Confessions of a lockdown sceptic

Now that Britain’s lockdown policy is being properly scrutinised at last, thanks to Rishi Sunak’s revelations in the Spectator, sceptics are coming out of the closet.

Not everyone has seen the light, and there is a mounting backlash in some quarters to Sunak’s “revisionism”, in particular from former No 10 aides Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, both lockdown fanatics.

But at least now there is a debate about the pros and cons, and questions are being asked about whether it was wise to close schools, shut down the economy, and “save” the NHS from all but Covid cases.

Sunak’s claim that a tiny cabal within Downing Street made sweeping decisions without weighing up the wider risks is chilling. As is his insight into SAGE, the committee of scientific advisers who apparently only gave the government one perspective on Covid scenarios and drowned out all dissenting voices.

Sunak said he didn’t want to point fingers but, still, there should be a reckoning whereby the original sceptics are vindicated, their reputations restored, and the chief perpetrators of the misjudged social experiment made to atone for their mistakes.

Some of our leading scientists, including the Oxford epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta, who called for focused protection, and Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, found themselves trolled and censored for daring to challenge lockdown orthodoxy early on. 

Paradoxically, sceptics were tarred as right-wing zealots, even by – especially by – left-wing commentators, as if toeing the Conservative government line was the only acceptable course.

Alternative narratives were thin on the ground – absent, in fact – among the broadcast media, which developed a perverse obsession with filming inside intensive care units. Just a handful of sober science correspondents in the prints kept their heads.

Living in Scotland throughout the pandemic was a uniquely surreal experience if you believed, as I did, that there must be a better way (Sweden’s, for example) of dealing with a virus that was mostly a danger only to the very old and fragile. 

For much of that period, the minutiae of people’s lives in Scotland were managed on the say-so of a dentist, and an anthropologist who pursued zero Covid and wanted to ban border crossings.

But worse than that was the spectacle of Nicola Sturgeon beamed into our living rooms for daily Covid briefings that doubled up as SNP political broadcasts.

Unlike in London, where a variety of ministers would front televised press conferences alongside Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, Sturgeon refused to delegate. When the BBC tried to scale back its coverage, she kicked up hell.

Did Sturgeon make me a lockdown sceptic? No, I don’t think so, but being told, as curbs eased in June 2020, that she would lock us up again because Scots were embracing liberty too literally by heading for the parks was too much.

I got in my car and drove south, cheering as I crossed into England. If I was arrested, I would say I was moving my daughter out of her London flat (which was true), moving house being one of the exemptions for breaking Sturgeon’s five-mile travel limit.

During the seemingly interminable lockdown that began on January 5, 2021, in Scotland and dragged on for bleak months as the vaccine programme got underway, I took day trips from Edinburgh to London on empty trains.

My excuse, if I had been challenged, was work but these were opportunities to see my daughters. We walked by the Thames, first in the snow and then as spring emerged, from Borough to Battersea and back again. 

Each time I arrived back at Waverley I could have punched the air, having again proved that a Nationalist First Minister, on what was by then an ego trip, could not physically prevent her subjects from leaving Scotland.

In October 2020, there was the northern uprising in England, with mayors and local council leaders, from Manchester to Bradford to Middlesbrough, demanding to see the scientific evidence that ruinous lockdowns saved lives.

At Westminster, a revolt from Tory MPs forced the PM to account for his latest three-tier system and submit any new strategy to parliamentary scrutiny.

There was no such opposition in Scotland, even when Sturgeon banned alcohol consumption in pubs and restaurants – still just about open then – and hoteliers in the Highlands, where cases were almost non-existent, said guests were nipping up to their rooms (where drinking was allowed) between courses to enjoy a bottle of wine.

Against the backdrop of this madness, when we knew that the statistical risk of a Covid death was as likely as being run over by a bus for the vast majority of us, defiance of Nationalist diktats helped restore sanity.

The pandemic gave Sturgeon an unprecedented platform, which she exploited for political ends; no wonder Scotland was always slower to exit lockdown than England. 

But thanks to a close-knit group of neighbours and friends, all blessed with gardens and minds of their own, some of us, in small ways, unlocked ourselves.