Matt Hancock
Photo:
Thomas Krych/Zuma Press
They were “following the science,” politicians told the public at every opportunity during the height of the Covid pandemic. The public in many countries has learned that was often far from true, and now we have proof from what our British friends are calling the Covid lockdown files.
The United Kingdom has witnessed in recent days the release of some 100,000 text messages that government officials sent each other during the pandemic. The glib resort to casual authoritarianism is shocking even for those who are cynical about politicians.
From the start, Britain’s Covid policies became a question of politics rather than science. Health Secretary
Matt Hancock,
a leading lockdown hawk, mused in January 2020—after news of the virus emerged in China but before the crisis in the West—that an outbreak could be good for his political career. He shared with a media adviser a message purportedly from “a wise friend” telling Mr. Hancock that “a well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league.”
The text messages show then Prime Minister
wondering in June 2020 whether to lift the country’s first lockdown on a faster timetable amid favorable data. His media advisers told him easing would be “too far ahead of public opinion.” Rather than explaining the latest data to the public, Mr. Johnson kept restrictions in place.
In the most serious incident exposed to date, Mr. Hancock conferred with colleagues about how to “deploy” news of the so-called Kent variant of Covid in December 2020 at the right moment to “frighten the pants off everyone” in order to build support for a new lockdown and boost compliance.
A month after Mr. Hancock scared everyone’s pants off, a senior civil servant suggested that a new national mask mandate would be worthwhile because it was “effectively free and has a very…
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