Polite as ever, Michael Gove took to the airwaves to defend the Conservative government, of which he was such a prominent member, against the devastating findings of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
Lord Gove still seems to relish tricky media assignments, and treats defending the indefensible as little more than a challenging debating game. He was not convincing; very much one of yesterday’s men and women, trying to win over a public that dismissed his party with some force on 4 July 2024.
The current leadership, by contrast, seems so embarrassed by the damning “too little, too late” verdict of the inquiry as to be in self-imposed lockdown for fear of contagion, fittingly enough. Some 23,000 lives needlessly lost don’t seem to be making many Tories particularly penitent.
Lord Gove, as one of the few ministers and officials closely involved in the response to the pandemic who has somehow escaped being flayed by Heather Hallett, chair of the inquiry, for incompetence and worse, was the most eligible to break the deafening silence that has otherwise emanated from those named and shamed for their inadequacies during the pandemic.
As ever, the now editor of The Spectator gave a display of apparent candour so laced with evasion, euphemism and diversion as to denude his apology of meaning. He wanted to apologise “on behalf of the government” of the time, though it’s not obvious with what authority he did so.
Had he had a preparatory chat with his old “frenemy”, Boris Johnson, about the then prime minister’s “failure to appreciate the urgency of the situation”, as alleged in the report? Were text messages exchanged with Matt Hancock about the former health secretary’s “nuclear levels of confidence” that “obscured the reality” of his department’s failings – a record that, we now know, left Mr Johnson firmly of the view, contemporaneously recorded, that Mr Hancock was “totally f***ing hopeless”?
Did he consult another ex-boss, Rishi Sunak, about how to defend the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, now exposed as having been launched with the benefit of no scientific advice?
Lord Gove didn’t volunteer how far he was freelancing or speaking with the knowledge of former colleagues, but he did throw in a distracting and contested conspiracy theory about the coronavirus having escaped from a Chinese lab as an excuse for the gross incompetence of the government at the time. The curious reasoning was that a lab-reared virus is necessarily liable to behave differently from one that emerges naturally, and that therefore the Johnson government couldn’t possibly have coped with it (and it’s all the fault of the Chinese, anyway). It’s a novel theory for a novel virus, but not backed by much microbiological evidence. Lord Gove, bright as he is, studied English at Oxford.
As for the disgraced ex-PM, the “singular focus” on Mr Johnson, Lord Gove intoned, “distorts political decision-making”. Translation: it’s not all Boris’s fault.
Yet, as the report made very clear – and as was reasonably apparent at the time – decision-making was confined to a tiny group, and Mr Johnson, as we were always told when he was later struggling to keep his job, made “the big calls” (which weren’t always right).
Someone might remind Lord Gove that he, like his feral protege Dominic Cummings, was one of those frustrated by the dithering of “the shopping trolley” and his failure to impose a lockdown sooner during February and March 2020. To their credit, it was they, and the experts, who were arguing in private at the time that the government indeed risked doing “too little, too late” – and were proven right.
Still, at least Lord Gove has faced up to the critics, as did Mr Cummings, and Nadine Dorries, now a Reform UK personality who berates her former colleagues for their cowardice.
The leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, who was minister for equalities at the time, usually likes to be at the centre of national debate – but she has been keeping her counsel. Elsewhere, the smaller beasts of the Tory jungle have confined themselves to claiming that Baroness Hallett’s painstaking report “rewrites history”; reviving old canards about the Swedish experience; and making snide remarks about the benefits of hindsight.
The mass denial of reality on the right has been eagerly joined by its client media. It is as though they’d rather everyone forgot about Covid, about Partygate, about Mr Johnson’s cry of “let the bodies pile high”, and those cringey CCTV images of Mr Hancock in a passionate clinch with his special adviser.
As with so much else in the record from 2010 to 2024, there is scant evidence of the Tories of today, or those of yesteryear, taking responsibility for their actions, or lack of them. It is true that they have, belatedly, come around to denouncing the Liz Truss mini-Budget (Ms Truss is making herself look even more foolish by sticking with it), and criticising the lack of a Brexit plan – but not Brexit itself, or the austerity that left the public services and the defence of the realm excessively weakened. Not even Partygate, or Mr Johnson’s deliberate misleading of the House of Commons.
Among many other services rendered to the nation by way of catharsis, the work of the Covid inquiry has served to remind the electorate just how unfit for office Mr Johnson and his colleagues were. For many whose lives were touched by tragedy, who lost loved ones or have to cope even now with the consequences of Covid, the coverage of the report has been painful. It is like reliving a nightmare, and it is part of the reason why, even with the Labour government suffering historic unpopularity, the British people on the whole cannot yet find it in themselves to contemplate voting for that lot – now still more unpopular than they were at the last general election.
In political terms, the Tories are also suffering from a kind of electoral “long Covid”, and it may take a new generation of leaders to effect a full recovery. Instead of quibbling and retreating into alibis, they could make a start by accepting the findings in Baroness Hallett’s evidence-based and exhaustive account of a dark episode made worse by the toxic and chaotic leadership of Mr Johnson. Speak up, and speak out, Ms Badenoch.
