Now we know how little those in power care for the elderly

The High Court ruling that the Government’s Covid care homes policy at the start of the pandemic was unlawful must surely come as a surprise to precisely no-one.

For the two women who mounted the crowdfunded legal challenge, Dr Cathy Gardner and Fay Harris, it was a pyrrhic victory. Both lost their fathers due to the shocking decision not to test people discharged from hospitals to care homes or isolate them in the first weeks of the pandemic in spring 2020.

Between March and June of that year – when Matt Hancock was health secretary – more than 20,000 elderly or disabled care home residents died from Covid in England and Wales.

This, despite an insistence from Hancock that the Government was endeavouring “to throw a protective ring around our care homes”.

Even back then, it rang hollow; I vividly remember reports of Covid spreading like wildfire in some care homes, as residents were unwittingly infected by their friends transferred back from hospital. Bickering over who knew what and when about asymptomatic transmission is a red herring.

The truth, then as now, was that freeing up hospital beds was a higher priority than safeguarding the elderly and the vulnerable. They went untested because a positive test would have made it impossible to send them back to their care homes. Whatever politicians claim, there was clearly a deliberate and deeply cynical strategy of ignorance.

I understand the pressure on ministers to get things right was immense, and I know that difficult decisions had to be made. But the way our elderly and our disabled were handled in the pandemic was a shameful indictment of a wider disregard for older generations who have contributed to this country.

The least they could have expected was to be treated as though their lives mattered rather than as collateral damage in the fight to save those deemed to be of greater societal value.

This court case marks the beginning of investigations into what happened in this desperate dark chapter of modern Britain. People rightly demand answers, some will want apologies, others compensation.

My hope is that the forthcoming Covid public inquiry will not just shed light on events but highlight ways any future health crisis can be met with compassion rather than callousness.