It was lonely opposing the first lockdown, but one day few will remember backing it
Admitting that the ruined businesses, NHS waiting lists, lost education and national debt were incurred in error isn’t easy – but it is right
Did you oppose the Iraq war? Good for you. It seems bizarre, 19 years on, that anyone ever thought it a good idea to spend a trillion pounds, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and turn millions more into refugees, only to end up destroying Western prestige and creating more extremists in the region than before.
I have to ask though – forgive my being so blunt – whether you are quite sure that you were against it at the time. You see, according to YouGov, 66 per cent backed the invasion when it was launched. Then the disasters began – the civilian casualties, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the rise of Islamic State – and people started to edit their memories. Asked the same question by the same pollster in 2015, only 37 per cent admitted to having backed military action in 2003.
Something similar, I have no doubt, will happen over the lockdowns. As the dreadful health and economic costs bite, few will recall having supported the closures. Just as most Frenchmen over a certain age remember backing the Resistance, so most Brits will remember being lockdown sceptics. Psychologists call it “hindsight bias”.
We are not there yet. Many cling, with a tinge of desperation, to the notion that their sacrifices were worthwhile. Admitting that the cancelled weddings, the ruined businesses, the lost education, the NHS waiting lists and the national debt were incurred in error, that we narrowed our children’s lives for nothing, is not easy.
Still, the evidence keeps piling up. A meta-study of 24 surveys, reported in Wednesday’s Telegraph, found that imposing a compulsory lockdown, as opposed to trusting people to use their common sense, reduced the mortality rate by just 0.2 per cent.
Think about that for a moment. Around 52,000 lives were lost in Britain in the first wave. If these figures are correct – and the researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University have done a thorough job with a huge dataset – then the most extreme curtailment of freedom in modern times saved perhaps 100 lives.
Those people were just as much the centre of their universes as you are of yours. But more lives will be lost through undetected tumours and other undiagnosed conditions. Indeed, as the researchers note, the lockdown killed people, not just through secondary causes, but with Covid, because it pushed them indoors where transmission was more likely.
Judged even by the metric of mortality, the lockdowns failed. But how to measure the other privations and penalties – the taped-off playgrounds, the dye poured into lakes to keep people away, the insolent tone which the police took with honest citizens, the loneliness of the elderly, the bankruptcies, the ruined university experiences, the moneyprinting, the mental health problems hatching in silence?
The thought that these things were needless is too painful to contemplate. The more we suffered, the more we tell ourselves that it must have been worthwhile.
Think, for example, of how quickly the cost-benefit analysis turned negative for the combatant nations in the First World War. Most belligerents hoped for swift and relatively painless victories. They instead found themselves paying a price that, had they been able to foresee it, would have made their participation unthinkable.
Yet, precisely for that reason, they felt they had to keep going. Settling for anything less than victory would mean betraying the sacrifice of the fallen. It would mean that their sons had died for nothing. And so, in history’s grisliest example of the sunk costs fallacy, they carried on hurling their young men against the machine guns.
It was hard to reappraise the First World War while survivors wanted to find meaning in their loss. Only in the 1960s did the view that the conflict was futile become dominant.
How long until the lockdowns are similarly reappraised?
Ninety-three per cent of Britons backed the first lockdown, and 85 per cent the second. Seventy-one per cent opposed the lifting of restrictions last summer. Only in December 2021 did the mood turn, with majorities against the closure of shops, schools and pubs.
Those earlier figures already feel incredible, don’t they? Broadcasters and Labour MPs who spent two years screaming for tighter restrictions are now, without a blush, talking about the misery they caused.
But, trust me, opposing the first lockdown was a bloody lonely business. Precious few commentators came out against the restrictions in March 2020, among them: Toby Young, Fraser Nelson, Jonathan Sumption, Matthew Parris, Freddie Sayers, Julia Hartley
Brewer, James Delingpole, Peter Hitchens, Ross Clark, Janet Daley and, soon afterwards, Allison Pearson.
Back in that sun-drenched, terrified, illiberal spring, no dissent was permitted. Even to point out that an alternative approach was possible – and, indeed, visible in Sweden – was to court vilification.
When Toby Young wrote that we habitually did put a value on human life via the recognised formula for calculating quality-adjusted life-years, that we used it whenever medical interventions were proposed, and that we should apply the same test to lockdowns, he became a national hate figure.
The odium was overwhelmingly one-way. Lockdown sceptics did not respond by accusing their opponents of aiming to destroy children’s education, or of being indifferent to mental illness, or of wanting others to die of cancer. Nor did they accuse them of being “anti-science”.
Yet it soon became clear that the science on which the lockdowns were predicated was incorrect. Supporters of the closures had predicted a catastrophe in Sweden. By imposing only mild restrictions, the authorities had, according to most international observers, condemned their people to mass fatalities.
In fact, cases peaked and declined in Sweden more or less in line with everywhere else. In other words, the original justification for the lockdowns had been falsified as early as April 2020. But, by then, people were invested in their sense of sacrifice.
The closures were maintained, but the justification kept having to be amended. “Flatten the curve” became “wait for a vaccine”. When the vaccine arrived, it became “keep the pressure off the NHS”, then “stop new variants”.
As more real-world data came in, it became clear that the length and severity of a lockdown made remarkably little difference to infection, hospitalisation or death rates. Other factors mattered more: latitude, population density, obesity, vaccination rates and, most of all, average age. But this did not stop the modellers from churning out their incorrect predictions – always incorrect in the same direction.
“Were we fools then,” asked William Hazlitt in his essay on William Godwin, “or are we dishonest now?” Have we forgotten the fervour with which we demanded that hairdressers be closed and kids kept off school? I think we are starting to.
It was perhaps natural, faced with what we were told was a deadly plague, to err on the side of caution. It was to be expected that, having normalised our new, hunkered-down lives, we would need to be coaxed back to normality. It was inevitable, if inexcusable, that dissenters were pilloried. And it was only human, as people began to feel the first promptings of doubt, that they would look for someone to blame. Which is enormously unlucky for Boris Johnson, on whose watch it happened.
The reason Tony Blair became a hate figure was not just that the Iraq war was mistaken. It was that people who had backed it felt guilty. They wanted a sin-eater, a scapegoat. Johnson, despite his dislike of lockdowns, has been marked for the same office.
Perhaps, on some level, he foresaw it. In 2008, Johnson mused, after the fashion of CS Lewis, on the archetype of the sacrificial king, the leader whose ritual slaughter allows his people to achieve redemption: “Some of the kings are innocent; some of them are less innocent. It doesn’t really matter. They must die.”
To put the horrors of 2020 behind us, we want to take out our sickles and soak the soil of the barley fields with kingly gore. Did Boris resist the lockdown fanatics more than other politicians? Did he defy the modellers to reopen in July? Did he disregard them again when they demanded a December lockdown? Was he vindicated? It doesn’t really matter.
In the scheme of things, few people are interested in his election-winning record, his lonely battle to control immigration or his determination to restore British sovereignty in Northern Ireland – let alone in who would do a better job.
We are in the grip of deep, tribal impulses. Blood calls to blood.
Back in that sun-drenched, terrified, illiberal spring, no dissent was permitted