Are we masking the true legacy of Covid?

IT now looks as if a final and rigorous examination of what really happened during the Covid pandemic will never be put before us. Usually, when the Government or any part of it has presided over a complete botch, a whitewash or a cover-up it is prepared to “prove” that despite billions frittered away it was all necessary, so no one in high office was to blame for anything.

In the case of Covid, the botch is so massive and so ruinous that it can never be excused. So it has to be ignored. But those two years and the damage they have done to our country will stain our history forever. It may be that we will never quite recover.

Ah, we will be told, but it was all necessary. Really? There is evidence that 80 per cent of it was avoidable. The figures indicating this emerge not from our own government but from figures reaching us from abroad – which the British establishment cannot muzzle.

We were told there was no alternative and that if we did not take the lockdown route we faced half a million deaths from the Chinese virus.We were told the Government was “following the science” – meaning doing whatever the SAGE Committee told it to do. Those blithering incompetents are now retired with their knighthoods.

Following SAGE advice we locked down an economy and a society. We paid millions of people to do nothing (they still are); we spent, borrowed and printed hundreds of billions and were told not to worry about the consequences. The few voices raised to protest this were told to shut up because the alternative would be a holocaust of mass death.

Today the inflationary wipe-out that is ruining millions of those who worked really hard, the rail strikes, the broken airlines, chaotic airports, incompetence, decay and decline – all can be directly traced back to lockdown – to the mountebanks who insisted on it and the Johnson government which enacted it.

So if our own government refuses to confirm this, how do we know?

The answer is the much-mocked European Union and the World Health Organisation. It comes down to deaths per 100,000 people – and that means real deaths due to Covid and only Covid. In the EU league table we rate at 109 per 100,000 or a fraction over one per thousand, putting us 15th out of the 28 countries. It is almost certain more died of neglect because they were elbowed away to give priority to Covid, but that is not provable.

What IS provable is that Sweden, advised by its public health chief Anders Tegnell, refused lockdown and kept everything possible open.

Now it has sustained less damage and is forging back to prosperity.

But at a fearsome cost in lives, surely? Wrong. The Swedish loss of lives was just 56 per 100,000 or one half of our own. And that is what our government desperately hopes you will never be told – that the economic devastation wreaked upon our country was unnecessary.

And that, not for any sharing of wine on the No 10 lawn, is why the present government should go.