or not, in the UK population.
To have imposed restrictions before we did – non-mandatory or otherwise – would have been to contradict the scientific advice we were getting, namely that you had to make sure that you did not go too early because of the risk of exhausting public patience with the restrictions.
And yet Lady Hallett believes we should have deployed measures not seen in this country for more than a century – and done it early – just as a precaution.
On her logic, we should have locked down for SARS. And for Ebola. And for swine flu. Insane.
There is absolutely no evidence, moreover, for her claim that some earlier, harder but ‘non-mandatory’ lockdown could then have been lifted earlier.
On the contrary, the whole lesson of the lockdowns is that once you get into them, they are very hard to lift. There are plenty of countries that went into lockdown slightly ahead of us – from Europe to China – but came out much later. So why has the inquiry ignored these facts?
I think it’s pretty obvious. Lady Hallett has been unable or unwilling to address the really important questions. So, faced with the agony of the Covid victims and their families – and their entirely understandable desire for catharsis of some kind – she has decided that the neatest thing is to administer a judicious kicking to the Tory administration, who no one much has an interest in defending except me, and to move on.
I would not mind, and would take it all in my stride, if this report were not so theoretically important for the future. In arguing, or at least seeming to argue, for more and faster lockdowns, it will set the framework for future government responses: more working from home, more furlough, more laws, more school closures, more spending – the whole nightmare.
The problem with Covid is that it saw a massive expansion in the powers and expenditure of the state. The whole experience sapped our national work ethic, enfeebled Britain, and emboldened our adversaries.
Instead of correcting the country’s direction, as the Tories had begun to do, Labour is badly exacerbating the problem.
We cannot hope to lead the European contest against Putin, and to spend even 3 per cent of our GDP on defence, if we can’t get any growth out of our economy.
We can’t get growth out of the economy if we cannot cut taxes and regulation, and we certainly won’t be able to cut taxes if we can’t get a grip on spending – and on this Labour is now in complete chaos.
I believe that in the next few years, perhaps earlier than we had imagined, we will see a watershed election – like 1979 – in which the British people decide that things just can’t go on as they are. There is a crunch coming, and I think people will once again want a government that is willing to stand up for freedom, at home and abroad.
In the meantime, and in the name of freedom, we need to file the 28-point Ukraine plan vertically – and the same, I am afraid, goes for the Hallett report into Covid.
