The Lockdown Files show how the state really operates. It’s chilling

The past week taught us more about the workings of government than anything since Watergate

We are back in the room where power dwells for the first time since Watergate. With the release of The Lockdown Files, we have been granted a rare glimpse of power’s true nature away from the media gaze: how, in private, it schemes, swears, sulks and derides. On full display are all its dismal paradoxes: its fierce megalomania and constant seeking of reassurance from political aides; its tendency to groupthink and relentless sniping.

It seemed apt to spend my weekend combing through the archives of Watergate – the Nixon administration’s attempts to cover up its involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee “Watergate” headquarters. The scandal led to Nixon’s resignation, after damning and compromising tapes of presidential meetings were sensationally released.

Of course there are differences in texture. While the Watergate tapes were compared to a “gangsters’ meeting in Apalachin”, today’s Whatsapp snippets smack more of minutes from a reputation-laundering outfit in WC1. Today’s leaks have not so much a thuggish air as a PR glow.

Still, in light of The Lockdown Files one feels a new cold solidarity with 1970s America in its horror at the “low-grade quality of mind” that characterised their political class. One person’s despair that President Nixon “thinks people will believe what he tells them on TV and the fallout subsequent to that will never catch up with him” is a description some might use to deride Matt Hancock today.

But perhaps the strongest parallel with Watergate is that our political class has lost its moral credibility. Regardless of one’s take on whether No 10 went too far or not far enough in tackling Covid, surely everyone can agree that the state’s operations seem suffused with humdrum nihilism. It is there in the amused crusades to “scare the pants” off people. It is in the deadpan mocking of holidaymakers locked up in quarantine (“hilarious”). It is in the remorseless dedication to “the narrative”. And it is there in the constant references to public “compliance” as if the public were not self-possessing individuals, or even vulnerable citizens, but rather slaves to a bureaucratic machine.

To be fair, there is a whopping difference between Watergate and The Lockdown Files. The fact is that no crime was committed when the country locked down three times with a reckless disregard for the consequences. Ironically, the only breach of law occurred when members of the ruling class broke their own wretched Covid rules. Nor is there any whiff of a cover-up, save for the row over parties at No10.

But that difference makes The Lockdown Files all the more disturbing. All excesses of state power that occurred during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system; the

Excesses of state power during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system

sovereign may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy.

The Lockdown Files reveal something even more chilling: namely how the people and the state are in lockstep, as we inch towards a new kind of authoritarianism.

The scoop exposes how leaders pursued lockdowns in response to public pressure. Whatsapp exchanges confirm that Boris Johnson dropped his push to end some of the first lockdown restrictions early after polling revealed he was “too far ahead of public opinion”.

But The Lockdown Files also show how zealously the state threw themselves into implementing draconian measures, once it had decided at HQ that lockdowns were the correct populist call. We have come to learn how Hancock conspired to “sit on” scientists, who he denounced as “wacky” or “loudmouth” for defying the official lines. We must digest the knowledge that civil servants insisted the “fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the dubious third lockdown. Just as unedifying is the revelation that, in the run up to this lockdown, politicians seized on a new variant as a tool to “roll the pitch with”. Perhaps most galling is Patrick Vallance’s advice that the Government should “suck up the media’s miserable interpretation of scientific data” to then “overdeliver” in an atmosphere of cranked up fear.

The question is, how did we get into such a mess? My own view is that the rot at the top is reflective of moral angst below. Modern society is simply unable to grapple with the question of how to balance two things – bare life and quality of life. In that ethical vacuum, politicians can only plot, deflect and wage war for control of “the narrative”.

As Giorgio Agamben, arguably one of the world’s most gifted living philosophers, points out, the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what we simply refer to as life: zoē (the biological fact of life) and bios (the way life is lived). The loss of the distinction reflects how modern society has come to prioritise survival over a life lived with meaning; and how Western governments, in their pursuit of power, come to “place biological life at the centre of... calculations”.

This is a dilemma society simply refuses to confront. Journalists are more comfortable examining the parts than the whole. Thus they prefer to pick over Isabel Oakeshott’s “betrayal” of Hancock than broach the greatest of philosophical questions. Those pro-lockdowners who are of a more reflective disposition prefer to cogitate on the supposed dark side of freedom than look in the eye humanity’s inhuman face. On the other end of the spectrum are the Covid deniers who would rather pretend the virus never existed than admit that preserving a certain quality of life for children might mean allowing significant numbers of elderly deaths.

Not even the greatest living philosophers can show us the way out of the moral maze – and thus political dilemma of our time. Until we face up to this conundrum, we are stuck, and we are blind. And so when something like The Lockdown Files comes along and power shows us that it is both the jailer and the mirror – we will fail to truly see.