Sunak urges pandemic response lessons after ‘fear narrative’ revelation

THE former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who is a finalist in the race to succeed Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and British prime minister, last Thursday (25) criticised what he said was a “fear narrative” and partial analyses behind the country’s Covid lockdowns.

Sunak, 42, revealed what went on behind the scenes in an interview with the Spectator.

He revealed his misgivings over the pandemic measures and what he said was a lack of accounting for trade-offs in completely locking down society.

“In every brief, we tried to say – let’s stop the ‘fear’ narrative. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong,” he was quoted as saying in the magazine.

Sunak was also critical of the public health posters showing Covid patients on ventilators because he said “it was wrong to scare people like that”.

He added that ministers were not given enough information to scrutinise analysis produced by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) – a group of independent experts who were advising the government on Covid-related measures.

“We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did. And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning.

“If we had done all of that, we could be in a very different place...We would probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example,” he said.

As chancellor between February 2020 and July 2022, Sunak was in charge of the country’s economic response to the pandemic. He claimed to have been among the few dissenting voices within prime minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet at the time.

He eventually began turning to wider analysis – including from his alma mater Stanford University and JP Morgan research data – to inform his own views, he revealed.

Sunak reiterated that his intention to speak out now was not point a finger of blame and name anyone specific, but to highlight the importance of learning lessons from the decisions made in 2020 and 2021.

He recalled one meeting where he got “very emotional” about education. “‘Forget about the economy. Surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare’ or something like that. There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.”

Asked if he threatened to resign if there was another lockdown, he said he used the “closest formulation of words” to imply that threat.

Sunak then apparently lobbied other ministers in the cabinet and built a wider network against another lockdown.

A public inquiry into the UK government’s handling of the pandemic has been set up, with public hearings set to begin next year. But Sunak said he believes lessons can and should be learnt right away and it would be up to the new leader at Downing Street to take those calls

Downing Street said throughout the pandemic, public health, education, and the economy were “central” to the difficult decisions made on the lockdown to protect the British public from an “unprecedented novel virus”.

“At every point, ministers made collective decisions which considered a wide range of expert advice available at the time in order to protect public health,” a spokesperson said.