Michael Dobbs
‘It’s my duty to get back to work’
First, a confession. A few days ago I watched pornography during a virtual debate on Covid in the House of Lords. I had called the debate, I was the lead speaker, but the IT hook-up went haywire and I ended up kicking off the debate by phone, several minutes late and with beads of sweat on my brow.
I was still desperately thumping the button to give me a visual link even as I was talking and suddenly my screen burst into life. Yet instead of “parliamentlive.tv” I was kicked through to something called simply “live.tv”. It’s a porn site. And desperately distracting while you are speaking to the House. Cue more sweat. By this point I was delighted the visual link wasn’t working.
We will all be left with unforgettable memories of this period, many of them pleasurable, of a time when we were paid generously to stay at home and the weather gods smiled upon us. Crisis? What crisis? Yet this spring of extended unreality is about to turn to savage summer.
I’ve played by the rules – most of us have – at home, near Stonehenge, with my wife and two of the children. I’ve read wonderful books, swept the garage, walked glorious miles. Yet it’s also been a time of pain. I’ve missed out on some of the most important moments in life. Staying at home meant that I couldn’t attend the funeral of my stepsister, wasn’t able to say goodbye. And I still haven’t been able to hold my new granddaughter or hug her parents. Many others have suffered more.
So I’m running out of patience, not only with Covid but with those who have used it for their own purposes. Prof Neil Ferguson terrified us with his model that predicted half a million deaths and kicked us into lockdown. Then the professor’s model turned out to be another man’s wife. It’s the sort of arrogance that starts revolutions.
For much of the country, Covid has been turned into a game played inside the Westminster bubble. It’s made us ever more sceptical of the messages we’re being fed from the centre.
Now, following various transgressions from those at the top and fatigue with the whole enterprise, lockdown isn’t so much being eased, it’s falling apart.
In all corners people have been surreptitiously and now brazenly fraternising with the enemy – each other. The Government has decided that six people outdoors are now fine but many had already decided they didn’t need permission and had been doing it anyway.
Boris Johnson can no longer “rely on the science”. What science? There’s so much to choose from. Two metres? One metre? Whatever happened to three British feet? Why is English science different from Scottish science? Or Swedish or German science?
Michael Levitt, a Nobel Prize winner, says lockdown may have cost more lives than it has saved through rises in alcoholism and domestic abuse, and the dropping away of medical procedures for non-covid conditions. Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford professor, believes long-term social distancing might actually make us more vulnerable to disease. Another Oxford study suggested that half the population might already have caught the bug. So who is right?
I don’t know. I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a fortune teller, but as a parliamentarian I sometimes have to ask difficult questions, and the one that’s buzzing away in my mind is hideously simple. Are we really saving lives?
I asked the Government for some figures about the non-covid death rate. What has happened to that while our attentions have been elsewhere? From January to March, the number of non-virus deaths almost precisely matched the five-year average. Every week’s figures were in line with what had gone before. Then on March 23 we fell into lockdown and things changed. Strangely, but inexorably and appallingly, the number of non-covid deaths began to rise.
In April alone, there were almost 11,000 more non-covid deaths than average. Unexpected and unexplained. So have we got the balance right? Is the cure just as deadly as Covid? Is it such a terrifying thought that we are afraid even to ask? My suspicion is that this rise – I daren’t call it a spike, dare I? – has in part been caused by people avoiding their doctors. To put it another way, Covid has frightened many people to death.
These words aren’t meant harshly. I haven’t caught that appallingly infectious disease called hindsight that kills all common sense on contact. These are simply insistent and awkward questions that need to be discussed.
The Prime Minister led us brilliantly through the early days of the epidemic, and I suspect his tireless effort helped make his personal battle with the virus all the more difficult. He clearly suffered. We now need his leadership to raise the discussion above simply Covid itself to the other dangers – the damage to business, to mental health, to relationships and families, to education, to the driving forces of ambition and enterprise that carry a nation forward. No nation can long live in fear and expect to survive.
Now is the moment of the Government’s greatest hazard. It can’t be expected to have all the answers. It has to take risks and leap into the unknown. There is no place called safety for anyone right now.
This isn’t just about science, it’s also about political leadership, and no leader simply does what he is told. There’s always a political judgment to be made. Winston Churchill got it right. “Experts on tap, not experts on top,” he said.
Which brings me to my own situation. I’m a working member of the House of Lords. I think it has an important job to do in asking difficult questions and helping make sure that policy is as robust and reasoned as it can be. That job can’t be done virtually at a distance and I can’t spend all afternoon watching pornography.
Jacob Rees-mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, put it this way. “We see in this Parliament the ineffectiveness of scrutiny in comparison to when the House is operating in the normal way… Are we a people set apart, a special class who are exempt from what the rest of the country is doing? No, we are not. We are the leaders of our nation and we have a responsibility.”
So the Commons is getting back to something like normal operations. This is the Government’s Get Back to Work week for almost everyone – children and teachers, factory workers and shopkeepers, dentists next week; even sweaty soccer players the week after. But not the House of Lords.
Why? Because the authorities argue that many of our members are vulnerable. We have to consider the members of staff. We haven’t got enough office space or access to sandwiches. And so on.
So next week we will timidly return to a hybrid House where a few will be allowed to sit on the red leather benches, but most of us are still urged to stay home. We are made to feel like naughty schoolchildren outside the headmaster’s office waiting – literally – to be “whipped”.
What example will we Lords be setting if we duck the challenge? It will encourage people to conclude that we are too elderly or too invalid or simply irrelevant. In politics, either you lead by example or you don’t lead at all.
The Writ of Summons sent to every peer in the name of the Queen is clear. It “commands” us to attend Parliament to consider “arduous and urgent affairs and imminent perils… waiving all excuses”. If it’s good enough for Her Majesty, who am I to argue?
So next week, even though my hair is ridiculously long, at the first possible opportunity I’m going to put my bum on the bench in the House of Lords. I’ll take the considered risks involved and try to do my best to persuade the Government that the new priority is getting the country back to business while there are still businesses left.
We fight Covid in many ways, not just with drugs and ventilators and social distancing but with jobs and new productivity, and above all, hope. It’s time for the House of Lords to lead by example and get back to work.