Opinion: Iain Macwhirter: 'Bagpuss Boris' followed the wrong science

Boris Johnson had nothing sensible to say about the Black Lives Matter demos which drove a coach and horses through the lockdown. He could either have endorsed the protests as legitimate on moral grounds, or called on the police to enforce the law. He did neither until forced to. Leadership was lacking.

The belated introduction of a 14-day quarantine for travellers to Britain seems like a self-destructive exercise in closing the door after the viral horse has bolted. His Government is cancelling border checks on the 10,000 lorries that enter the UK every day, while also saying that the Brexit transition period will not be extended.

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Johnson is accused of allowing children in England to go to theme parks but not to schools, leading to further problems for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The two-metre rule is causing massive problems as the economy tanks, yet the medical evidence for its effectiveness is contradictory.

But the most serious accusation made last week against Boris Johnson was that he was asleep at the wheel in early March, and that his dilatory behaviour led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

The claim was made by the former SAGE member, Professor Neil Ferguson (“Professor Pantsdown” as he was dubbed when he resigned over breaking the lockdown rules to meet his married lover).

“Had we introduced lockdown a week earlier,” the Imperial College epidemiologist told MPs last week, “we’d have reduced the final death toll by at least half.”

In other words, if the UK Government had closed the schools and shops on March 12 instead of March 23, the official death toll might have been 20,000 instead of 40,000. This retrospectively validates Ferguson’s own forecast back in March that, on his model, lockdown should have kept the death toll to around 20,000.

I think most now accept that the UK did just about everything wrong in its response to Covid-19. We didn’t close the borders, didn’t protect care homes, abandoned testing and locked down too late. The question is: who is to blame for all this?

The editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, in “The Covid Catastrophe” which is to be published this week, names the guilty man: Boris Johnson. He failed to attend crucial meetings of COBRA, the Cabinet crisis committee, failed to listen to scientists, and thought the country should “take it on the chin” in order to protect the economy.

But it was not just the PM who delayed lockdown by one week. This was also the policy of the Scottish Government.

I happened to be in the Scottish parliament on March 12, the day that Leo Varadkar announced the closure of schools and universities in Ireland. At First Minister’s Questions, Nicola Sturgeon explained why she was not following suit. She was, she insisted, “following the science”.

School children sent home were likely to take the disease into their communities and to older people, “which might be a greater risk in terms of spread of infection than their being in school”. She also said that parents would have to stay at home to look after them and this would denude staff for essential services like the NHS.

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It all seemed sensible at the time. The national clinical director, Jason Leitch, was all over the media saying that the vast majority of us were going to get the virus anyway, because there was no vaccine, and that we had to “protect the vulnerable” as it “worked its way through the population”.

The release of SAGE minutes two weeks ago confirms that the scientific advisers were at best cool about lockdown. They may not have been in thrall to heartless herd immunity, but they did believe that trying to suppress the virus would be counterproductive.

On March 13, the minutes say "SAGE was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress the spread of Covid-19 will cause a second peak”.

It added that it was “a near certainty that countries such as China, where heavy suppression is under way, will experience a second peak once measures are relaxed”.

The scientific consensus was that eradication of the disease was not possible because it would spread until herd immunity – 60% of the population – finally burned the virus out. But Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, took a different view. She closed the borders immediately cases appeared and kept them closed, and imposed a severe lockdown internally and suppressed the virus until it disappeared. Last week she declared victory over Covid 19.

Only time will tell whether SAGE was right. There may indeed be a second wave and New Zealand will have very little immunity to it. Borders cannot be kept closed forever. However, the minutes seem to confirm that, as Professor Lawrence Freedman argued in the New Statesman, “the Government was largely following SAGE’s advice”.

Some have claimed that Nicola Sturgeon wanted to follow different advice and was overruled by Westminster. That isn’t the case. The First Minister was following the same scientific advice as Westminster, and made clear she did not believe lockdown was yet necessary or desirable on March 12.

It’s hard to believe that a week’s delay could have led to 20,000 deaths, as many as on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Scientists will debate this for years.

Indeed, analysts in Bristol, led by the mathematical modeller Professor Simon Wood, now claim now that the disease peaked before lockdown was introduced, suggesting that SAGE was right.

SAGE had always argued, as the minutes show, that the best way to contain the spread was hand washing, social distancing, and protecting the old and vulnerable. The UK Government was only persuaded of lockdown by Neil Ferguson’s infamous forecast, on March 17, that without it 250,000 would die.

The one thing we have learned from coronavirus is that science is not a monolith and that scientists disagree as much as politicians. All of which makes little difference to the state of the PM’s popularity, which dropped dramatically during Cummingsgate and has not recovered.

Tory commentators are whispering that Johnson has lost it, doesn’t look well. Has he fully recovered from Covid-19 himself? He nearly died, after all.

It’s difficult to tell with Boris Johnson because he never seems particularly in command. For an intelligent man, he is remarkably inarticulate. He “ums” and “ahs” his way through Prime Minister’s Questions as if he is making it up as he goes along. The suspicion is that he is, and that he relied too much on Dominic Cummings to do the thinking for him.

Before he became Prime Minister, Johnson had a reputation for being lazy and shallow. Three years ago, his Tory colleague and rival Michael Gove said that “Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead”. Gove recanted – but it could be he was right all along.

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