He should have been the grown-up in the room, but he was as bad as the rest
When Simon Case was made the youngest-ever Cabinet Secretary, Matt Hancock sent a message congratulating him. “I think 41 is a good age to be in these very big jobs,” said the 41-year-old health secretary. By this time, both were wielding incredible power, overseeing the biggest suspension of civil liberties in peacetime. The members of the “top team” Whatsapp group had started to see lockdown as a political campaign – with enemies to be mocked and destabilised. The only person in the group in a position to lower the political temperature and insist upon sound government was Simon Case.
But The Lockdown Files show that, time and time again, he ended up as political as the politicians – in some cases, even more so. Some of the most outrageous comments on the files are his. Like others, he started off quite moderate. But before too long, he was revelling in the power to lock people up (saying he wished he could see “some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a Premier Inn shoe box”) and being as gung-ho as the ministers he worked with. The civil servant became indistinguishable from the politicians.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came in June 2020 when Alok Sharma, the business secretary, argued for certain rules to be advisory rather than compulsory. At this stage, Covid circulation had plummeted: deaths had fallen by 93 per cent from the peak. A permanent secretary with oversight over the UK government might have appreciated the importance of not needlessly burdening the economy – or at the very least weighed up the trade-offs ministers were making.
But Case seemed just as appalled as Hancock at this resistance to lockdown laws. “Question I can’t understand is why Alok is against controlling the virus,” Hancock complains. Case offers an explanation: Sharma, he says, is motivated by “pure Conservative ideology”. He does not seem to use the phrase as a compliment. If this is his view about the notion of regulatory restraint, it cannot make his job – enacting the policy of a Conservative government – any easier.
Mark Sedwill, his predecessor, had clashed with Dominic Cummings about reshaping the Civil Service. Case, a former principal private secretary to David Cameron, had by then left the service and was working for Prince William. He was called back to Whitehall to run the Government in a more buccaneering way: first in No10 and then as Cabinet Secretary. There seemed to be an unspoken deal: Case would get unprecedented power at a young age. In return, he’d be more likely to go with the political flow.
The messages show no sign of him questioning the government-by-socialmedia set up. And while most of his messages relayed information from and to the prime minister (he was No10 permanent secretary until September 2020), it’s not clear whose side he was on during the lockdown conference on Oct 31 2020. At this stage, he’s prolockdown, and like Hancock seems worried the PM is not.
Case says people must be persuaded to isolate – but getting that message across “relies on people hearing about isolation from trusted local figures, not nationally distrusted figures like the PM”. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of his boss. “From the conversation I had with the PM after you,” he tells Hancock, “my concern is that the PM is less convinced of need for action than Rishi! He was really kicking back.” A prime minister, thinking through the ramifications of locking down the public yet again? Perish the thought.
The lockdown plan (by then not agreed) was leaked to the press, after which not even the PM could reverse it. Given what Case says about Sunak – speaking about him as if he’s a problem to be solved – he comes across as being on a pro-lockdown side. What’s less clear is why. How did the head of the Civil Service end up taking sides in such a debate?
We know what other permanent secretaries might have done, because they’ve made it public. Gus O’donnell, who ran the Civil Service from 2005 to 2011, says Sage had too much power, and its reports should have been fed into a higher committee that would have made the decisions, factoring in economic and social damage. In other words, a cost-benefit analysis: a basic tool for public health interventions.
In The Lockdown Files, we see the prime minister appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred – thinking it’s 0.04 per cent, not 4 per cent. Why did Case not make sure the PM had basic facts to hand? Or had Case, like Cummings, come to regard his boss as a “wonky shopping trolley” to be steered rather than served? And if so, steered at whose direction?
In January 2021, Case says “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” – a point on which Hancock is already sold. But we don’t find Case (or anyone else) noting economic and social downsides to fear messaging. And this, overall, is what jumps out. The absence of a wise Civil Service voice adding perspective politicians may have missed.
When I first came across the files, I hoped to find high-quality, top-level secret briefings. Instead, ministers were sharing newspaper articles and graphs found on social media. The quality of information was often poor. Case could at least have addressed the abysmal state of Sage reports, which turned out in the omicron wave to be staggeringly wrong. By then, JP Morgan ended up giving clients better Covid analysis than ministers got from the government – and these ministers (including Sunak) phoned around to find non-government advice. Case presided over this shambles.
Among today’s civil servants, Case is seen as a creature of the Johnson era of chaos: someone regarded as young and malleable, whose unspoken job remit was to not push back. Prime ministers run the Civil Service and are ultimately responsible for dysfunction. But Case ought to have been on the side of basic government standards, cost-benefit analyses and informed decisions.
The Lockdown Files show that Britain ended up with a standard of decision-making far below what should have been. And for that, Case deserves his full share of the blame.
He started off quite moderate, but before long, he was revelling in the power to lock people up