Fear, not data, shapes the public’s view of Covid

We have unprecedented access to information, yet our response to the virus has often been hysterical

Information was supposed to make us smarter citizens, but nothing trumps fear. According to a poll for The Conservative Woman, people believe the median age at which Covid victims have died is 65 (it’s actually 82.4, about a year higher than the average life expectancy) and some 41 per cent think Covid has been the single biggest cause of UK deaths in 2020. In fact, in September, as The Conservative Woman points out, it wasn’t the first, the second or even the tenth. In England it was the 19th, in Wales the 24th.

Though perhaps this is simply being tricky with the numbers. If you take September as your snapshot, Covid looks weak. If you go back to the spring, it looks terrifying. But the point is that public perception of the risks of Covid are totally out of whack with the facts – and the problem, I’d wager, is not an absence of coverage, but a surfeit. The Government has played up the dangers of Covid to get us to obey public health orders, and not since 9/11 have we seen such enthusiastic collusion with the broadcast media, which has seized upon every worst-case scenario to create a sense of impending doom that happens to be good for business. “Stay tuned or you will die.”

We’ve even seen the return of dodgy dossiers. When the Government was bounced into a second lockdown by an internal leak – yes, your masters really are that dysfunctional – it built its case by deluging us with data. At the press conference on October 31, we were shown graph after incomprehensible graph, with the implication that if you dissent from all this science you must be an idiot – except that some of the numbers were wrong and the Government later downgraded them.

Among a minority, this sort of thing saps confidence. It even inspires conspiracy theories. The next great battle will be over the vaccine: quite a few of us, according to studies, will refuse to take it. This is not only irrational, it’s a sign of decadence: you don’t find many anti-vaxxers in countries that have consistently endured severe pandemics because they know the costs of inaction, and the whole discourse of the anti-vax movement smacks of rich Westerners with too much time and information on their hands, working themselves up into a silly mess.

But they have a right to do it, yes? Apparently not! A survey carried out for The Sunday Telegraph found that four in five Britons think that anyone spreading misinformation about vaccines should be prosecuted, and Labour favours stiff penalties for the social media firms that give them a platform.

The public wants to control information, but hasn’t made the most of what data it has. It wants to stop panic, yet – let’s be honest – the reaction to Covid has often been hysterical. Never has the citizen been so potentially empowered, yet the state is bigger than ever and the media indulgent (the question at press conferences is never “Why are you doing this?”, it’s always “Why didn’t you do it sooner?”). Fear is the key. The internet has changed our economy and culture, but not human nature, and people will still pick the truths that confirm their worst fears and the politicians who offer them security and control.

I’m not very popular with The Conservative Woman. Recently it ran an article with the title “Down with Tim Stanley-ism”, for I am the embodiment of a “wishy-washy, we-are-all-in-this-together, on-theone-hand-this-but-on-the-other-handthat sort of conservatism” that must be exposed for what it is really is: “weakness and cowardice”. Country Squire, a website that offers recipes for cranberry pudding, also called me “harmless” but “loathsome”. What next – savaged by Horse & Hound?

They’ve picked on me because there’s a philosophical difference at play – they are weapons-grade libertarians, I am not – and because

I see my job, when on television, to explain to the audience what both sides of an issue think and why. But it’s also because I’m called Tim. Tims aren’t tough, not like a Dominic or a Lee, and don’t you have to be tough to get things done?

Well, I certainly thought that when I was younger and could be very mean (put it down to childish insecurity), but as I’ve grown into Christianity I’ve come to realise that strength comes in different forms, that it can be strong to acknowledge your weakness and know your limits. And don’t we as conservatives want to preserve the peace, rather than go about knocking heads together and smashing things up? I’m not sure it even works as a political strategy. Donald Trump is the embodiment of The Conservative Woman’s brand of toughness and he lost. Dom and Lee are on their way out, too. Conservatives love a rugged individual, but it takes a team to run a country; ego is an iceberg.

The bottom line is that if you hire a Tim, you’re going to have to put up with a lot of workplace accidents and, and, yes, he will insist on bringing a smelly labrador into the office that he obviously can’t control. But the ship of state will sail smoothly. Hire a Dom or a Lee and it’ll be a wild ride, but may end in a tribunal. The good news is that when the ship goes down, despite their anti-tim agenda, Dom or Lee can probably rely on a Tim for a sofa to crash on. So long as they can put up with the snoring dog, that’s not a bad deal.