Why did Boris the freedom lover join Team Lockdown in the first place? David Cameron’s key strategist STEVE HILTON offers the PM a way out of the Partygate fiasco
A new standard for political shiftiness was set by Bill Clinton 30 years ago when he famously responded to a question about his past drug use by saying he smoked but didn’t inhale.
Happily for him, Clinton may have just lost his title as purveyor of the most ludicrously evasive political porkie ever told.
At a recent American football game in Los Angeles’s brand new SoFi stadium, the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti (along with San Francisco mayor London Breed – yes, that’s really her name), was pictured gurning for the cameras with basketball legend Magic Johnson.
There was only one problem: despite Los Angeles County’s strict Covid policies, which required everybody to wear a mask in all indoor public places and at outdoor events, the mayoral mug was bare.
His explanation? Wait for it – and no, I’m not making this up: he said he removed his mask to take a picture but held his breath the whole time.
Brilliant! Now we have the ‘I didn’t exhale’ excuse.
There’s a big difference between Boris Johnson and the American public figures who have found themselves the target of public ire for failing to abide by the diktats they impose on everyone else
Which might just give Boris Johnson a crumb of comfort, based on the fact that he’s far from the only politician caught breaking their own Covid rules – and he’s not even the one with the worst explanation.
But there’s a big difference between Johnson and the American public figures who have found themselves the target of public ire for failing to abide by the diktats they impose on everyone else.
In the US, all the notorious cases of Covid hypocrisy have involved Democrats – from Garcetti and Co last week to California Governor Gavin Newsom (caught having a lavish private dinner in one of the world’s top restaurants while he’d put his entire state in lockdown), to Steve Adler, mayor of Austin, Texas, who recorded a video message telling his constituents to stay at home… while he was lounging around in a luxury villa in Mexico where he’d flown to for the weekend.
While Republican politicians – Donald Trump at the national level and governors of individual states such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis – could be (and were) accused of many things over the course of the pandemic, hypocrisy was not one of them.
Instead of breaking their own rules, they argued against imposing them in the first place, on the grounds that draconian restrictions such as lockdowns, school closures and compulsory mask-wearing would do little to protect public health but would do a lot of harm in other ways.
Of course they were pilloried for their stance by the media, which from the start has been in thrall to the medical establishment’s pro-lockdown group-think – as has been the case mainly in Britain.
But at least the lockdown sceptics were being honest and consistent.
The Covid hypocrites, by contrast, said one thing in public but acted very differently in private.
The truly baffling question, however, is why Boris Johnson joined Team Lockdown instead of standing up in public for the principles unwittingly expressed in his private behaviour.
A new standard for political shiftiness was set by Bill Clinton 30 years ago when he famously responded to a question about his past drug use by saying he smoked but didn’t inhale, writes Steve Hilton
What’s more, if the Prime Minister can now bring his post-Covid policy agenda into line with those principles and personal instincts, it just might offer a way out of his present political predicament.
That’s because the real scandal revealed by these Covid ‘gotcha’ stories – whether it’s prosecco parties in Downing Street or fancy dinners in California – is not about hypocrisy.
Yes, in a literal sense it’s hypocritical if the people in charge ignore their own rules. But the rule-breaking tells us something much more disturbing: that the people making the rules knew all along that they made no sense.
If Boris Johnson, those Democrat leaders in the US and others sincerely believed what they were telling us – that the removal of our everyday freedoms was vital for public health; that if we didn’t obey their commands we would be ‘putting lives at risk’ – then surely they would have followed the rules, as most people did? These politicians may be hypocrites, but let’s at least concede that they don’t actively want to kill their fellow citizens.
So we must inevitably come to the conclusion that the people in charge, who had more access to the best information than anyone else, knew, even as they were pompously lecturing and patronisingly berating us in their interminable, self-indulgent press conferences, that the whole thing was a charade.
That lockdowns would not actually ‘save lives’. That banning social contact for everyone was totally unjustified. That wearing a cloth mask is pointless.
They knew all this but imposed their ludicrous, micro-managing coronavirus law anyway. That’s the real political crime.
It’s not just that our leaders’ brazen flouting of the rules is a slap in the face to the many millions of dutiful, law-abiding people who followed the rules and made such enormous sacrifices.
The elite rule-breaking reveals the awful truth: that most of the sacrifices of the past two years were actually in vain.
Lockdowns, social distancing, all those endless bossy instructions barked at us by bureaucrats… ‘Hands, Face, Space’… none of it made any real difference.
We don’t just have to deduce this from the behaviour of the politicians who promoted all this rubbish. We now have objective evidence. We have, er, data.
What’s more, if the Prime Minister can now bring his post-Covid policy agenda into line with those principles and personal instincts, it just might offer a way out of his present political predicament
Remember how they droned on about ‘following the data’? Well, let’s do that, shall we?
One of America’s most respected universities for the study of public health, Johns Hopkins, recently published a comprehensive analysis of the Covid policy response in multiple countries.
The conclusion was that lockdowns had ‘little to no effect’ in saving lives, showing just a 0.2 per cent decrease in Covid-19 mortality on average across Europe and the US.
Worse still, the researchers found that limiting social gatherings may have increased Covid-19 mortality: ordering people to stay at home ‘may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness… often, lockdowns have limited people’s access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks and zoos, or included… strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places’.
Listen to Steve Hilton’s podcast on podnews.net
No wonder they had all those parties in the Downing Street garden!
So what did the lockdowns accomplish? According to the study, ‘they have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence and undermining liberal democracy’.
The authors’ conclusion: ‘Lockdowns are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.’
Now, lest anyone say that this is being wise after the event: no, it was all known from almost the first days of the pandemic.
The idea behind social distancing is to counteract viruses spread by droplets, which typically land within a metre or so of the source. But we knew early on that Covid-19 was mostly spread through much smaller particles known as aerosols, which are lighter and can travel 30ft or more.
While Republican politicians – Donald Trump at the national level and governors of individual states such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis – could be (and were) accused of many things over the course of the pandemic, hypocrisy was not one of them
Instead of the social-distancing rules, we should have focused on ventilation and the benefits of being outdoors. It was known as soon as data started to emerge from Italy in early 2020 that the virus posed a massively different risk depending on someone’s age and health condition.
Instead of universal lockdowns targeting the whole population, we should have protected the most vulnerable.
And so on… all these arguments have been rehearsed over and over again during the past two years. Some of us were making them right from the start.
I argued in March 2020 on my Fox News show for the lifting of America’s lockdown, warning that the ‘cure is worse than the disease’. Well, now we know that the ‘cure’ wasn’t even a cure.
Lockdowns failed in their stated aim but caused a huge amount of pain, suffering and collateral damage in the process.
It’s easy to see why Left-wing politicians jumped at the chance to impose lockdowns. Their ideology is all about centralised government control.
They sincerely believe in the utopian ideal of an all-knowing ruling elite of experts making wise decisions on behalf of a compliant populace who can’t be trusted.
Conservatives, however, have always rejected the arrogance and hubris of this technocratic zealotry. We understand that no central planning authority, however well-intentioned, can match the wisdom and common sense of individuals, families, neighbours, businesses doing the right thing for themselves and their community.
The tragedy of the past two years is that few politicians seemed to grasp this as instinctively as Boris Johnson.
From his days as a journalist mocking the bureaucratic madness of the EU to his leadership of the Brexit campaign with its passionate and entirely valid riposte to Remain elitism – ‘the British people have had enough of experts’ – Johnson was a living, breathing rebuke to out-of-control administrative over-reach.
How did we get from that to the Government telling people how many family members they could see, which items of shopping were ‘essential’, and arresting old ladies for sitting on a park bench?
Johnson’s instincts at the start of the pandemic – and frankly, the instincts that led to some semblance of normal life carrying on inside No 10 – reflected the values that endeared him to such a wide swathe of the electorate, giving the Tories their biggest General Election victory since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
But at some point he let ‘the experts’ take over.
Now that we can see just how wrong those experts were (and just how much damage they did), it’s time to recapture that populist anti-bureaucratic spirit.
Start with the economy – and learn from the mistakes of the Biden administration in America.
Huge increases in government spending and an enormous expansion in regulations have unleashed inflation and crushed small business.
An extremist ‘climate agenda’ has sent energy costs soaring without actually curbing emissions.
As the author of ‘Vote Blue Go Green’, I’m all for effective action on climate change. But the focus should be on next generation nuclear power, not clobbering businesses and consumers.
Some commentators mistakenly believe that conservative populism has to mean Big Government conservatism.
In fact, the right combination is to be pro-business on tax and regulation while being pro-worker on immigration. That’s the best way to help create a dynamic economy that generates good jobs with high earnings.
In a post-pandemic world, it’s understandable that one of the main drivers in the opposite direction – towards Big Government – will be a desire to support the NHS. And of course everyone rightly recognises and appreciates the heroism of NHS workers who battled to save lives in often unbearable circumstances.
But the fact that lockdowns were sold to the British people as a way to ‘protect the NHS’ tells you something serious is wrong.
Wasn’t the NHS supposed to protect the British people? Those who work in the NHS are heroes, but its structure is way past its sell-by date.
One of the most shocking statistics during the entire pandemic was the ratio of intensive care units to the population in different countries. The US tops the list with nearly 35 per 100,000. In Germany, it’s just under 30; France has just over 11.
In the UK the figure is 6.6.
This is almost entirely the result of the fact that healthcare in the UK is centrally controlled – with a staggering 1.3 million people directly employed by the NHS. Far from saving lives, the antiquated top-down structure of the NHS made the impact of the pandemic much worse than it need have been
The 2010-15 coalition government tried to reform the NHS with much needed competition but turned back in the face of vocal opposition, from nurses in particular.
If there’s anyone who can sell the benefits of NHS reform, it’s Boris Johnson, with his bureaucracy-busting mojo back.
It’s too late to undo the damage that lockdowns have done. And it seems unlikely that Johnson will be able to undo the damage to his personal reputation from the ‘Partygate’ revelations.
But what he can do is revive his political reputation – and his party’s political fortunes – with a high-energy effort to throw off the bureaucratic sclerosis of the past few years and set Britain on a new course of positive populism that makes life better for all the people who put their trust in Boris Johnson not so long ago.
Listen to Steve Hilton’s podcast here.
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