The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files — conclusions — part 1

My lengthy look at The Telegraph‘s March 2023 series The Lockdown Files concludes today and tomorrow.

My most recent post examined the decline in the communications of British government officials and advisers: from professionalism to infighting.

What can we learn from The Lockdown Files? Several things.

Who else would have published the WhatsApps?

Just days after the first instalment of The Lockdown Files, MPs from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation interviewed News UK chief operating officer David Dinsmore, Guardian head of news Nick Hopkins, Daily Mirror editor in chief Alison Phillips and DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright.

Press Gazette has a good recap of the session, available to view on Parliamentlive.tv.

Had The Telegraph not published the WhatsApps and their context, would any other newspaper have stuck its head above the parapet?

It seems unlikely there would have been such an in-depth examination elsewhere (emphases mine below):

Bosses at Sun and Times publisher News UK, Mail publisher DMG Media, the Mirror and The Guardian have indicated they would have published, or seriously considered publishing, Matt Hancock’s Whatsapp messages …

Asked by Labour MP Kevin Brennan whether he would have published Hancock’s messages, News UK [Murdoch’s media empire] chief operating officer David Dinsmore initially said: “You’d need to ask the editors” …

Asked the same question Nick Hopkins, head of news at The Guardian, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation: “I think we would have considered it.

“We’d have looked at the material on its merits. I think we would have probably, if we were going to publish it, done it in a slightly different way.”

Daily Mirror editor Alison Phillips, gave a more decisive answer, saying: “I mean, The Telegraph and Isabel Oakeshott do have an anti-lockdown agenda. We didn’t – we were on the side of caution in terms of lockdowns.

“However, I do think those Whatsapp messages are in the public interest, and we would have used them.”

DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright agreed: “I agree with Alison, I think they were very much in the public interest. We don’t really know the exact nature of this nondisclosure agreement [binding Oakeshott], which you would have wanted to see.

“But I’m afraid it gives a unique insight into the way government works and how the government handled the pandemic.

“I wouldn’t like to be in the position of having turned it away.”

Wright did say however that he had some “qualms” about how the story was handled by The Telegraph.

How Government works

As DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright said above, The Lockdown Files showed us how the Government works.

On March 6, The Telegraph‘s Sherelle Jacobs had an excellent article on the subject, ‘Like Watergate, The Lockdown Files show how the state really operates. It’s chilling’:

… perhaps the strongest parallel with Watergate is that our political class has lost its moral credibility. Regardless of one’s take on whether No 10 went too far or not far enough in tackling Covid, surely everyone can agree that the state’s operations seem suffused with humdrum nihilism. It is there in the amused crusades to “scare the pants” off people. It is in the deadpan mocking of holidaymakers locked up in quarantine (“hilarious”). It is in the remorseless dedication to “the narrative”. And it is there in the constant references to public “compliance” as if the public were not self-possessing individuals, or even vulnerable citizens, but rather slaves to a bureaucratic machine.

To be fair, there is a whopping difference between Watergate and The Lockdown Files. The fact is that no crime was committed when the country locked down three times with a reckless disregard for the consequences. Ironically, the only breach of law occurred when members of the ruling class broke their own wretched Covid rules. Nor is there any whiff of a cover-up, save for the row over parties at No 10.

But that difference makes The Lockdown Files all the more disturbing. All excesses of state power that occurred during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system; the sovereign may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy.

The Lockdown Files reveal something even more chilling: namely how the people and the state are in lockstep, as we inch towards a new kind of authoritarianism …

But The Lockdown Files also show how zealously the state threw themselves into implementing draconian measures, once it had decided at HQ that lockdowns were the correct populist call. We have come to learn how Hancock conspired to “sit on” scientists, who he denounced as “wacky” or “loudmouth” for defying the official lines. We must digest the knowledge that civil servants insisted the “fear/guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the dubious third lockdown. Just as unedifying is the revelation that, in the run up to this lockdown, politicians seized on a new variant as a tool to “roll the pitch with”. Perhaps most galling is Patrick Vallance’s advice that the Government should “suck up the media’s miserable interpretation of scientific data” to then “overdeliver” in an atmosphere of cranked up fear.

The question is, how did we get into such a mess? My own view is that the rot at the top is reflective of moral angst below. Modern society is simply unable to grapple with the question of how to balance two things – bare life and quality of life. In that ethical vacuum, politicians can only plot, deflect and wage war for control of “the narrative”.

… the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what we simply refer to as life: zoē (the biological fact of life) and bios (the way life is lived). The loss of the distinction reflects how modern society has come to prioritise survival over a life lived with meaning; and how Western governments, in their pursuit of power, come to “place biological life at the centre of… calculations”.

This is a dilemma society simply refuses to confront. Journalists are more comfortable examining the parts than the whole. Thus they prefer to pick over Isabel Oakeshott’s “betrayal” of Hancock than broach the greatest of philosophical questions. Those pro-lockdowners who are of a more reflective disposition prefer to cogitate on the supposed dark side of freedom than look in the eye humanity’s inhuman face. On the other end of the spectrum are the Covid deniers who would rather pretend the virus never existed than admit that preserving a certain quality of life for children might mean allowing significant numbers of elderly deaths.

Not even the greatest living philosophers can show us the way out of the moral maze – and thus political dilemma of our time. Until we face up to this conundrum, we are stuck, and we are blind. And so when something like The Lockdown Files comes along and power shows us that it is both the jailer and the mirror – we will fail to truly see.

The leaders we possibly deserved

Taking Sherelle Jacobs’s observations a step further, did we get the leaders we deserved because we cannot think critically and cannot distinguish between surviving and living?

Quite possibly.

The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley explains a few practical truths in ‘Matt Hancock was the lockdown champion Britain deserved’:

… how … did this man of marginal ability and dubious character become health secretary? One answer is that when he took the job, in 2018, it wasn’t considered very important. 

The health service was devolved and self-governing; Jeremy Hunt [current Chancellor], Matt’s predecessor, limited his day-to-day responsibilities to wearing an NHS badge. Hancock’s innovation was to take that badge and stick a rainbow flag on it (because when you’re lying on a hospital trolley, bleeding to death, it’s a comfort to know that the A&E you’re not being treated in is inclusive and diverse).

We have to blame Brexit, too. Leavers, like me, were so obsessed with “getting it done” we were willing to park other issues, like health reform, and vote for a team that wasn’t the best. But … Remainers must also take responsibility for opposing Brexit so doggedly that they pushed half the country into the arms of such incompetents. Matt was a Remainer, though it probably wasn’t one of his convictions. He hasn’t got any of those. Yet.

There’s a running theme in the Lockdown Files of Westminster contempt for the so-called “hard-Right” of the Conservative Party, characterised as libertarian, even pro-virus. Enthusiasm for lockdown was about saving lives, absolutely; yet in the deepest recesses of our political id it was also Remainers’ Revenge. Not in the sense of it being narrowly motivated by Brexit but because it allowed bureaucrats and experts who felt spurned by populism to re-flex their muscles – and a large number of Britons who felt discombobulated by the politics of the past few years (however they’d voted) to “take back control” via a giant reboot of culture and society. Lockdown was popular. Many people have never left it.

When Boris considered lifting some of the restrictions in the summer of 2020, he was warned that it would be “too far ahead of public opinion”, which probably favoured tougher regulations for longer. One might speculate that Matt was the health secretary Britain deserved because he largely did what we wanted. A more thoughtful individual who questioned the science, moved cautiously and visibly U-turned on policies when they didn’t work would not have provided the reassurance we craved …

This was the politician who, at the height of his career, opened an empty hospital [a Nightingale] that would never be used – a hollow man in the hollow ward, a saga that leaves one wondering how much of lockdown was necessary and how much was simply a bromide?

Continuing on the same themes is James Rogers, who wrote a March 6 article for Conservative Woman: ‘Hancock circus masks Johnson’s coup against democracy’:

… it is clear that Hancock behaved as he did only because the Johnson government – which became a regime – enabled him. Whitehall had a clear strategy to do whatever it wanted; naysayers would be ignored and cast as paranoid trouble-makers.

The Johnson Regime seized extraordinary powers and escaped all scrutiny, save for castigation by Labour, the BBC and Guardian for being ‘too slow to lock down’. They would not take their boots off the people’s throats for 18 months, nor would they seek to pacify their minds; they treated us like farm animals, and sadly many of us behaved like sheep.

Fifteen years earlier, even Tony Blair’s government acknowledged the need for parliamentary supervision of a government that had invoked emergency powers. When it updated the relevant legislation – Emergency Powers Act 1920 and Civil Defence Act 1948 – it passed the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA), which imposed a ‘triple lock’ of conditions that would bind an ‘emergency government’ to submit its strategies and diktats to parliament every 30 days. Not the Johnson Regime: it swept the CAA aside, and introduced the Coronavirus Bill.

The Johnson government had an 80-seat majority. There would have been no piece of reasonable legislation that it could not have got through. Instead, it chose to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, and govern by ministerial decree for 18 months. What occurred in spring 2020 was a brazen, ultra vires coup.

The justification by Michael Gove and Penny Mordaunt was bizarre. They stated that C-19 was an emergency that demanded bespoke legislation, but since there was sufficient time for it to be drafted, it was not appropriate to use the CCA which applied to immediate emergencies. However, by the same token, the situation was so ‘urgent’ that only one day could be spared for debating the Coronavirus Bill. (How was a 350-page Bill drafted in five days?)

Rogers raises several pertinent points for the official coronavirus inquiry, which was supposed to have started in March 2023, by the way. Hmm. How’s that going? Answer there came none.

Some of his points follow:

1. The Johnson government ignored the Cabinet Office convention that for ‘emergency powers’ to be invoked, the nation had to be faced with a ‘catastrophic emergency’. There was never any ‘catastrophe’, nor was there any ‘emergency’, nor any risk of such, only the semblance of such created by the government and MSM. Here is a link to ONS figures on C-19 fatalities in 2020. Deaths from C-19 with NO pre-existing condition (England) 4,169; (Wales) 294. That’s fewer than 4,500, with an average age of 82.5 years.

2. The same convention holds that ‘emergency powers’ must be relinquished as soon as the reason for invoking them diminishes. The Johnson Regime held these powers until autumn 2021. Almost certainly, the government desired to maintain the ‘emergency powers’ so that it could push through the untested jabs with an ‘emergency use authorisation’.

3. The government awarded itself £266billion of our money to spend as it saw fit, with no parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever. Matt Hancock was empowered to use our freedoms to promote his career and an unseen Cabinet Office agenda.

4. The government co-opted the MSM (with more than £500million of our money). They were told not to ask awkward questions at this ‘vital time’ and complied with enthusiasm.

5. In WWII it was a criminal offence to spread fear, negativity and a defeatist attitude. In 2020-21 it became government policy, one that was prosecuted with great intensity. I know of one person who was so alarmed in spring 2020 that she took her own life.

9. Then came the jabs. In browbeating, bullying and bribing the populace, the government behaved with contempt for medical ethics. It abandoned the principle of ‘informed consent’, and in mandating jabs for care workers (and attempting the same for NHS staff) the government acted illegally, contravening the Public Health Act 1984 s.45E.

10. Perhaps most worryingly, the government hobbled the courts. In 2020 Simon Dolan’s applications for a judicial review of the government’s actions were twice tossed out by our judges – the same judges who a year earlier had chastised Johnson’s proroguing of the Commons in order to uphold the ‘primacy of parliament’.

… What happened in 2020, 2021 and into 2022, can only be regarded as a coup, and it has been habit-forming, as Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng can attest.

Now, in spring 2023, Johnson has walked, never to be held accountable, while the jackass Matt Hancock is being set up as the patsy. The Cabinet Office goons are still pulling the strings. They are giving us Hancock in the hope that if the common man sees his public execution, the government, indeed the whole establishment that brought us a 30-month nightmare, will not be pursued.

What is being released seems carefully controlled with the intention of provoking ‘social outrage’. Hancock himself is clearly rattled, and has been demanding immunity from prosecution. However I doubt that anything that shows the Johnson Regime’s policies were grossly unscientific will be released. Unless we are shown internal messages or documents that admit that lockdowns didn’t work, masks were useless and vaccination was pointless because natural immunity trumped anything a jab could achieve, the ‘Hancock Files’ are essentially froth …

Hancock will get his comeuppance, I am sure, but the most pressing questions that need answering are: a) Why did the Johnson Regime execute a coup? b) Why was this consistently ultra vires conduct never scrutinised in parliament or by the press? If we do not insist on protecting our democracy, we will lose it – the World Health Organisation will see to that.

Interestingly, parts of the Coronavirus Act 2020 still remain — and would take primary legislation to repeal. Why?

‘COVID-19 Response: Living with COVID-19’ on the Government’s website says:

There are a number of permanent provisions within the Coronavirus Act 2020 which would require new primary legislation in order to repeal. Some of these provisions are still necessary to support the recovery from the pandemic, including:

• • a. Section 11: Indemnity for health service activity: England and Wales. This provision ensures that any gaps in indemnity cover for NHS clinical negligence do not delay or prevent ongoing care. Without this, NHS Resolution would be unable to pay legitimate clinical negligence claims, leaving clinicians exposed to the full cost and patients without compensation.
  • b. Section 75(1): Disapplication of limit under section 8 of the Industrial Development Act 1982 (IDA). This provision ensures that the financial limits set out in section 8 of the IDA do not hinder the allocation of vital Government schemes for businesses such as the Help to Grow scheme, the Automotive Transformation Fund, and the Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme (OWMIS).

The Government is committed to removing unnecessary provisions from the statute book as soon as possible and will look for opportunities to do so as the Government’s legislative programme proceeds.

Once the Government has received the conclusions of the COVID-19 public inquiry, it will consider whether further changes to public health legislation are needed. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and any outstanding provisions in the Coronavirus Act 2020 would be in scope for this work.

The Government will also work with the Devolved Administrations [Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland], who have used their specific powers within the Coronavirus Act during the pandemic, to help transition provisions into devolved legislation where necessary.

Also puzzling is what appears to be a further extension of the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Extension of Powers to Act for the Protection of Public Health) Order (Northern Ireland) 2023, ‘laid before’ the Northern Ireland Assembly — which has not met for many months — on March 23, 2023 and came into force the following day. It was signed by Peter May, ‘A senior officer of the Department of Health’. How does that work? The Alteration of Expiry Date section says:

2. Section 48 of, and Schedule 18 to, the Coronavirus Act 2020 do not expire at the time when they would otherwise expire and expire instead on 24th September 2023.

MPs kept in the dark

Hope might lie in a group of Conservative MPs who are either lockdown rebels or did not receive requested information from the Government about the pandemic.

On March 5, The Telegraph posted ‘Project Fear’s “psychological warfare” must never be repeated, say lockdown rebels’:

Sir Charles Walker, who was a leading member of the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative backbenchers, said that he was distressed by the leaked conversations.

“What makes me so angry is the evils and the psychological warfare we deployed against young people and the population, all those behavioural psychologists,” he told The Telegraph.

“And there needs to be a reckoning. We need to understand and fully appreciate the damage that those sorts of campaigns did.”

Sir Charles lamented Parliament going “missing in action” as most MPs waved through dozens of Covid restrictions with little debate.

He said: “Those voices that raised concerns were just othered. We were positioned as being anti-lockdown, Right-wing headbangers. And actually wanting to do the right thing isn’t Right-wing.

“We did terrible things to youngsters. We did terrible things to a large number of people. We need to make sure we never do those things again” …

Craig Mackinlay, the Tory MP for South Thanet, added: “An artificial climate of fear was created, which has led to all the corollary outcomes that many of us, particularly in the Covid Recovery Group, were concerned about.

“Ongoing negative health issues, education issues – and not least the destruction of our economy, as one crackpot idea after another found its way onto the statute book.”

Sir John Redwood, another member of the Covid Recovery Group, said the tactics ministers used “always backfire, they always mislead and they don’t lead to good government”.

Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland Office minister who led revolts against restrictions as a backbencher, retweeted 19 tweets he sent while lockdowns were in place.

His posts set out both the economic and mental health damage caused by restrictions and called for a new Public Health Act, including reform to modelling.

Esther McVey MP laid out her concerns for The Telegraph in ‘The inconvenient questions the Covid inquiry must answer’:

Who could have guessed that Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages would be so revealing and painful? The Lockdown Files have laid bare the extent to which ministers, civil servants and scientists were allowing political machinations rather than the scientific evidence to drive the catastrophic moves to inflict lockdowns, masks and more on the nation. My hope now, as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery, is that these revelations will prompt the kind of robust debate on Covid policies that we should have had in 2020-21.

One would hope that the official Covid inquiry would provide a platform for that discussion …

But I fear that interrogation may not happen. There is a major risk that we will end up with an inquiry that focuses disproportionately on small details, such as whether a lockdown should have happened a week earlier, rather than the untold damage done to the nation from the best part of two years of restrictions … 

Along with other MPs and peers, I have already urged Baroness Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, to consider a wider range of voices, in order to avoid it being a whitewash. The inquiry needs to go beyond the direct costs of the disease itself and quantify the losses from the unintended, but very real damage that Covid policy has done. It also needs to ask perhaps the least convenient question of all: should we have stuck to the original pandemic plan, which didn’t advocate mass lockdowns?

Indeed, I still haven’t heard a good answer to the question of why the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011, which was revised in 2014, was seemingly discarded in 2020 without good reason. Lockdowns were never part of the plans or those of 27 other European countries, all of which were published by the European Centre for Disease Control on Feb 5, 2020 …

Moreover, we must not forget that the severity of the disease ended up being much lower than our politicians had made out …

The inquiry might also wish to ask, in light of the revelations in the Lockdown Files, why it seems that the system of government can be manipulated by a couple of overzealous ministers or officials. And it should analyse how much was done just for the sake of appearing to do something, leading to many unnecessary restrictions. These are not easy matters, but they made a great deal of difference when it mattered.

As one of only a handful of Tory MPs who has consistently spoken and voted against Covid restrictions, it has been quite obvious to me that our cure has been worse than the disease. The Covid inquiry should take views like mine seriously, but will it have the courage to do so? I once again urge Baroness Hallett to find the integrity and boldness she needs to assess the policy of lockdown and other mandates honestly and fully.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was Leader of the House during the pandemic — as such, a Cabinet member — said that he was unaware of evidence for a reduction in quarantine time.

‘Jacob Rees-Mogg: We were denied evidence we needed to make anti-lockdown case’ tells us:

Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he was never told that the Chief Medical Officer believed it would be possible to reduce the number of days people had to self-isolate after contact with a positive Covid case …

Reacting on GB News, Mr Rees-Mogg said that he would have argued in favour of a reduction had he known.

The former leader of the House of Commons said four senior ministers made all key Covid decisions and that other Cabinet colleagues were not shown the evidence they needed to make an anti-lockdown case.

Mr Rees-Mogg said: “I was in the Cabinet at the time and I didn’t know that Chris Whitty was saying that we could perfectly safely reduce the quarantining period.

“Otherwise I would have been saying: ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’

“That wasn’t what was being briefed to the Cabinet. We were getting briefed that the decision had been made, that it was going to remain; and then it was finally reduced under great pressure.

“The enthusiasm for locking people up was something that was not shared with the rest of the Cabinet – or the evidence!”

He said such decisions were made by a so-called quad of Boris Johnson, the former prime minister; Rishi Sunak, then the chancellor; Mr Hancock; and Michael Gove, then chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

He added: “It was decided by the quad, and I think the then chancellor Rishi Sunak was making the case for easing lockdowns.

“When I spoke to Boris during this period, I was inevitably making the case for easing lockdowns, but I wasn’t in the quad.

“There were Cabinet discussions but by the time we got to those discussions, most of those decisions had already been made. We had a pre-Cabinet briefing for those of us who weren’t in the quad basically to tell us what had been decided” …

Liz Truss, another Cabinet member at the time, said the same thing last year.

The article continues:

Mr Rees-Mogg agreed with the suggestion that the lockdowns had a “calamitous” impact on the country’s mental health and economy.

He said: “I agree. We must never do this again. When it first started, I was not in favour of emergency legislation. I was in favour of the Civil Contingencies Act, which has much greater parliamentary scrutiny, and happens on a UK-wide basis, rather than the devolved authorities.

“The devolved stuff was ridiculous. If you lived on the Welsh border and you went into Wales, you were at risk of being arrested. It caused great confusion. It should have been done on a UK-wide basis, and then it would have required very regular parliamentary votes, whereas we had six-monthly votes to decide whether to extend it or not.”

The former Cabinet minister said he had no sympathy for Mr Hancock over the way the WhatsApp messages had come out.

“I think if you’re in public life, you must expect that things about you come out into the public arena,” he said …

“I’m very against the creeping privacy law – another thing we’ve got from the human rights courts – because I believe in freedom of speech, and if I’ve done something or I’ve said something, people should be entitled to report it.

“And bear in mind politicians spend most of their time – particularly if you look at the WhatsApp things of Matt Hancock – trying to get good impressions of themselves. It’s only fair that when there’s something critical, it’s printed.”

Asked whether all MPs are as obsessed with their appearance and how they come across as Mr Hancock, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “I think Matt takes it to an extreme.

“My view in government is that if you do the right thing, if you do a good job, you’ll get good PR for it – and that’s much more important than painting yourself orange, as some politicians do, to try to appear good.”

The media and Project Fear

The media have much for which to answer from the fear that they reinforced day after day, with no contrarian voices. (GB News did not exist at the time.)

On March 4, The Telegraph’s Janet Daley wrote, ‘The BBC conspired in the campaign of fear that kept Britain locked up’:

It wasn’t about science, it was about politics. That was obvious as soon as the government began talking about following The Science as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth. Nobody who knows anything about science could say such a thing unless they were engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion …

The mass public acceptance of these extraordinary diktats was, initially, not all that surprising. At its outset, this was classed as a temporary emergency. What’s a few weeks (of what was exceptionally pleasant sunny weather) out of a lifetime if it serves to protect yourself and others – and, of course, the National Health Service? But it went on and on – and the longer it went on, the more the population appeared to accept it as a new normal. Even when the damage – especially to the young in both educational and psychological terms – was becoming clear, it went on. It is important to try to understand this …

What was most alarming was the alacrity with which the broadcast news media fell into line – with boundless enthusiasm – as they were given a key role in the day to day dissemination of government authority. As the medium through which the official information was conveyed – with, as we now know, often misleading modelling projections and outdated death figures – they went from being public service news media to what the BBC notably has always insisted it is not: state broadcasters. From disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound …

If this crisis was as severe as we were being told, wasn’t it vitally important that every source of expertise was given a fair hearing? Or was the appearance of unity considered so vital that it overrode everything – even sometimes the facts? Perhaps the worst effect of all this uncritical coverage was that government ministers, having manipulated public opinion into a frenzy of anxiety and potential guilt, then found themselves trapped in the national mood they had created.

How could we not have seen the consequences coming? How could anyone who has raised children not have foreseen the damage that would likely result when developing infants, growing toddlers, and sensitive adolescents were deprived of all that essential contact with the unfamiliar world beyond their own homes? Let alone the hideous fate of those elderly patients who had to die alone and the interminable grief of their loved ones who were forced to miss the final moments and were even denied the comfort of a full funeral.

What on earth was everybody thinking?

Interestingly, that same day, The Times had testimony from educators at all levels about the deleterious changes that lockdown produced in primary school pupils to university students in ‘Eerily quiet and sad: how lockdown affected students — by their teachers’:

A primary school teacher reported that children had lost the most basic skills:

With so much time spent on screens, handwriting was a challenge: we gave them each a pot of Play-Doh and had “dough disco” sessions, where they squished the dough to music, in order to improve their motor skills sufficiently that they could start writing again. We still hold additional handwriting sessions weekly. Handwriting has become an issue nationally in schools since the pandemic …

In reception class we have placed a huge dressing-up box. If they want to be a princess, they have to do up the buttons on the dress. Ofsted has said that in many schools, children forgot how to eat with a knife or fork or struggled to dress themselves after the pandemic.

We had to re-teach our school expectations such as rules and manners. I wrote a set of behaviour scripts, right down to how to speak to a teacher at the school gate. We taught even the youngest to say “Good morning, how are you?” as a conversation opener.

The secondary school principal said that self-harm was on the rise and that literacy skills had declined:

We quickly noticed telltale signs that both boys and girls had been self-harming — we recorded a 300 per cent increase compared to before the pandemic. Many cut themselves still; my staff have been trained to spot the markers. We try to get help for them.

After two years, much of it spent alone at home on screens, their literacy levels were at rock bottom. We assessed our 1,200 pupils in 2022 and found that 11-year-olds had a reading age of nine. These kids did not have books in their houses during the pandemic. They may have been reading on screens — but that will have been with Instagram and Snapchat notifications pinging and disrupting their focus.

So, teaching the children to read has become our number-one task. I hired a reading tutor who still does nothing but teach reading over six weeks using the phonics system of sounding out letters, which is really the job of a primary school. If kids cannot read properly, every subject — science, maths, history — is beyond them. We soon saw a correlation between this illiteracy and dropping out of school, not turning up to lessons and behaving badly. If you are in a history class and you cannot read, you will kick off to avoid looking like an idiot …

One of the biggest concerns is the slump in the number of children turning up to school, even now. Instead of our pre-pandemic figure of 97 per cent of pupils attending school, the figure has dropped to the low 90s. There are children we struggle to get in even once a fortnight …

I am anxious myself — I am on Sertraline to cope with it. It was sparked by having the responsibility of trying to make the right decisions to keep my kids learning, to give them a future, while also keeping my staff and families safe. Last week as Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages were revealed I felt sick at the thought that the politicians may not have been giving us accurate information to make the right choices. It makes me feel angry for the children and all they have lost.

The university professor says that his students are withdrawn and quiet:

By the time the Covid generation reached me in my university lectures and seminars, they were a shell of their former selves …

By the time they found their way into my first-year university lectures they were, compared to the students of old, unrecognisable.

Having spent their coming-of-age years online, sitting on Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams, they were now withdrawn and hunkered down. They were nothing like the passionate, vocal and highly engaged students I had become used to teaching for 20 years …

The net result of all this was a Covid generation who were eerily quiet, silent almost, and who often appeared to shun socialising and interacting with others. What used to be a thriving campus felt like a ghost town, while in my lectures and seminars students only rarely raised their hand to ask a question.

… to be honest, I think we’ve yet to see the full effects of the pandemic in higher education. Increasingly, across the country, there is growing chatter about much larger number of students simply dropping out from their studies, perhaps because they are struggling with the cost of living but also because they are struggling with the transition back to the post-Covid reality.

So, while the pandemic had a very visible impact on my world, it’s also clear this impact still has a long way to run.

I will wrap up on The Lockdown Files tomorrow.

I bet the official inquiry won’t come remotely close to what the series uncovered.

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Red Wall MPs: Miriam Cates — part 3

My series on the Red Wall MP Miriam Cates concludes today.

Those who missed my previous posts on the Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire can find them here and here.

On October 27, 2021, Miriam Cates revealed to GB News that she and her family had to move out of their home for a time when she got doxxed. YorkshireLive has the story:

The MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge told GB News she has felt frightened by her previous experiences.

She said: “I have had an experience where someone was trying to incite Twitter users to share my address online.

“I had to move my family out of the family home while the police got involved.”

But she claims her colleagues have faced even worse issues, saying some have “got harrowing stories.”

The Conservative MP also said her parliamentary role was an adjustment from her previous position as a school teacher.

Online Safety Bill

Cates supports the Online Safety Bill, which is with the House of Lords at the moment.

The proposed legislation has captured the hearts and minds of nearly every MP.

On the evening of Tuesday, January 17, 2023, in the Bill’s last day in the Commons, Sir Bill Cash rose to put forward his new Clause 2 (emphases mine):

In a nutshell, we must be able to threaten tech bosses with jail. There is precedent for that—jail sentences for senior managers are commonplace for breaches of duties across a great range of UK legislation. That is absolutely and completely clear, and as a former shadow Attorney General, I know exactly what the law is on this subject. I can say this: we must protect our children and grandchildren from predatory platforms operating for financial gain on the internet. It is endemic throughout the world and in the UK, inducing suicide, self-harm and sexual abuse, and it is an assault on the minds of our young children and on those who are affected by it, including the families and such people as Ian Russell. He has shown great courage in coming out with the tragedy of his small child of 14 years old committing suicide as a result of such activities, as the coroner made clear. It is unthinkable that we will not deal with that. We are dealing with it now, and I thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for responding with constructive dialogue in the short space of time since we have got to grips with this issue …

The Irish have come up with something that includes similar severe penalties. It can be done. But this is our legislation in this House. We will do it the way that we want to do it to protect our children and families. I am just about fed up with listening to the mealy-mouthed remarks from those who say, “You can’t do it. It’s not quite appropriate.” To hell with that. We are talking about our children.

On past record, which I just mentioned, in 1977-78, a great friend of mine, Cyril Townsend, the Member for Bexleyheath, introduced the first Protection of Children Bill. He asked me to help him, and I did. We got it through. That was incredibly difficult at the time. You have no idea, Mr Deputy Speaker, how much resistance was put up by certain Members of this House, including Ministers. I spoke to Jim Callaghan—I have been in this House so long that I was here with him after he had been Prime Minister—and asked, “How did you give us so much time to get the Bill through?” He said, “It’s very simple. I was sitting in bed with my wife in the flat upstairs at No. 10. She wasn’t talking to me. I said, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ She replied, ‘If you don’t get that Protection of Children Bill through, I won’t speak to you for six months.’” And it went through, so there you go. There is a message there for all Secretaries of State, and even Prime Ministers.

Cates was next:

I too rise to speak to new clause 2, which seeks to introduce senior manager criminal liability to the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) set out, we will not push it to a vote as a result of the very welcome commitments that the Minister has made to introduce a similar amendment in the other place [House of Lords].

Protecting children is not just the role of parents but the responsibility of the whole of society, including our institutions and businesses that wish to trade here. That is the primary aim of this Bill, which I wholeheartedly support: to keep children safe online from horrendous and unspeakable harms, many of which were mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) …

Only personal criminal liability will drive proactive change, and we have seen this in other areas such as the financial services industry and the construction industry. I am delighted that the Government have recognised the necessity of senior manager liability for tech bosses, after much campaigning across the House, and committed to introducing it in the other place. I thank the Secretary of State and her team for the very constructive and positive way in which they have engaged with supporters of this measure …

I offer my sincere thanks to the NSPCC, especially Rich Collard, and the outstanding Charles Hymas of The Telegraph, who have so effectively supported this campaign. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash); without his determination, knowledge and experience, it would not have been possible to achieve this change. He has been known as Mr Brexit, but as he said, even before he was Mr Brexit, he was Mr Child Protection, having been involved with the Protection of Children Act 1978. It is certainly advantageous in negotiations to work with someone who knows vastly more about legislation than pretty much anyone else involved. He sat through the debate in December on the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), and while the vote was taking place, he said, “I think we can do this.” He spent the next week in the Public Bill Office and most of his recess buried in legislation. I pay tribute to him for his outstanding work. Once again, I thank the Secretary of State for her commitment to this, and I think this will continue our Parliament’s proud history of protecting children.

Many members of the public, however, are concerned that this will go far beyond child safety. We shall see.

Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: Section 35

Before Christmas 2022, I wrote about the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which the Scottish Parliament (Assembly) passed in breathtaking haste.

The Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack MP, invoked Section 35 to block it. It was an unprecedented move, because Westminster has never before used Section 35 to block Scottish legislation.

The Commons debated the move on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 17, 2023.

No one could have imagined that all hell would break loose.

Miriam Cates said:

I rise to support the Government’s decision to use their section 35 powers with regard to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill …

In paragraph 27, the Government point out that the Bill does not create “sufficient safeguards”. They are right to be concerned about “fraudulent and/or malign applications” because of the implications for child safeguarding. This morning, the Education Committee heard from Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse. It was harrowing to hear the stories of decades of child sexual abuse throughout institutions across the country. One key feature of such abuse is that predators will exploit any loophole that they can find to get access to children, and I am afraid that that is what will happen with the Bill.

We should not be asking how easy it is for someone who is uncomfortable with their sex to obtain a GRC [Gender Recognition Certificate]; we should be asking how easy it is for a predator to get access to children. The Bill would make it vastly easier for a predator to get access to children by changing their gender with an eye to exploiting loopholes to access children and women in particular …

… Changing legal gender, with a potential route to long-term changes to fertility, sexual function and health, is not suitable for 16-year-olds and is a huge safeguarding risk.

Paragraphs 30 and 48 mention membership on the grounds of sex and single-sex spaces. Sex Matters recently did a report that looked at the impact on single-sex spaces of men’s ability to access them by changing their gender. Women say, “I never went back to that swimming pool,” or, “I never went back to that counselling class,” because for many of them, the dignity of having a women-only space and knowing that there will be no men there is important. We will see a chilling effect on important single-sex rights if the Bill passes. As a woman, I fully understand the threats to dignity and safety that the Bill poses, because it will change the social contract. In this country, we recognise that in toilets, changing rooms and public spaces, there are areas where only women are allowed.

In a restaurant recently, I had an experience where a man dressed as a woman walked into the toilets where I was on my own. He stood behind me and stared at me in the mirror, looking me in the eye. I have no idea whether he intended me any harm, but my evolved instinct as a woman was to be frightened, because unlike in almost any other species, women are far less powerful than men and we cannot defend ourselves. [Interruption.] No, it is a fact. The difference in strength between men and women is phenomenal, which is why we have separate sex categories for sport. Women are evolved to be wary of men in intimate spaces, which is why we have single-sex spaces and why they must continue to exist for the safety and privacy of women. The Bill threatens that social contract.

Finally, this threatens the understanding of our law, which should be based on fact, and someone cannot change their sex any more than they can change their place of birth or who their parents are. I fully understand the complex arguments involved and we should treat this with compassion, but if the law is not based on fact, then how can we trust the law? That is why the Government are absolutely right to serve this notice.

The Labour bench was quite noisy.

Madam Deputy Speaker Rosie Winterton called the House to order.

Labour’s Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) rose:

Goodness me, that speech was probably one of the worst transphobic dog-whistle speeches I have heard in an awfully long time. Linking the Bill with predators is, frankly, disgusting, and you [Cates] should be ashamed.

The Deputy Speaker said:

Order. No—calm down!

Somewhere at this point — I didn’t see it on BBC Parliament, but I might have looked away — Russell-Moyle, who has form for playing up in Parliament having been suspended for a day for picking up the mace, crossed over to the Conservative benches to sit near Cates.

You can see it here, starting at 1:51. It was part of GB News’s Mark Dolan’s editorial asking if Labour have a women problem:

'When did standing up for women and their hard-won sex-based rights make you a bad person?'@MrMarkDolan pic.twitter.com/EWZu3PuGe4

— GB News (@GBNEWS) January 22, 2023

Conservative MP Paul Bristow moved down a row or two to sit next to Cates. Father of the House Peter Bottomley is sitting in front of her. Bristow made a Point of Order about Russell-Moyle’s behaviour a few days later. More on that in a moment. Here is Conservative MP Laura Farris’s tweet of the scene:

I’m so glad this creepy weird behaviour has been called out today. Not content with screaming abuse at my friend Miriam Cates after her speech on Wednesday, @lloyd_rm plonked himself onto the Conservative benches to intimidate her pic.twitter.com/cI7kFCRhI1

— Laura Farris MP (@Laura__Farris) January 20, 2023

Cates spoke:

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Russell-Moyle replied:

No, I will not give way to you, or anyone else. [Interruption.] I mean to the hon. Member.

On the substance of this, ignoring that horrible speech we have just heard—

The Father of the House [longest serving male MP] Sir Peter Bottomley, a Conservative, intervened:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Did you hear anything transphobic in the previous speech?

Madam Deputy Speaker responded:

I have to say to the Father of the House that different Members of this House will interpret speeches in different ways. I suggest that we move on quickly, and I think the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) needs to calm down, moderate his language and move on to the substance of the debate, otherwise I will ask him to resume his seat.

Russell-Moyle said:

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is difficult when we are talking about these emotional matters.

The reality of this is that this section 35 is the new Tories’ section 28. It is their continuation of a war against a group of people—their culture war—that they want to pursue, and they think it will advantage them in the polls. That is what the Australian Conservatives thought as well and what the Republicans in the US thought, but I trust it will not, because the people do not like the bigotry that we hear from the other side.

Another Conservative MP, Alicia Kearns, intervened:

I recognise that the hon. Gentleman feels very strongly about this, but I would ask him to use caution about labelling a party as solely one thing, because it is Conservative party colleagues who led for the conversion therapy ban that has been announced today. When I was elected, no other MP talked about it for seven months, and we have delivered it today. I caution him to please not label all Members on certain sides of the House as transphobic or homophobic, and I also challenge anyone being labelled that in this House.

Russell-Moyle then spoke, acknowledged Alicia Kearns’s point then said, in part:

What this report says in reality is that there is no amendment this Government would accept or allow to pass. What this flimsy piece of paper indicates is that the only Bill they would accept is the current UK law, and anything that deviates from it would be blocked. I am afraid that is an undermining of the very concept of devolution. The Government should just be honest, and say that they want to remove the devolved competences in this area from the Scottish Parliament and return them back to Westminster. At least that would be an honest debate, rather than this dog-whistle debate about the safety of children, which, frankly, is not correct.

… Let us see how this Bill rolls out in Scotland. We could then see the flaws that might come from it, and the Scottish Parliament could have amended it and taken action, because all Bills are living, practical documents.

I say this as a gay man who loves all-male spaces sometimes and finds that the liberation of having such spaces is important—and I am sure that many women feel that the safety of all-women spaces is important to them—but this Bill does not change that law one bit. GRCs exist at the moment, and we already have a system for people to change their passport and their driving licence without a GRC. Going into a toilet, a public facility or a refuge is not contingent on a certificate at all, so all those arguments are bogus, and to continue a bogus argument knowing that it is bogus is, I am afraid, a form of bigotry.

Afterwards, Conservative MP Craig Mackinley lightened the mood by discussing what one can and cannot do at the age of 16, excerpted below:

I am rather concerned that the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) might have a seizure at the end of my speech, but we will do our best to keep him calm …

I do have issues with the whole concept of this—I am not going to stray into that too much, but I find the provision on the age of 16 scarcely believable. Even in Scotland a 16-year-old cannot drive or buy alcohol or cigarettes.

I was going to cover the things that people can do at 16. I understand that in education in Scotland, access for the armed forces to encourage a future and a career in the armed forces is actively discouraged, which is taking a lot of people away from credible and superb future employment. In Scotland—I always like to give the sunbed rule—someone cannot even go on a sunbed, and they cannot contract, yet here we are—[Interruption.] We all wanted to do lots of things aged 16. I rather wanted a tattoo and an earring, but here I am aged 56, and I am damn pleased I did not go down that route. It means that when I lie on beaches, most people sort of point at me say, “Look at that. There’s a guy without a tattoo on this beach.”

The other safeguards I am concerned about regard sex offenders. Are we really so naive as to think that those who are so minded will not exploit some of these rules to do things that we know they want to do? Are we so naive as to think that people will do the right thing in all circumstances? I am an absolute libertarian Conservative and I have no interest in how people want to live—that is a matter for them. I have completely no interest, and I do not bring my opinions on it to this place for legislation. That is not my interest or concern. I steadfastly say that—people can do exactly as they please …

I am concerned that the process for obtaining a GRC would be much easier and much reduced under the Bill, as opposed to what I think has been a well debated, well rehearsed, and settled argument across the UK up to this date. The settled will has been that a GRC can be obtained where someone has lived as a different sex for two years, had some medical advice and intervention and guaranteed that they shall live in that way for the rest of their days. I think that is sensible; I am fully in agreement with that.

As I said, I am a libertarian Conservative, so I really do not mind what people want to do, but this is an issue about section 35 of the Scotland Act. The Bill would change the Equality Act 2010 and change how we live. I support the Government.

People responding to Laura Farris’s aforementioned tweet complained about Madam Deputy Speaker and Lloyd Russell-Moyle:

Deputy Speaker was pretty passive I thought. Not the same as impartial obvs!

— Shelagh Fogarty (@ShelaghFogarty) January 20, 2023

She should have expelled him, but, then again, she’s a Labour MP.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who wasn’t there, didn’t say anything, either.

Imagine if a Conservative MP had done that: immediate suspension with the video making the news for weeks!

On Sunday, January 22, The Express reported that Russell-Moyle apologised to Cates:

It is understood that Mr Russell-Moyle has written to Ms Cates, calling the tone of his remarks “a mistake”.

Also apologising to the Deputy Speaker on Wednesday, Mr Russell-Moyle said, “I should have expressed my deep disagreement on what I believe is an abhorrent view in a more appropriate way.”

On Monday, January 23, Guido Fawkes had a further update. Paul Bristow had raised a Point of Order about the incident:

These red lines were measured 2 sword lengths apart to prevent opposition MPs from causing harm to each other & birthed the red line trope. Why then has our current parliament @CommonsSpeaker allowed a male MP to breach this in order to intimidate a female MP? pic.twitter.com/KQQmi2IvDe

— Geordikev (@_Geordi_kev_) January 23, 2023

Guido’s post says (red emphases his):

Tory MP Paul Bristow just made a point of order in the Commons rightly condemning the behaviour of Lloyd Russell-Moyle on the green benches last week. While Russell-Moyle has already apologised for failing to control his “passion” during his screed at Miriam Cates last week, his decision to then sit directly next to her on the Tory benches has also sparked outrage. Surely just a coincidence… 

Deputy Speaker Dame Rosie Winterton also responded, although hedged her bets a bit by claiming “it is very difficult for me to know what was in the honourable gentleman’s [Russell-Moyle’s] mind” when he sat a yard away from the woman he’d just screamed at. Doesn’t seem that difficult to Guido…

This morning, Lloyd tweeted:

It is not uncommon at the end of a debate for people to sit at different seats while waiting to enter the chamber or the lobbies.

I had no concept that this was making any member feel awkward and would never do anything to deliberately intimidate anyone in or out of the chamber.

Guido will let observers decide whether Russell-Moyle’s seating decision was a mere coincidence…

That statement of Russell-Moyle’s is quite something. For a start, this was not at the end of the debate. It was during the debate. As such, no one was waiting to enter or leave the chamber.

His second sentence is absolutely breathtaking. He would have seen Paul Bristow move next to Miriam Cates. She had just related an experience in which she felt intimidated, then Russell-Moyle crossed the aisle to move near her when her expectations would have been for him to remain in his seat across the chamber.

Disgusting.

I do not know if Miriam Cates has been re-selected by her local Conservative Association for 2024. She seems a determined lady and, no doubt, she is a good constituency MP. We need more like her.

More profiles on Red Wall MPs will follow after Easter.

The Lockdown Files: Matt Hancock’s hunger for absolute control — part 3

Matt Hancock looms large in The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series which ended earlier this month.

For more background, see parts 1 and 2.

Matt Hancock latest

The series continues after an update on latest news about the UK’s former Health and Social Care Secretary.

On Saturday, March 25, 2023, The Guardian reported that Hancock had been one of a handful of Conservative MPs caught in a prank set up by the left-wing activist group Led By Donkeys, ‘Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company’ (emphases mine):

The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.

Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling” …

The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday, with recorded undercover footage …

The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs.

Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.

It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window …

In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.

“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”

… Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.

Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents …

Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.

A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”

Furthermore, Matt will be looking for a new job as he will not be standing again as an MP come the next general election.

Although I am not a defender of Hancock, former BBC presenter Jon Sopel is hardly in a position to take pot shots at him, considering that he, too, fancies filthy lucre, as Guido Fawkes revealed on Monday, March 27:

Here's Jon Sopel giving a $10,000 speech at an event promoting the world’s biggest tobacco company when he was a BBC presenter. https://t.co/0LKJPmfcgP pic.twitter.com/qYGFRZUYLH

— Media Guido (@MediaGuido) March 27, 2023

Days earlier, on March 18, The Mail‘s Richard Eden reported that Hancock’s girlfriend and her estranged husband sold their South London house to Gordon Ramsay for several million pounds:

Should she ever tire of turning her boyfriend, Matt Hancock, into a TV star, Gina Coladangelo has a lucrative alternative career as a property tycoon.

I can disclose that she and her estranged husband, Oliver Tress, managed to sell their marital home to fiery TV chef Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, for a staggering £7.5 million.

It’s an astonishing price for the area of South London. Not only is it almost double the £3.8million that Gina and Tress paid in 2015, but it’s £2.5 million more than the top price paid previously for any property in their street.

Zoopla had estimated its value as between £3.8 million and £4.6 million …

The sale, which Land Registry documents confirm went through in January, is all the more impressive as it comes when British property prices are predicted to plunge by ten per cent.

The five-bedroom Edwardian house is in one of London’s most desirable areas. Ramsay, 56, and his wife, 48, bought it in their joint names from Gina and Tress, the founder of upmarket homeware and clothing chain Oliver Bonas.

Gina, 45, left Tress, 55, with whom she has three children, for former health secretary Hancock, 44, who competed in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!.

Ramsay, who has an estimated fortune of £175 million, already owns a huge house, said to be worth £7 million, less than a mile away …

Last year, he, Tana and their five children were reported to have temporarily moved out after work began on a super-basement …

Tatler adds:

It is easy to see why Ramsay might need a new home. The chef announced at the start of the year that he and wife Tana are expecting their sixth child. On the Heart Breakfast show, the chef said that ‘there’s one more on the way’ to join their five children: Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Oscar, three. Holly recently featured as one of the most eligible singles at Tatler’s Little Black Book party. According to Hello! magazine, the Ramsays are believed to have paid in cash for their new luxury pad; they also own a £6 million house in Cornwall and a mansion in Los Angeles. Gordon and Tana marked their 26th wedding anniversary very recently, having married in Chelsea in 1996.

On March 6, as The Lockdown Files were drawing to a close, The Telegraph reported, ‘Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps “upset” travel industry’:

A major international travel conference has axed Matt Hancock from its programme after The Telegraph revealed he had been highly critical of the travel sector during the pandemic.

The Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT) confirmed that Mr Hancock will no longer be speaking at its annual conference in Doha, Qatar, saying that the messages uncovered by The Telegraph had caused upset to many in the travel industry.

Last week, as part of its Lockdown Files series, The Telegraph revealed that Mr Hancock and Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, shared jokes about those being forced to stay in quarantine hotel rooms during the pandemic …

The former health secretary was also highly critical of the airline and airports industry, describing them as being “totally offside” and “unhelpful”, while Mr Case [top civil servant Simon Case] labelled them as “horribly self-serving” ...

In a statement to The Telegraph, Steven Freudman, chairman of the ITT, said that Mr Hancock had become a “major distraction”.

He added: “We have over 25 distinguished speakers and it would have been unfair on them for the focus to have been solely on Matt Hancock.”

The ITT annual conference is regarded as one of the sector’s key annual events, with thousands of travel professionals and high-profile speakers from across the globe attending.

The initial decision to invite Mr Hancock as a speaker at the conference was widely criticised by sector figures even before The Lockdown Files revelations were published.

Industry figures told The Independent that they wanted the ITT to reconsider its decision, accusing Mr Hancock’s policies of “destroying the sector” and resulting in thousands of travel jobs being lost …

Dr Freudman said: “The original invitation was issued in the hope that Matt Hancock would recognise the damage that he and his government caused the travel industry with its handling of the pandemic.

“We were also hoping that he might confirm that lessons had been learnt and that any future crises would be handled differently.

“However, his WhatsApp messages have upset many of us in the travel industry and his presence would clearly have been a major distraction.”

The Telegraph has contacted Mr Hancock for comment.

That day, Hancock’s lawyer appeared on GB News and was introduced as such. He responded vehemently that he did not want that detail mentioned. The presenter calmly read out the lawyer’s email to GB News stating that he permitted them to describe him as Hancock’s lawyer. The lawyer sheepishly responded that he forgot to type ‘not’. Comedy gold:

hancock's crisis PR will help you understand why Tory MPs struggle to do much except spread chaos & why the party shd be closed down in 2024 https://t.co/kYgs5PL1eT

— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) March 6, 2023

Isabel Oakeshott describes The Telegraph ‘bunker’

Hancock gave Oakeshott access to the 100,000 WhatsApp messages because she co-authored his book, Pandemic Diaries.

On Friday, March 24, she wrote an article for Tatler describing what working in seclusion with The Lockdown Files reporters was like at the beginning of 2023:

… The Daily Telegraph was the only newspaper that consistently challenged the lockdown agenda and had a track record of managing huge investigations in the public interest – famously exposing the MPs’ expenses claims in a scandal that rocked Westminster in 2009. They immediately agreed to put a full team of top journalists on the project: The Lockdown Files. 

In a secure bunker, well away from the main newsroom, I worked alongside their reporters, filleting the messages: a team of eight or so, full time, for eight weeks. To avoid hackers, our computers were not connected to the internet. We worked from hard drives stored overnight in a safe. Anything printed was swiftly shredded. Nobody else came into the bunker, which, as the weeks went by, became increasingly unhygienic. Discarded takeaway containers, half-eaten packets of Colin the Caterpillar sweets, mouldy mugs and other detritus were strewn over every grubby surface. Hunched over our computers in a room with no windows, we were like lab rats in some dubious experiment, wracked by colds, coughs and – oh, the irony – Covid. By the week of publication, our core team had swelled to some 25 writers and digital news experts. The Daily Telegraph’s newsroom was emptying out – leaving those who remained wondering where all their colleagues had gone. 

There was a curious voyeuristic pleasure in reading the banter between Government ministers and their aides – including some very flirty exchanges between two household names. Who was sending who the heart emojis and who was complimenting who on their sexy outfits? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t be too happy if that news was in the public domain.

On Sunday, March 26, we got an answer about the heart emojis. Michael Gove sent them to Hancock:

Gove Explains “I ❤️ You” WhatsApp to Matt Hancock https://t.co/fxDcSZNbDg pic.twitter.com/HTAV3ftxSo

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 26, 2023

Hancock responded, ‘You have been true throughout’.

Gove explained to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that he agreed, particularly on that day, with Hancock’s course of action. No surprise there. They’re cut from the same cloth.

Guido Fawkes has the interview:

Oakeshott’s article continues:

The WhatsApp from Matt Hancock came through at 1.20am: ‘You have made a big mistake,’ it said darkly – leaving me to imagine what punishment he had in mind. The following day, he released a furious statement, accusing me of ‘massive betrayal’. Fair enough – I had breached his trust and would face plenty of questions about that decision. But did anyone outside the media bubble seriously doubt it was for the public good? The torrent of grateful messages from ordinary people, often with harrowing personal stories about their own suffering during lockdown, was answer enough for me … Dining in a mountain restaurant in the French Alps, my partner, Richard Tice [leader of the Reform Party], was surprised – and touched – to be passed a note by the waiter from a fellow diner who had recognised him. On the crumpled piece of paper were the words ‘please thank Isabel’. 

Lord Sumption on Hancock: ‘a fanatic’

On March 10, after The Lockdown Files came to an end, Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and guardian of civil liberties, wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘Matt Hancock was never a policy maker — he was a fanatic’:

The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself.

Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out …

Nevertheless, Hancock’s WhatsApp messages offer an ugly insight into the workings of government at a time when it aspired to micromanage every aspect of our lives. They reveal the chaos and incoherence at the heart of government, as decisions were made on the hoof. They expose the fallacy that ministers were better able to judge our vulnerabilities than we were ourselves. They throw a harsh light on those involved: their narcissism, their superficiality, their hypocrisies great and small. Above all, they show in embarrassing detail how completely power corrupts those who have it.

… Even the most ardent lockdown sceptics accept that in extreme cases drastic measures may be required. But Covid-19 was not an extreme case …

No government, anywhere, had previously sought to deal with epidemic disease by closing down much of society. No society has ever improved public health by making itself poorer …

The fateful moment came when the government chose to go for coercion. This ruled out any distinction between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, because it would have been too difficult to police. It also meant that ministers began to manipulate public opinion, exaggerating the risks in order to justify their decision and scare people into compliance. So we had the theatrical announcement of the latest death toll at daily press conferences from Downing Street. Shocking posters appeared on our streets (“Look him in the eyes”, etc). Matt Hancock announced that “if you go out, people will die”.

The scare campaign created a perfect storm, for it made it more difficult to lift the lockdown …

Hancock was the chief peddler of the idea that everyone was equally at risk from Covid-19. This proposition was patently untrue, but it was useful because it frightened people. “It’s not unhelpful having people think they could be next,” wrote his special adviser, who knew his master’s mind well. Other countries did not behave like this. In Sweden state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was able to reassure his public that a lockdown was neither necessary nor helpful. Events have proved him right.

… Matt Hancock insisted on schoolchildren wearing masks in class in spite of scientific advice that it made little difference, because it was necessary to keep up with Nicola Sturgeon. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to suggest that once the vaccine rollout started the lockdown should be relaxed, Hancock resisted. “This is not a SAGE call,” he said, “it’s a political call.”

Once ministers had started on this course, there was no turning back. It is hard to admit that you have inflicted untold damage on a whole society by mistake. Hancock resisted shortening the 14-day quarantine period in spite of scientific advice that five days was enough, because he did not want to admit that the original policy had been wrong. Relevant evidence was simply shut out. His response to the success of Sweden’s policies was not to learn from it but to dismiss it as the “f—ing Swedish argument”. Having no grounds for rejecting the Swedish argument, he had to ask his advisers to find him some. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he barked.

The adrenalin of power is corrosive. It was largely responsible for the sheer nastiness of the Government’s response to criticism. Hancock lashed out at the least signs of resistance or dissent. He wanted internal critics sacked or moved. He suggested the cancellation of a learning disability hub in the constituency of an MP who intended to vote against the tier system. Ministers “got heavy” with the police to make them tougher on the public …

I’ll get to the learning disability hub in a moment. Shameful, just shameful.

Lord Sumption’s editorial continues:

There is no sign that Hancock either thought or cared about the wider consequences of his measures. He seems to have believed that there was no limit to the amount of human misery and economic destruction that was worth enduring in order to keep the Covid numbers down. Rishi Sunak is on record as saying that any discussion of the wider problems was ruled out in advance, and this is fully borne out by the WhatsApp messages. Any hint from Sunak or business secretary Alok Sharma that the cure might be worse than the disease provoked an explosion of bile but no actual answers.

Hancock fought tooth and nail to close schools and keep them closed. Deprived of many months of education, cooped up indoors and terrified by government warnings that they would kill their grandparents by hugging them, children suffered a sharp rise in mental illness and self-harm although they were themselves at no risk from Covid-19. Cancer patients were left undiagnosed and untreated. Old people, deprived of stimulation, succumbed to dementia in large numbers. Small businesses were destroyed which had taken a lifetime to build up. A joyless puritanism infected government policy. No travel. No wedding parties or funeral wakes. No hugs. Anyone who spoke up for a measure of decency or moderation in this surreal world was promptly slapped down as a “w—er”.

Real policy-making is never black and white like this. It is always a matter of judgment, of weighing up pros and cons. In that sense, Matt Hancock was never a policy-maker. He was a fanatic.

Why did hitherto decent people behave like this? In Hancock’s case, at least part of the answer is vanity. The crisis was good for his profile. He saw himself as the man of action, the Churchill of public health, the saviour of his people, earning the plaudits of a grateful nation. As early as January 2020, he was sharing a message from a sycophantic “wise friend” assuring him that a “well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league”. He fussed over his tweets. He pushed his way in front of every press camera. He tried to divert the credit for the vaccines from Kate Bingham to himself. “I think I look great” is one of his more memorable messages.

Sumption says that Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisers could not have restrained Hancock. Boris had no strategy, and the others were lacklustre:

Apart from Sunak and Gove, his Cabinet was probably the most mediocre band of British ministers for nearly a century. Collectively, they proved unable to look at the whole problem in the round. Their eyes were never on the ball. They were not even on the field. These are the lessons of this sorry business.

Blocking disability hub

Hancock did not tolerate Conservative MPs voting against his health policies during the pandemic.

On Tuesday, March 7, The Telegraph led with a story about James Daly MP from Bury North:

Tuesday's Telegraph: 'Block funds for MPs who don't toe line on lockdown' #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/pACZsauy7A

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) March 6, 2023

‘Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown’ tells us:

Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, The Lockdown Files show.

WhatsApp messages between Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, and his political aide show they discussed taking a plan for a learning disability hub in Bury, Greater Manchester, “off the table” if James Daly, the Bury North MP, sided against the Government in a key vote.

It came ahead of the vote on Dec 1, 2020 on the introduction of a toughened new local tiers system of restrictions for England.

The Telegraph has also obtained a WhatsApp message with an attached list of 95 Conservative MPs planning to vote against the tier system and detailing their concerns about it. 

The article has that list.

On November 20, 2020, Allan Nixon, one of Hancock’s Spads (special advisers) WhatsApped his boss:

… Thoughts on me suggesting to Chief’s spads that they give us a list of the 2019 intakes thinking of rebelling. Eg James wants his Learning Disability Hub in Bury – whips call him up and say Health team want to work with him to deliver this but that’ll be off the table if he rebels

These guys’ re-election hinges on us in a lot of instances, and we know what they want. We should seriously consider using it IMO

Hancock replied:

yes, 100%

James Daly only found out about this through The Lockdown Files:

Mr Daly – whose constituency is the most marginal in the UK mainland with a majority of just 105 – told The Telegraph he was “appalled” and “disgusted” that the disability hub, for which he had been campaigning, had been discussed as a way of coercing him into voting with the Government.

He said he had never been contacted by the Whips’ Office and no threat to block the scheme had been made.

The conversation between Nixon and Hancock continued on December 1, 2020:

On the morning of the vote, Mr Hancock messaged his adviser to say: “James Daly is with us”, but Mr Nixon responded with the caveat: “If extra hospitality support is forthcoming.”

Later that day, Mr Nixon also forwarded his boss a new list of MPs who were undecided on the vote. In the event, Mr Daly voted against the Government, according to the parliamentary record.

In total, 55 Conservative MPs opposed the tiers system, forcing Mr Johnson to rely on Labour abstaining to get the measures through. It was, at the time, the biggest rebellion of the Johnson administration.

After revealing that he had not been contacted by the Whips’ Office, Mr Daly said: “It sounds like the whips didn’t bother.”

The Bury North MP said he was surprised that the hub, which would allow specialists to coordinate activity under one roof, was even being threatened because “it never got dangled in the first place”.

He added: “They were never proposing to give it to me. I still don’t have it. Even though I have repeatedly campaigned for it, Hancock never showed the slightest bit of interest in supporting it. I had a number of conversations with Hancock at that time, but I can definitively say the hub was never mentioned.

“I think it is appalling. The fact that they would only give a much needed support for disabled people if I voted for this was absolutely disgusting.”

Mr Daly had discussed the need for the centre with Mr Hancock in January 2020. In a post on his website about “how we improve health outcomes for all Bury North residents”, he published a photograph of himself with the then health secretary. The hub, he said, would benefit “the most vulnerable in our community”.

That afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak rebukes Matt Hancock over plot to block disability funding’:

Downing Street has rebuked Matt Hancock after it emerged that he had discussed a plan to block funding for a new disabled centre to pressure a Tory MP to back lockdown restrictions …

Asked whether this was not the way Rishi Sunak would like his ministers to operate, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Of course. There are rules and guidelines which apply.

“I can’t speak for the actions of a former government. I think you heard from the Prime Minister, who said it’s important that the inquiry looks at all the issues in a complete way rather than relying on piecemeal bits of information.

“You will know that funding decisions are taken in line with strict guidelines to ensure value for money set out in the spending framework, and ministers’ departments are held accountable for their decisions.”

Allison Pearson: Hancock ‘should be arrested’

After The Telegraph published No. 10’s rebuke to Hancock, one of the paper’s columnists, Allison Pearson, weighed in with ‘Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office’:

… Dismayingly, if not entirely unpredictably, it was the very restrictions Matt Hancock and his lockdown zealots told us were necessary to save the health service which have very nearly finished it off. “The NHS has collapsed anyway as a direct result of the lockdowns and the vast backlog they caused,” says my source. Ironies don’t come much more bitter than that …

Just when you think he has sunk as low as is humanly possible, he ponders using children with special educational needs as leverage (“yes 100%,” enthused Hancock). By unhappy coincidence, I have just had an email from Rob, a father with an autistic son. This is what Rob wrote: “Lockdown sent him from a happy 14-year-old into a complete psychological breakdown. The fear of why everyone was wearing masks, the breaking of routine (so important for SEN children) and closing of schools. He was utterly terrified. The knock-on-effect for our family has been devastating. Thanks to anti-psych meds he’s slowly getting there, but from the second lockdown onwards it’s destroyed the fabric of our family to say nothing of our life savings being lost (self-employed). To read the WhatsApps in The Telegraph makes me so angry. Having the heartbreak of a disabled child made worse by self-aggrandising fools is almost too much to take. Administering psychiatric medicines to your child tends to focus the mind as to where the blame lies and it isn’t with Isabel Oakeshott.”

Well, there’s another Hancock Triumph. A 14-year-old boy who successfully had the pants frightened off him. (Hope you feel proud of yourself, Matt.) Are Members of Parliament seriously not going to debate what we suspected, but now know for sure, was done quite deliberately to Rob’s son and thousands of other vulnerable children, some of them no longer with us because they were scared into taking their own lives? …

As for Matt Hancock, he has lost the Whip and, unfortunately, can no longer be disciplined by the Conservative party. The slithy tove can – and must – be dragged before a Select Committee. Personally, I would like to see him in jail for the vast hurt he has caused.

Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”? …

Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.

Also of interest is ‘Dominic Cummings takes “nightmare” swipe at Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock’.

I hope to wrap up the rest of my review of The Lockdown Files tomorrow.

The Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland — a gateway back into the EU

The past week was a newsy one in the UK.

We had Boris’s hearing before the Privileges Committee and Matt Hancock being stung by a fake consultancy.

However, it all began on Monday, March 20, and continued on Wednesday with the approval of the Stormont Brake Statutory Instrument of the Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland.

The Windsor Framework replaces the Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, which everyone knew was imperfect and this new framework replaces it. According to the Government, it renders the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill unnecessary.

However, it seems to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that it goes too far in favouring the EU. Who can forget the beaming smile on Ursula von der Leyen’s face when she signed it alongside Rishi Sunak at the end of February? She knew she had the cat by the tail. Unfortunately, Rishi is still in the dark, as is most of Parliament:

Rishi Unveils “Windsor Framework” Northern Ireland Protocol Deal https://t.co/Un1KSza4t6 pic.twitter.com/o6nFdjwcEo

— Euro Guido (@EuroGuido) February 27, 2023

The only vote on it in Parliament was on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. It should be emphasised that was not a vote on the Framework as a whole but only on one statutory instrument (SI) of it, the Stormont Brake.

Rishi overly promoted the Stormont Brake, which, in principle, grants a veto to the Northern Ireland Assembly via the UK Government of new EU acts or rules that it disagrees with.

I cannot see it working as smoothly as specified below. The EU holds the better hand of cards here.

This Twitter thread comes via Jess Sargeant, senior researcher at the Institute for Government, beginning with the flowchart:

So the statutory instrument on the Stormont brake has been published 👇
It's pretty much in line with what the UK initially government proposed in the command paper, but a few interesting details 🧵https://t.co/2aFnsFkwbt pic.twitter.com/2PqAbPD1dB

— Jess Sargeant (@Jess_Sargeant) March 20, 2023

The Northern Ireland Assembly, once it reconvenes (the DUP are resisting for the time being), will have a new Windsor Framework Democratic Scrutiny Committee to inform MLAs’ (assembly members’) decisions on pulling the Brake:

The intention is that the work of the committee will inform MLAs' decision as to whether to pull the brake, but an inquiry is not required before doing so.

— Jess Sargeant (@Jess_Sargeant) March 20, 2023

The Brake can be triggered by 30 MLAs from two parties. The Secretary of State (SoS) for Northern Ireland, who sits in Parliament, then reviews the proposed trigger. If the SoS finds it valid, he then liaises with the EU:

The SoS then considers the 'validity of the notification' – mainly whether it meets the conditions in the Windsor Framework 👇. If it meets them conditions the Ministers "must" accept the notification and notify the EU – if not, they must provide a reason. pic.twitter.com/9y3EPYUk0V

— Jess Sargeant (@Jess_Sargeant) March 20, 2023

In principle, any resolution must have ‘cross-community’ support in Northern Ireland before being implemented, unless there are exceptional circumstances:

…unless there are exceptional circumstances (including the Assembly not sitting or no Exec) or it would not create a regulatory border (defined as requirements that would divert trade or impair the free flow of good).

— Jess Sargeant (@Jess_Sargeant) March 20, 2023

The DUP oppose it as do members of the ERG (Parliament’s European Research Group), but it has majority support among MPs:

The DUP have said that their MPs will vote against the SI, and the ERG's star chamber is expected to give it the thumbs down. But the PM is still likely to have enough support to pass it, so it looks like it will be passed.https://t.co/te5upxQDk0

— Jess Sargeant (@Jess_Sargeant) March 20, 2023

 

On Tuesday, March 21, the ERG interviewed the SoS for Northern Ireland, Chris Heaton-Harris MP, a 90-minute session available on parliamentlive.tv. Heaton-Harris could barely look the MPs in the eye as he maintained that voting on the SI (Stormont Brake) was but one of many votes. Perhaps inconveniently for him, a civil servant sitting next to him said that Downing Street would consider a majority vote on the SI proof that MPs approved of the Windsor Framework.

Here is some background on that session from Monday, March 20. Heaton-Harris is on the left of the photo with the ERG’s Sir Bill Cash MP on the right:

EU Scrutiny Committee to Grill Northern Ireland Secretary on Windsor Framework https://t.co/angMqBPVZg pic.twitter.com/BEzILOAU2c

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 21, 2023

Guido Fawkes tells us that the ERG wanted to interview Rishi Sunak rather than Heaton-Harris (emphases in the original):

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris will appear in front of the European Scrutiny Committee tomorrow afternoon, just a day before MPs vote on the Stormont Brake element of the Windsor Framework Brexit deal in the House of Commons. The Committee’s chair, Sir Bill Cash, had previously invited Rishi Sunak, with Cash accusing the PM of dodging scrutiny by repeatedly skipped the invitation. As a compromise, he’s sent Heaton-Harris as his loyal lieutenant… 

With the DUP voting against the deal, and the ERG expected to announce their own verdict tomorrow – also not looking positive – it won’t be smooth sailing for wise-cracking Heaton-Harris. Stay tuned…

More background from the morning of Tuesday, March 21 follows. The ERG session with Heaton-Harris took place in the afternoon.

A small but vocal opposition bloc was building. Pictured below are Sir Bill Cash, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Rishi:

I may not be politically astute but I now constantly get the feeling those supposed to be governing in the best interest of the UK, whether it be the government, Bank of England etc, are actually working in the best interest of other states at the detriment of UK

— Deryk (@derykj) March 24, 2023

Guido’s post said, in part:

Tory MPs speaking to Guido say they nonetheless expect the Tory rebellion to be “soft“, and “they’ll have to have uncovered something pretty bad for a lot of people to vote against it”. The Telegraph has heard similarly, with one MP saying the group were “genuinely torn”…

The ERG’s Legal Advisory Committee’s review of the Windsor Framework can be found here. Although it is 137 pages long, the first 28 pages are the immediately relevant ones. As opponents of the Windsor Framework point out, the Green (customs) lane won’t become greener as Rishi said, but rather pinker, as the report states on page 13 (purple emphases mine):

Before coming to the specifics of how the “green lane“ would operate as regards movements of goods which would fall within it, it should first be pointed out that there will continue to be many goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland which will fall outside the scope of the “green lane“ arrangements and will therefore be subject to the full panoply of EU external border checks, even though those goods are not going to be exported into the Republic or elsewhere in the EU. Businesses within Northern Ireland acquiring goods from Great Britain which intend to sell their products within Northern Ireland, elsewhere in the United Kingdom or to the rest of the world will continue to be damaged by these controls and duties while receiving no conceivable benefit from the NI Protocol arrangements.

The general position will remain that, outside the specific accommodations, EU customs laws will apply to the movement of goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland (this internal movement is treated as an “importation“26) and to importations of goods from the rest of the world. In other words, there is a customs border, within UK territory, across the Irish Sea, and the EU‘s rather than the UK‘s external customs duties will apply to imports from the rest of the world. Importantly, goods which are to be used by businesses in Northern Ireland for “commercial processing“ will be subject to EU customs duties, unless the business or the type of processing falls within a specific exemption.

This is why, since Brexit, most British businesses will not ship to Northern Ireland. Big corporations, such as supermarkets, do and will continue to do so, but even British retail chains (e.g. department stores) are not willing to put up with the paperwork and specific knowledge required to ship to Northern Ireland. It’s just too much hassle.

For that and many other reasons, the ERG chair Mark Francois called the Framework’s Stormont Brake ‘practically useless’:

Commercial Chancery Barrister Steven Barrett explains why the Stormont Brake could result in ‘huge and ongoing fines’ for the UK:

I want to try to explain the fine-by-arbitration in the Stormont Brake

Sometimes my being a commercial lawyer is useful – I am not sure that non-commercial lawyers see this type of damages calculation

Conclusion – these are likely to be huge and ongoing fines

— Steven Barrett (@SBarrettBar) March 21, 2023

The EU can calculate any perceived industry losses if the Brake is applied:

The EU will say 'ah ha, that gives your product an advantage over our products, you have hurt our industry by X percentage'

That's likely to be a small percentage, of a huge number – therefore still a huge number which the UK must pay the EU

— Steven Barrett (@SBarrettBar) March 21, 2023

The fines could extend from year to year:

The fines the EU can impose are the ultimate reason that the Stormont Brake simply won't work in practice

— Steven Barrett (@SBarrettBar) March 21, 2023

Therefore, the Brake might never be applied:

Yes – and if applied, it won't last forever

— Steven Barrett (@SBarrettBar) March 21, 2023

The ERG’s Mark Francois stated:

The star chamber’s [the aforementioned report’s] principal findings are: that EU law will still be supreme in Northern Ireland; the rights of its people under the 1800 Act of Union are not restored; the green lane is not really a green lane at all; the Stormont brake is practically useless and the framework itself has no exit, other than through a highly complex legal process.’

Thought so.

That evening, another prominent Brexit supporter, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said on his GB News show that he would not be supporting the Government in the vote on the Stormont Brake on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 22:

I will not find it possible to support His Majesty’s Government in the Windsor Framework vote, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

💻 GB News YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwFhttps://t.co/8Zao16NjqB

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 21, 2023

This was his Moggologue that evening, and the transcript:

'Had the DUP swallowed the Windsor Framework, I could have swallowed it too. But I did not think it was right to second guess them.'@Jacob_Rees_Mogg says he will 'not find it possible to support his Majesty's Government' in tomorrow's vote on the Northern Ireland Brexit deal. pic.twitter.com/GrJ3SiIHep

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 21, 2023

Rees-Mogg said that the Government’s view, based on a very short summary of the Framework, differs to the ERG’s report, which comes much closer to the EU-focused reality:

… everybody has to look through it in detail and that’s what’s been done by the committee set up by Mark Francois, the chairman of the European Research Group, which went to really strong legal advisers to see.

What was actually happening and what they came up with was not the same as the view given by His Majesty’s government.

Indeed, it was closer to the view that was in fact given by the European Commission.

So the Government claimed that 1700 pages of EU laws are disapplied.

The report found no EU laws will be disapplied or removed from Northern Ireland.

We were told that the jurisdiction of the European Court would be disapplied.

The report found Northern Ireland will remain subject to the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, as was said to me by a very senior member of the DUP, European Union law remains a major part of Northern Ireland’s settlement and in certain areas outranks UK law.

So we were told that the deal would restore Northern Ireland’s place in the Union and safeguard sovereignty. Because this is what it’s about. We voted to leave as one United Kingdom, not as Great Britain, and then separately.

Northern Ireland and we are one people.

Under the Act of Union of 1800, we were told that there would be green lanes and you know what a green lane is.

When you come back from your holidays, you go through a green lane and nobody stops you.

But the green lane to Northern Ireland requires 21 pieces of information to be given.

So what was it at that line in Macbeth that may apply to the Windsor framework, the multitudinous Irish Sea and Canadine?

The green one is made red. And last of all, the Stormont brake, which is what we’re actually voting on tomorrow, is said to be hard to use.

But even then we’ve been told that though the vote technically is on the brake, we’re actually voting on the whole of the protocol. So even if the brake is good, we’re being asked to vote on the bits that are not good.

And the Guardian angels of unionism, the DUP, have said that it’s not good enough. So that’s the position we’re in. We are facing a vote tomorrow.

I will not find it possible to support His Majesty’s Government in this vote …

Rees-Mogg then interviewed a KC (King’s Counsel) who is a specialist in EU law. He said much the same thing …

'Not a single European Union law that applies to Northern Ireland under the protocol will be removed by the Windsor Framework.'

Barrister specialising in EU law Martin Howe QC joins @Jacob_Rees_Mogg to discuss the 'extremely restrictive' aspects of The Windsor Framework. pic.twitter.com/2kHjf000o9

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 21, 2023

… as did former Conservative Home Secretary and former Brexit Party MEP Anne Widdecombe:

'We still have a situation, after all this tinkering, in which EU law prevails in Northern Ireland.'

Ann Widdecombe says the Windsor Framework puts the Union in peril. pic.twitter.com/nNhoLoVt74

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 21, 2023

On the morning of Wednesday, March 22, The Telegraph reported that Boris Johnson MP would vote against the Stormont Brake SI:

The former prime minister said in a statement to this newspaper that the proposals would keep the province “captured by the EU legal order” and were “not acceptable”.

Mr Johnson is expected to interrupt his appearance during the House of Commons Privileges Committee hearing on partygate to vote when the division bell rings …

Mr Johnson told The Telegraph: “The proposed arrangements would mean either that Northern Ireland remained captured by the EU legal order – and was increasingly divergent from the rest of the UK – or they would mean that the whole of the UK was unable properly to diverge and take advantage of Brexit.

“That is not acceptable. I will be voting against the proposed arrangements today. Instead, the best course of action is to proceed with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, and make sure that we take back control.”

The decision sees Mr Johnson reprise the role he adopted during the final year of Theresa May’s premiership, when he put himself at the front of a group of Tory MPs voting against her Brexit proposals. 

A few hours later, Liz Truss said she would also be voting against the SI:

Liz Truss will vote against the deal.

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 22, 2023

That afternoon, MPs divided — voted — on the SI, which won over nearly all of the Commons. Only 29 MPs voted No, among them the nine DUP MPs:

MPs Back Stormont Brake Ayes 515, Noes 29 https://t.co/gQ9QnOca7Z pic.twitter.com/0zYS1LzEUx

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 22, 2023

MPs had very little time to consider the Windsor Framework. There was Rishi’s speech to Parliament after it had been agreed, so, 90 minutes. Then there was the 90-minute debate about the SI, which, in reality, was Downing Street’s way of approving the whole Framework. Ergo, three hours of discussion about our national sovereignty with regard to Northern Ireland.

On Thursday, March 23, former DUP leader, Arlene — now Baroness — Foster wrote about this parlous state of affairs for The Express:

The Prime Minister promised a vote on the Windsor Framework deal, and this was it – all 90 minutes of it.

The Stormont brake is the central selling point of the agreement between the Government and the European Union to remedy the defects of the NI Protocol.

The idea is that if the Assembly activates the Stormont Brake, then the Government will decide whether to veto whichever new European law has been foisted on the people of Northern Ireland without their say so.

The chances of the Government actually vetoing new European law is next to negligible. As pointed out by the legal opinion of the ERG the Stormont brake is worse than useless because the bar has been set so high and there must be a willingness by the Government to actually trigger the veto – not likely on current experience.

The Government has shown itself in fear of the European Union starting a trade war regardless of how unlikely that is and so they continue to appease the EU’s outrageous demands.

It is plain as the nose on your face that the Windsor Agreement was oversold as something it was not.

It was an improvement on the NI protocol, I absolutely acknowledge that, but it falls short of dealing with all the problems. And the Prime Minister and his cheerleaders would have been far better suited to have been honest with us all instead of trying to spin us into the willing suspension of disbelief.

We were told by the PM that the Irish sea border has gone – it clearly hasn’t – but this claim in the latest Government infographic has been downgraded to… wait for it… “ removes any sense of a border in the Irish sea”… You really couldn’t make it up.

How refreshing it would have been if the Prime Minister had announced his deal by saying, “I have moved the negotiations forward, I have made some wins. I recognise it doesn’t deal with all the problems, but I will keep working with European colleagues to monitor the issues”.

Instead we were treated to spin on a scale not seen since the justification of the Iraq war!

Let’s have a look at the reality of the deal:

Firstly, the Stormont Brake is not a veto, no matter what the hapless NI Secretary of State says. The current version is an attempt to put a veneer of consent on the fact that European law will still apply in my part of the United Kingdom.

The mechanism could be strengthened by the Government, because after all Parliament is sovereign, but my guess is that they will not want to upset Brussels.

The Windsor Framework does not deal with the recent decision of the Supreme Court which stated that the Protocol suspended the internal UK trade element of the Acts of Union.

Again, the Government could remedy this element by passing a simple piece of legislation as the later law will take precedence – will they do that? – it would go a long way to dealing with the constitutional aspects of the Protocol.

Another of the elements of the Windsor Framework was the construction of green lanes and red lanes. Sounds good you may think – anything going to NI for final destination from GB will go through the green lane and anything transiting through to the Republic of Ireland will go through the red lane.

However, it is not that simple as there are still forms to be completed to go through the green lane and there is still not full clarity about what goes through the green lanes.

One of the hauliers in NI has described the green lane under the Windsor Framework as not really green but pink, i.e. a lighter version of the red lane!

And what about those manufacturers in NI who only serve the UK market – do they have to abide by EU rules even though their goods are not going to the EU?

As you can see there are many important questions still to be answered and dealt with, but it appears the Prime Minister just wants to push on and prioritise good relations in Europe over internal constitutional issues.

Many who supported Brexit see this Framework as a gateway back into the EU.

Alex Story explained in his article for The Express, ‘Sunak capitulated — this is step one to UK’s craven re-joining of the EU’:

Sunak’s Windsor Framework breaks up the United Kingdom. It creates a border that did not exist and that no one wanted.

In effect, Sunak chose subjugation and humiliation.

He didn’t kick the can into the long grass so much as build a framework for our eventual and full capitulation.

Accepting no divergence between the United Kingdom and a sclerotic European Union is tantamount to climbing back onto the Titanic to hear the band strike up a tune one last time.

A country unable to pass her own laws to serve her own people according to their needs is not sovereign.

In the short term, given the mess that is the Conservative Party and the duplicity of the Labour Party, there is little doubt that the Government will get its way – by hook or by crook.

Accepting humiliation once, however, is a sure way of guaranteeing we will suffer more indignities at ever decreasing time intervals until, in the end, our heads bowed, we will be forced to re-join on extraordinarily onerous terms. The French will have it no other way.

By choosing short term expediency instead of solid principles, the Government is telling us that our country no longer matters to it.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is worth remembering that beyond the empty rhetoric and the torrent of dishonesties we hear daily lies a graveyard of broken promises and discarded pledges.

The jam is always promised for tomorrow.

Our borders are none existent; Our children are under attack in their schools and in their towns; Our police are no longer concerned about real crimes such as burglaries, assaults, and grooming.

Our Government no longer knows how to govern and is desperate to delegate the arduous task to a non-democratic body beyond our shores …

And a country unable to govern itself cannot long survive …

Sunak, to his very small electorate, promised competence.

From the point of view of a marketing exercise, the Windsor Framework and the deception it carried had a certain panache.

But, what the big print giveth, the small print taketh.

In this case, the small print points to one of the greatest acts of abject surrender to a foreign power we have ever witnessed.

Sunak is ensuring the constant interference of the European Union into our internal affairs.

And, lo, so he has.

On Friday, March 24, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic formally adopted the Windsor Framework:

UK and EU Formally Adopt Windsor Framework https://t.co/uaQHaHZogT pic.twitter.com/HWuaAr8Vhg

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) March 24, 2023

Guido’s post says:

Sefcovic is in London today to formally adopt the agreement, after MPs voted in favour of the Stormont Brake element on Wednesday. The one and only time they’ll get to do so…

Speaking just before rubberstamping the deal, Cleverly said:

By formally approving the Windsor Framework, we are delivering on our commitment to provide stability and certainty for Northern Ireland. The Framework is the best deal for Northern Ireland, safeguarding its place in the Union and protecting the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. I look forward to further effective cooperation with the EU on key issues, such as security and energy.

DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is still vowing not to return to power-sharing in Northern Ireland though…

Good for him and the DUP.

This will end up being as divisive as Brexit, because the other main parties in Stormont are ready to resume power-sharing.

Red Wall MPs: Miriam Cates — part 2

Those who missed my first post on Red Wall MP Miriam Cates can find it here.

Today’s post continues a profile of the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire.

Levelling up

Miriam Cates is interested in giving the more rural parts of Britain the same advantages as the more urban areas. This is what levelling up means.

On Wednesday, November 9, 2022, she spoke in the Levelling Up Rural Britain debate with a focus on public transport. An excerpt follows, emphases mine:

My constituents share many of the challenges of urban areas, such as the rising cost of living and access to affordable family housing, but we also face some unique disadvantages that highlight the pressing need to include rural Britain in the levelling-up agenda. To state the obvious, and as other Members have said, the lower population density of rural places means that service models that work in urban areas are much less viable in our communities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) put this eloquently. The metrics that are used to describe the viability of urban services just do not work in rural areas; they have to have special cases.

I want to speak particularly about bus services, which over recent months have declined significantly in my constituency. Residents of Stocksbridge, Grenoside, Chapeltown, High Green, Ecclesfield, Wharncliffe Side, Oughtibridge and other villages have seen services reduced or even disappearing altogether, cutting people off from jobs, education, training, healthcare and leisure.

The impact on everyday life cannot be overstated. The old are left stranded at bus stops, the young arrive late for school and workers are forced to pay for taxis to get to work. Local employers offering good jobs have told me of their difficulty in recruiting because their premises are no longer served by bus. The vision of levelling up is to spread opportunity evenly around the country, but it really does not matter how much opportunity there is if people cannot get to it.

What has gone wrong in South Yorkshire, particularly rural South Yorkshire, and how can we fix it? Services were struggling even before covid, but the post-pandemic environment has been a perfect storm for rural bus services in South Yorkshire. From my meetings with Stagecoach and First Bus, it is clear that patronage has fallen sharply at the same time as fuel costs have increased.

I was pleased to be successful over the summer in persuading the Government to release a third round of the covid bus recovery grant. But, crucially, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority’s bus service improvement plan bid failed completely, which resulted in our region’s receiving not a single penny while neighbouring authorities in Manchester, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire received tens of millions of pounds.

I am grateful to the Bus Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden), for meeting me this morning to discuss the issue, but I urge the Minister responding to this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), to press this matter with his Government colleagues. My constituents pay the same taxes as everybody else. It is not their fault that our combined authority’s bid did not meet an acceptable standard.

Things may look bleak, but I believe there are some glimmers of hope. We have had local successes with the new No. 25 and No. 26 routes around Penistone and a new service connecting Northern College with Barnsley. Those services have reconnected isolated villages and are based on an innovative small bus model pioneered by the excellent South Pennine Community Transport.

In Stocksbridge and Deepcar, we have plans to use our towns fund to commission new buses to help residents to travel around our towns—for anyone who has not been there, Stocksbridge is incredibly steep and people absolutely need a bus to get back up the hill. We are also progressing with plans to restore a passenger rail service along the Upper Don valley and we have a levelling-up fund bid to improve the Penistone line.

However, we need to accept that a one-size-fits-all approach to public transport just does not work. Rural services will never be as profitable as urban routes, but, if they are designed sensibly around what communities actually want, if they are regular and reliable with easy-to-understand timetables, they can be self-sustaining, as we have seen with our new routes. Ultimately, levelling up rural transport requires a localism agenda, putting commissioning in the hands of local people—our town, parish and local councils—and with a funding model that recognises the unique challenges of rural life.

Considering that levelling up was in the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto, Lee Rowley, representing the Government, provided a somewhat disappointing response at the end of the debate:

… My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), along with my hon. Friends the Members for Witney (Robert Courts), for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates), for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond), among others, raised the point about connectivity, be it of the physical kind, in terms of buses and public transport, or the virtual kind, in terms of broadband. They are absolutely right to advocate on the challenges that this brings. We all know that there have been challenges associated with buses in the past few years. When the level of decrease of passenger use is so profound as it has been with covid, of course we want to try to work through how we can support rural communities. That is no different in my constituency. We have to try to look at the innovative solutions that my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch highlighted with regards to a demand response to travel, while also ensuring that people have good quality bus services over the long term …

Sex education

Lately, Miriam Cates has been outspoken about sex education in English schools. She has put up with a lot for rightly pointing out that children are learning things at school that should be off limits.

On Thursday, June 30, she was granted a backbench business debate on relationship and sex education [RSE] materials in schools:

I beg to move,

That this House has considered relationship and sex education materials in schools …

Let me start with a health warning: my speech is not suitable for children. That is sadly ironic, given that all of the extreme and inappropriate material I am about to share has already been shared with children in our schools. As a former biology teacher, I have delivered my fair share of sex education. Teaching the facts of life often comes with more than a little embarrassment for teachers and pupils alike. I remember teaching about reproduction when I was about 30 weeks pregnant with my first baby. One child asked me if my husband knew I was pregnant. Another, having watched a video on labour and birth, commented, “Miss, that’s really gonna hurt, you know.”

Just as children do not know about photosynthesis or the digestive system without being taught, neither do they know the facts of reproduction. Thus, it is important that children are taught clearly and truthfully about sex. Of course, there is a lot more to sexual relationships than just anatomy. Many people believe that parents should take the leading role in teaching children about relationships, since one of the main duties of parenting is to pass on wisdom and values to children. Nevertheless, in some families parents cannot or do not teach children about relationships, and it is also sadly the case that the internet now presents children with a vast array of false and damaging information about sex.

There is widespread consensus that schools do have a role to play in relationships and sex education. That is why the Government chose to make the teaching of relationships and sex education compulsory in all secondary schools from September 2020. According to the guidance, the aim was to help children

“manage their academic, personal and social lives in a positive way.”

Less than two years later, my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary has written to the Children’s Commissioner asking her for help in supporting schools to teach RSE because we know that the quality of RSE is inconsistent.

The Education Secretary is right that the teaching of sex education is inconsistent. Unlike maths, science or history, there are no widely adopted schemes of work or examinations, so the subject matter and materials vary widely between schools. However, inconsistency should be the least of the Education Secretary’s concerns when we look at the reality of what is being taught. Despite its good intentions, the new RSE framework has opened the floodgates to a whole host of external providers who offer sex education materials to schools. Now, children across the country are being exposed to a plethora of deeply inappropriate, wildly inaccurate, sexually explicit and damaging materials in the name of sex education. That is extremely concerning for a number of reasons.

First, if we fail to teach children clearly and factually about relationships, sex and the law they will be exposed to all sorts of risks. For example, if sex is defined as, “anything that makes you horny or aroused”—the definition offered by the sex education provider, School of Sexuality Education—how does a child understand the link between sex and pregnancy? Sex Education Forum tells children they fall into one of two groups: menstruators or non-menstruators. If a teenage girl’s periods do not start, what will she think? How does she know that is not normal? How does she know to consult a doctor? How will she know she is not pregnant? Will she just assume she is one of the non-menstruators?

The book for teachers, “Great Relationships and Sex Education”, suggests an activity for 15-year-olds in which children are given prompt cards and have to say whether they think certain types of sexual acts are good or bad. How do the children know what acts come with health risks, or the risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections? If we tell children that, “love has no age”—the slogan used in a Diversity Role Models resource—do we undermine their understanding of the legal age of consent? Sex education provider Bish Training informs children that:

“Most people would say that they had a penis and testicles or a clitoris and vagina, however many people are in the middle of this spectrum with how their bodies are configured.”

As a former biology teacher, I do not even know where to start with that one.

As adults, we often fail to remember what it is like to be a child and we make the mistake of assuming that children know more than they do. Children have all sorts of misconceptions. That is why it is our responsibility to teach them factually, truthfully and in age-appropriate ways, so that they can make informed decisions.

Another concern relates to the teaching of consent. Of course it is vital to teach about consent. The Everyone’s Invited revelations make that abundantly clear. But we must remember that, under the law, children cannot consent to sex. Sex education classes conducted by the group It Happens Education told boys of 13 and 14 that the law

“is not there to…punish young people for having consensual sex”

and said:

“It’s just two 14 year olds who want to have sex with each other who are consensually having sex.”

It is not hard to see the risks of this approach, which normalises and legitimises under-age sex. Not only are children legally not able to consent; they also do not have the developmental maturity or capacity to consent to sexual activity—that is the point of the age of consent.

The introduction of graphic or extreme sexual material in sex education lessons also reinforces the porn culture that is damaging our children in such a devastating way. Of course it is not the fault of schools that half of all 14-year-olds have seen pornography online—much of it violent and degrading—but some RSE lessons are actively contributing to the sexualisation and adultification of children. The Proud Trust has produced a dice game encouraging children to discuss explicit sexual acts, based on the roll of a dice. The six sides of the dice name different body parts—such as anus, vulva, penis and mouth—and objects. Two dice are thrown and children must name a pleasurable sexual act that can take place between the two body parts. The game is aimed at children of 13 and over.

Sexwise is a website run and funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and recommended in the Department for Education’s RSE guidance. The website is promoted in schools and contains the following advice:

“Maybe you read a really hot bit of erotica while looking up Dominance and Submission…Remember, sharing is caring”.

Sex education materials produced by Bish Training involve discussion of a wide range of sexual practices—some of them violent. This includes rough sex, spanking, choking, BDSM and kink. Bish is aimed at young people of 14 and over and provides training materials for teachers.

Even when materials are not extreme, we must still be careful not to sexualise children prematurely. I spoke to a mother who told me how her 11-year-old son had been shown a PowerPoint presentation in a lesson on sexuality. It was setting out characteristics and behaviours and asking children to read through the lists and decide whether they were straight, gay or bisexual. Pre-pubescent 11-year-olds are not straight, gay or bisexual—they are children.

Even School Diversity Week, a celebration of LGBTQIA+ promoted by the Just Like Us group, leads to the sexualisation of children. Of course schools should celebrate diversity and promote tolerance, but why are we doing that by asking pre-sexual children to align themselves with adult sexual liberation campaigns? Let us not forget that the + includes kink, BDSM and fetish …

Even primary schools are not immune from using inappropriate materials. An “All About Me” programme developed by Warwickshire County Council’s Respect Yourself team introduces six and seven-year-olds to “rules about touching yourself”. I recently spoke to a mother in my constituency who was distraught that her six-year-old had been taught in school about masturbation. Sexualising children and encouraging them to talk about intimate details with adults breaks down important boundaries and makes them more susceptible and available to sexual predators, both on and offline.

Another significant concern is the use of RSE to push extreme gender ideology. Gender ideology is a belief system that claims that we all have an innate gender, which may or may not align with our biological sex. Gender ideology claims that, rather than sex being determined at conception and observed at birth, it is assigned at birth, and that doctors sometimes get it wrong.

Gender theory sadly has sexist and homophobic undertones, pushing outdated gender stereotypes and suggesting to same-sex-attracted adolescents that, instead of being gay or lesbian, they may in fact be the opposite sex. Gender theory says that if someone feels like a woman, they are a woman, regardless of their chromosomes, their genitals, or, in fact, reality.

Gender ideology is highly contested. It does not have a basis in science, and no one had heard of it in this country just 10 years ago. Yet, it is being pushed on children in some schools under the guise of RSE, with what can only be described as a religious fervour. Department for Education guidance states that schools should

“not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender”,

and that:

“Resources used in teaching about this topic must…be…evidence based.”

Yet a video produced by AMAZE and used in schools suggests that boys who wear nail varnish or girls who like weight lifting might actually be the opposite sex. Resources by Brook claim:

“‘man’ and ‘woman’ are genders. They are social ideas about how people who have vulvas and vaginas, and people who have penises and testicles should behave”.

Split Banana offers workshops to schools where children learn ideas of how gender is socially constructed and explore links between the gender binary and colonialism. A Gendered Intelligence workshop tells children that:

“A woman is still a woman, even if she enjoys getting blow jobs.”

Just Like Us tells children that their biological sex can be changed. PSHE Association resources inform children that people whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth are described as cisgender.

Gender theory is even being taught to our very youngest children. Pop’n’Olly tells children that gender is male, female, both or neither. The Introducing Teddy book, aimed at primary school children, tells the story of Teddy, who changes sex, illustrated by the transformation of his bow tie into a hair bow. The Diversity Role Models primary training workshop uses the “Gender Unicorn”, a cartoon unicorn who explains that there is an additional biological sex category called “other”.

Numerous resources from numerous sex education providers present gender theory as fact, contrary to DFE guidance. However, it is not just factually incorrect resources that are making their ways into schools; visitors from external agencies are invited in to talk to children about sex and relationships, sometimes even without a teacher present in the room.

Guidance says that, when using external agencies, schools should check their material in advance and

“conduct a basic online search”.

However, a social media search of organisations such as Diversity Role Models reveals links to drag queens with highly sexualised, porn-inspired names, or in the case of Mermaids, the promotion of political activism, which breaches political impartiality guidelines.

In some cases, children are disadvantaged when they show signs of dissent from gender ideology, as we saw in the recent case, reported in the press, of a girl who was bullied out of school for questioning gender theory. I have spoken to parents of children who have been threatened with detention if they misgender a trans-identifying child or complain about a child of the opposite sex in their changing rooms. I have heard from parents whose child’s RSE homework was marked down for not adhering to this new creed. 

Children believe what adults tell them. They are biologically programmed to do so; how else does a child learn the knowledge and skills they need to grow, develop and be prepared for adult life? It is therefore the duty of those responsible for raising children—particularly parents and teachers—to tell them the truth. Those who teach a child that there are 64 different genders, that they may actually be a different gender to their birth sex, or that they may have been born in the wrong body, are not telling the truth. It is a tragedy that the RSE curriculum, which should help children to develop confidence and self-respect, is instead being used to undermine reality and ultimately put children in danger. 

Some may ask what harm is being done by presenting those ideas to children, and, of course, it is right to teach children to be tolerant, kind and accepting of others. However, it is not compassionate, wise, or legal to teach children that contested ideologies are facts. That is indoctrination, and it is becoming evident that that has some concerning consequences …

There has been a more than 4,000% rise in the referrals of girls to gender services over the last decade, and a recent poll of teachers suggests that at least 79% of schools now have trans-identifying children. That is not a biological phenomenon. It is social contagion, driven by the internet and reinforced in schools.

The Bayswater Support Group, which provides advice and support for parents of trans-identifying children, reports a surge of parents contacting them after their children are exposed to gender content in RSE lessons and in assemblies. A large proportion of parents say their child showed no sign of gender distress until either a school assembly or RSE lessons on those topics. Children who are autistic, who are same-sex attracted, who do not conform to traditional gender stereotypes, or who have mental health conditions are disproportionately likely to identify as trans or non-binary.

In fact, children who tell a teacher at school that they are suffering from gender distress are then often excluded from normal safeguarding procedures. Instead of involving parents and considering wider causes for what the child is feeling and the best course of action, some schools actively hide the information from parents, secretly changing a child’s name and pronouns in school, but using birth names and pronouns in communications with parents.

One parent of a 15-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome said she discovered that without her knowledge, her daughter’s school had started the process of socially transitioning her child, and has continued to do so despite the mother’s objections. Another mother said:

“It’s all happened very quickly and very unexpectedly after teaching at school during year seven and eight. As far as I can understand the children were encouraged to question the boundaries of their sexual identity as well as their gender identity. Her friendship group of eight girls all adopted some form of LGBTQ identity—either sexual identity or gender identity. My daughter’s mental health has deteriorated so quickly, to the point of self harm and some of the blame is put on me for not being encouraging enough of my daughter’s desire to flatten her breasts and for puberty blockers.”

As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, some parents have been referred to social services when they have questioned the wisdom of treating their son as a girl or their daughter as a boy.

Socially transitioning a child—changing their name and pronouns, and treating them in public as a member of the opposite sex—is not a neutral act. In her interim report on gender services for children, paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass remarks that although social transition

“may not be thought of as an intervention or treatment,”

it is

“an active intervention because it may have significant effects on a child or young person’s psychological functioning.”

The majority of adolescents who suffer from gender dysphoria grow out of it, but instead of safeguarding vulnerable children, schools are actively leading children down a path of transition. If a child presented with anorexia and a teacher’s response was to hide that from parents, celebrate the body dysmorphia and encourage the child to stop eating, that would be a gross safeguarding failure. For a non-medical professional to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, exclude the child’s parents and encourage the child to transition is just such a failure.

In some schools, children are not only taught about the concept of gender theory but signposted to information about physical interventions. Last year, sixth-formers at a grammar school sent a newsletter to girls as young as 11, detailing how to bind their breasts to “look more masculine” and outlining how surgery can remove tissue if it hurts too much. Also, schools have played a major role in referrals to gender identity clinics, where children are sometimes set on a path to medical and surgical transition.

I was really pleased to see the Health Secretary announce today that he is commissioning a more robust study of whether treatment at such clinics improves children’s lives or leads to later problems or regret, because schools may think that they are being kind, but the consequences of full transition—permanent infertility, loss of sexual function and lifelong health problems—are devastating, as has become clear following the case of Keira Bell.

Anyone hearing for the first time what is going on in schools might reasonably ask, “How can this be allowed?” The answer is that it is not allowed. DFE guidance tells schools:

“Resources used in teaching about this topic must always be age-appropriate and evidence-based. Materials which suggest that non-conformity to gender stereotypes should be seen as synonymous with having a different gender identity should not be used and you should not work with external agencies or organisations that produce such material.”

However, many teachers just do not have the time to look into the background of every group that provides sex education resources, and when faced with teaching such difficult and sensitive topics, they understandably reach for ready-made materials, without investigating their source.

Furthermore, those teachers who are aware of the harms are sometimes afraid to share their concerns. A lot of teachers have written to me about this situation, with one writing:

“I left my job in a Primary School after we were asked to be complicit in the ‘social transitioning’ of a 7 year old boy. This was after Gendered Intelligence came into the school and delivered training.”

Relationship and sex education in this country has become a Wild West. Anyone can set themselves up as a sex education provider and offer resources and advice to schools. Imagine if someone with no qualifications could set themselves up as a geography resource provider, insert their own political beliefs on to a map of the world—perhaps they would put Ukraine inside the Russian border—and then sell those materials for use in schools. I do not believe that some of these sex education groups should have any place in our educational system.

Indeed, the guidance says that schools should exercise extreme caution when working with external agencies:

“Schools should not under any circumstances work with external agencies that take or promote extreme political positions or use materials produced by such agencies.”

Yet all the organisations that I have mentioned today, and many others, fall foul of the guidance. What is more, the Government are actually funding some of these organisations with taxpayers’ money. For example, The Proud Trust received money from the tampon tax, and EqualiTeach and Diversity Role Models have received money from the DFE as part of anti-bullying schemes. We have created the perfect conditions for a safeguarding disaster, whereby anyone can set up as an RSE provider and be given access to children, either through lesson materials or through direct access to classrooms.

Yet parents—those who love a child most and who are most invested in their welfare—are being cut out. In many cases, parents are refused access to the teaching materials being used by their children in school. This was highlighted by the case of Clare Page, which was reported at the weekend. She complained about sex education lessons that were being taught in her child’s school by an organisation called the School of Sexuality Education. Until this year, that organisation’s website linked to a commercial website that promoted pornography. Mrs Page’s daughter’s school refused to allow the family to have a copy of the material provided in lessons, saying it was commercially sensitive.

Schools are in loco parentis. Their authority to teach children comes not from the state and not from the teaching unions, but from parents. Parents should have full access to the RSE materials being used by their children. We have created this safeguarding disaster and we will have to find the courage to deal with it for the sake of our children …

… there are strong parallels here with grooming practices, and I have no doubt that children will be more susceptible to being groomed as a result of the materials they are being exposed to.

How have we gone so wrong? We seem to have abandoned childhood. Just as in the covid pandemic when we sacrificed young for old, our approach to sex education is sacrificing the welfare and innocence of children in the interests of adults’ sexual liberation. In 2022, our children are physically overprotected. They have too little opportunity to play unsupervised, to take responsibility and to mature and grow wise, yet at the same time they are being exposed to adult ideologies, being used as pawns in adults’ political agendas and at risk of permanent harm. What kind of society have we created where teachers need to undertake a risk assessment to take pupils to a local park, but a drag queen wearing a dildo is invited into a library to teach pre-school children?

Parents do not know where to turn, and many I have spoken to tell me how they complain to schools and get nowhere. Even the response from the DFE comes back the same every time telling parents that, “Where an individual has concerns, the quickest and most effective route to take is to raise the issue directly with the school.” The complaints system is circular and schools are left to mark their own homework.

Ofsted does not seem willing or able to uphold the DFE’s guidance. Indeed, it may be contributing to the problem. It was reported last week that Ofsted cites lack of gender identity teaching in primary schools as a factor in whether schools are downgraded. There is a statutory duty on the Department to review the RSE curriculum every three years, so the first review is due next year. I urge the Minister to bring forward that review and conduct it urgently. I understand that the Department is in the process of producing guidance for schools on sex and gender, so will Minister tell us when that will be available? …

The DFE should consider creating a set of accredited resources, with regulatory oversight by Ofqual, and mandating that RSE be taught only by subject specialists. The Department has previously said in correspondence that it is

“investing in a central package to help all schools to increase the confidence and quality of their teaching practice in these subjects, including guidance and training resources to provide comprehensive teaching in these areas in an age-appropriate way.”

Can the Minister say when that package will be ready?

In the light of the Cass review interim report, the Department must write to schools with clear guidance about socially transitioning children, the law on single-sex facilities and the imperative to include parents in issues of safeguarding. The Department should also conduct a deep dive into the materials being used in schools, the groups that provide such materials and their funding sources …

… it is the Department for Education that imposed the mandatory requirement for schools to deliver RSE, so it is fundamentally the responsibility of the Department to ensure that schools are equipped and held accountable to deliver it well.

I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Department plans to clean up this mess and give our children the protection they deserve.

Afterwards, Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton Kemptown) spoke. Keep his name in mind, because this was the start of an unheard-of incident in another debate in January 2023:

… Where I disagree, I am afraid, is on some of the hon. Member’s examples. I did not plan to say this, but during the pandemic, my second cousin—a 15-year-old boy—died in a tragic accident of auto-asphyxiation. It devastated the family, as can be imagined, and happened in the pandemic when we were only allowed six people at the funeral. If he had been taught about risky sex acts—he was 15, not a pre-pubescent child—and how to make sure he did things safely, rather than just learning something from the internet that then led to the end of his life, he might still be around and his family might not be devastated. So, actually, because of that personal experience I do have a problem with saying that we should not teach any of this to our children.

The hon. Member picks out examples of the dice or whatever that might sound frivolous, and I cannot judge how exactly things played out in those schools—she might well be right that it was played out by some teachers incorrectly—but the principle of learning about things before people are legally able to do them but when they are physically able to engage in them, which 15-year-olds are, I am afraid, could have been lifesaving.

My sister, who is a teacher in Essex, has worked hard to try and incorporate some of those teaching methods into the school’s RSHE, focused on an age-specific approach and on stories of people such as my cousin and others, so we can talk about the dangers of some of these things. We cannot know about the dangers of things if we do not talk about them, or if we say that they are just things that families need to talk about. I am afraid most families will not do that because those kinds of things are darn embarrassing to talk about—but also because you never think your child will do something like that. I disagree with that element of what we heard today. I do agree that there needs to be oversight and I do agree that there need to be checks to make sure that we are not just promoting risky activities; we need to be talking about the risks of risky activities. Then, when people are of age, they can make their own choices.

I want to reflect on the things I was planning to say in this debate in the last few seconds I have. The UK Youth Parliament ran a campaign for years to try to get RSHE better taught. Elements of the campaign were about emotions and relationships, and it was also about LGBT inclusive education—and that does include T. We have seen the Fédération Internationale de Natation ruling that competitors will not be able to swim unless they transitioned before they were 12, so we are in a difficult and complex world that we have to navigate. Broad-brush bans from the Department are unhelpful; we need to be content specific and school specific. The Department needs to show more leadership, but we cannot exclude talking about trans people or these complex issues in schools because that, I am afraid, would be very dangerous.

Later on, Northern Ireland’s Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party, Strangford) sided with Miriam Cates:

… Relationships and sex education is an essential issue, and a crucial topic for young people to understand. We must all realise that there is a time and a place for relationships and sex education in schools. However, underpinning that is the right of a family to pass on their morals and values, and not to be undermined by teachers who do not know individual children and cannot understand the family dynamic.

I am clear about what I want to see when it comes to sex education: no young person should be unaware of how their body works, but similarly, no teacher nor programme should seek to circumnavigate the right of a family to sow into their child’s life what they see is needed. That is especially the case in primary school children—I think of innocence lost …

… a worrying number of schools across the United Kingdom have felt it necessary to teach children not only about sex, but about gender identity and trans issues. Conservatives for Women has said that children are being encouraged from as young as primary school to consider whether they have gender identity issues that differ from their biology—being male or female—as the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge outlined. That leaves children confused for no other reason than the misunderstanding, and it makes them believe that they should be looking at their own gender issues. My humble opinion—I am putting it clearly on the record—is that children in primary schools are too young to be taught sex education at that level …

It is crucial that we do not unduly influence young people or pupils’ innocent minds by teaching extreme sex and gender legislation. I have seen some material taught in Northern Ireland, such an English book that refers to glory holes, sexual abuse of animals and oral sex. That book was taught to a 13-year-old boy, whose parents were mortified whenever they saw it, and the young boy had little to no understanding of what was going on. I wrote to the Education Minister in Northern Ireland, asking how that book could ever be on a curriculum and what possible literary benefit—there is none—could ever outweigh the introduction of such concepts.

There needs to be a greater emphasis on the line between what is appropriate to be taught at school and at home, and a greater respect for parents and what they want their children to be taught. Family values should be at the core of a child’s adolescence education, as it is of a sensitive nature and needs to be treated carefully, with respect and compassion.

Robin Walker replied for the Government:

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates), along with my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), on securing today’s debate …

I have listened carefully to some of the examples that have been given by Conservative and Opposition Members, in particular those cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge. There is no doubt that some of those things are totally unsuitable for school-age children: “age is only a number” is clearly an unsuitable phrase to be used in the context of consent, and the Department has been clear that the Proud Trust’s dice game is unacceptable for use as a school resource. I have to say that, despite a lot of coverage of that particular issue, we are unaware of any individual cases in which that game has been used in schools.

… To support teachers to deliver in the classroom, we have run expert-led teacher training webinars that covered pornography, domestic abuse and sexual exploitation—topics that teachers told us they find difficult to teach. We also published additional guidance to schools on tackling abuse, harassment, and other sensitive topics.

It has been almost three years since the Department published statutory guidance on relationship, sex and health education, and almost two years since relationship education became a compulsory subject for all schools and relationship and sex education became a compulsory subject for all secondary schools. As has been acknowledged, primary schools can choose to teach sex education in order to meet the needs of their pupils, but if they do so, they must consult with parents on their policy and grant parents an automatic right to withdraw their child from sex education lessons …

At the heart of RSHE is the need to keep children healthy, happy and safe. The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) gave a very powerful example of where more education could make a difference in terms of safety. I sympathise with his deep hurt …

The Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges found that online forms of sexual abuse are increasingly prevalent, with 88% of girls and 49% of boys reporting being sent unwanted sexual images and 80% of girls and 40% of boys pressured to provide sexual images of themselves. The review also showed that children, even in primary schools, are accessing pornography and sharing nude images. We want to make sure that children receive appropriate teaching in schools on topics that are relevant to their lived experience, rather than going online to educate themselves. Through the RSHE curriculum, pupils will be taught about online relationships, the implications of sharing private or personal data—including images—online, harmful content and contact, cyber bullying, an overreliance on social media and where to get help and support for issues that unfortunately occur online. Through the topic of internet safety and harms, pupils will be taught to become discerning customers of information and to understand how comparing oneself with others online can have an impact on one’s own body image. The Department is reviewing its guidance on teaching online safety in schools, which supports teachers to embed teaching about online safety into subjects such as computing, RSHE and citizenship. The guidance will be published in the autumn of this year. The Online Safety Bill will also ensure that children are better protected from pornographic content, wherever it appears online.

The statutory RSHE guidance sets out the content that we expect children to know before they complete each phase of education. We have, however, been clear that our guiding principles for the development of the statutory guidance were that all the compulsory subject content must be age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate. It must be taught sensitively and inclusively, with respect for the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils and parents, while always with the aim of providing pupils with the knowledge they need. Given the need for a differentiated approach and the sensitive and personal nature of many of the topics within the RSHE curriculum, it is important that schools have the flexibility to design their own curricula, so that it is relevant and appropriate to the context of their pupils. The Department’s policy, therefore, has been to trust the expertise of schools to decide the detail of the content that they teach and what resources they use.

As mentioned previously, we have made a commitment in the White Paper to strengthen our guidance in this respect. We will also review and update that guidance regularly—at least every three years. We are confident that the majority of schools are capable of doing this well and have been successful in developing a high-quality RSHE curriculum that is appropriate to the needs of their pupils, but, in the context of this debate, it is clear that that is not always the case and that there are genuine concerns about many of the materials that have been used.

I stress that allowing schools the flexibility to make their own decisions about their curricula does not mean that they should be unaccountable for what they teach. Schools are required by law to publish their RSHE policies and to consult parents on them. As their children’s primary educators, parents should be given every opportunity to understand the purpose and content of what their children are being taught. In the RSHE statutory guidance, which all schools must have regard to, we have set out a clear expectation for schools to share examples of resources with parents. Schools are also bound by other legal duties with regard to the delivery of the wider curriculum. All local authority maintained schools are required to publish the content of their school curriculum, including the details of how parents or other members of the public can find out more about the curriculum that the school is following. There is a parallel requirement in academy trust model funding agreements for each academy to publish the same information on its website. It is our intention that that should form part of the new standards for academies.

… We are clear that schools can show parents curriculum materials, including resources provided by external organisations, without infringing an external provider’s copyright in the resource. For example, it is perfectly possible for a school to invite parents into the school to view materials on the premises. Although of course we have to be mindful of not overburdening schools with repeated requests, we do expect schools to respond positively to all reasonable requests from parents to share curriculum material. We therefore expect schools to share RSHE content and materials with parents openly and transparently, where requested. We are clear that they should not enter into any contracts with third parties that seek to restrict them from sharing RSHE resources with parents.

… To help schools to make the best choices, the Department published the non-statutory guidance, “Plan your relationships, sex and health curriculum”. That sets out practical advice for schools on a number of topics, including using externally produced resources. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge quoted from it.

… We are working with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure that we are giving the clearest possible guidance to schools on transgender issues. We will hold a full public consultation on the draft guidance later this year. Given the complexity of the subject, we need to get this right and we want to take full account of the review being conducted by Dr Hilary Cass.

I realise that my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge will need time to respond, so I conclude by saying that I hear very clearly the concerns that have been expressed. As a parent of both a girl and a boy, I know that we need to address these issues and to do so in a way that can reassure parents but continue to deliver high-quality relationships, sex and health education.

Miriam Cates concluded:

I thank the Minister for his response. I am looking forward to seeing the consultation on the guidance. I thank everybody who contributed today. This has been a very good debate. We have had some surprising areas of agreement. I think that most of us have agreed that this is a very important topic. The key phrase that has come out is “age appropriate”. I personally do not think that it should be up to schools, teachers or, potentially, parents to have to decide that. I think that we need child development experts on the case to determine which materials are suitable for which time.

I will conclude by reflecting on the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price). Family is key to this, and parents’ values and parents’ choice are so important. We must never teach relationships and sex education in schools outside the context of respecting parents’ choice and parents’ values. Parents are the people who love and are most invested in children, and theirs are the views that we should most take into account.

I saw that debate on BBC Parliament. My shock at the time has not diminished, even when sharing the Hansard transcript with you.

As for Lloyd Russell-Moyle, things came to a head between him and Miriam Cates in January. More on that next week.

Red Wall MPs: Miriam Cates — part 1

Because events in British politics have been so dramatic, it has been some time since I wrote about Red Wall MPs in England.

My last entry was for Marco Longhi in July 2022.

Yesterday, I mentioned Miriam Cates’s renewed opposition this month not only to certain aspects of sex education curricula in England but also to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s seeming disdain for mothers who wish to stay at home to raise their children. He said:

… it is damaging to the economy …

Egregious.

Background

Miriam Cates was elected in December 2019 to represent the South Yorkshire constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, which was created in 2010.

Until 2019, Labour’s Angela Smith represented Penistone and Stockbridge. Smith, who by then was a Liberal Democrat, ran an unsuccessful campaign in Altrincham and Sale West, which Sir Graham Brady, the Conservative incumbent and chair of the Party’s 1922 Committee, won. Cates defeated Labour’s Francyne Johnson by 7,210 votes, quite the achievement, considering that the old Penistone constituency had only one Conservative MP, elected in 1931. All the others were Labour.

Cates, the daughter of a general practitioner (since retired), was born in Sheffield in 1982. Her parents were practising Christians, and she has two younger brothers.

Cates has spent most of her life in or near Sheffield. She left to read Genetics at Cambridge, then returned to her home town to earn a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Sheffield Hallam University. She taught science, including biology, at the city’s Tapton School. She and her husband then founded their own firm, a technology consultancy called Redemption Media.

She and her husband have three children and live in Oughtlibridge, a village in the Sheffield area. She and her husband met at church whilst working on a project there. Cates is an Evangelical Christian.

Cates became interested in politics when she began listening to BBC Radio 4 at the age of 11. She was elected as a councillor for the Oughtlibridge Ward in 2015 and was re-elected in 2019. She resigned her post in 2021.

In 2016, she was a Remainer until aspects of the Leave campaign convinced her to vote for Brexit in the June referendum that year.

Maiden speech

Cates gave her maiden speech in the House of Commons in February 2020, when the 80-strong Conservative majority were full of optimism:

She gave her speech, during a debate on Migration and Scotland. Emphases mine below:

My interest in this place began when I was 11 years old and somehow I acquired an ancient, long-wave radio that would only tune to Radio 4. In the 1990s, before YouTube and Candy Crush, I had to make do with the “Today” programme and “Westminster Hour”, but I was hooked—captivated by the history of our democracy, the workings of our politics and its power to bring change.

My first big political experience was the 1997 general election. Growing up in Sheffield, in what was the capital of the socialist republic of South Yorkshire, this was no ordinary election. I was fascinated by the whole campaign and I sent off for and displayed posters from every single political party, including the Referendum party. I even had a Liberal Democrat board on a post in our front garden, but we all make errors of judgment in our youth …

To cut a short story even shorter, I found my home in the Conservative party and I now stand before you as the Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge. Apart from a three-year stint at university, I have lived in the Sheffield area for my whole life, so it is a profound privilege to represent a community that I call home.

Penistone and Stocksbridge is a truly remarkable constituency. We have stunning scenery, moorland and reservoirs. We have beautiful rural villages like Bolsterstone, Wortley and Cawthorne. We have the historic market town of Penistone, which received its market charter in 1290 and where Penistone Grammar School, founded in 1392, still provides an excellent education to local children. The school’s original motto was “Disce Aut Discede”, which means learn or leave. This sentiment clearly held sway in the 2016 referendum, where the constituency judged that the EU had failed to learn and so we should indeed leave.

The town of Stocksbridge, with its industrious history of steel manufacture, boasts the proud legacy of Mr Samuel Fox, inventor of the Paragon umbrella frame, and whose wire factories were responsible for the development of the town we know today. We have many other wonderful communities, like Dodworth, Pogmoor, Chapeltown, Ecclesfield, High Green, Grenoside and Burncross, and numerous rural villages, each with their own unique character.

Ten years ago, I moved to Oughtibridge, one of these villages, and, being until this point a city girl, I was utterly unaware of the strength and depth of community that I was about to encounter. Throwing myself into village life, I discovered voluntary groups, the school PTA, the local church and the parish council, bringing together people of all ages and from all walks of life. The wonderful thing about a village is that when everyone shares the same school, the same park and the same pub, it is natural to form friendships that are based on a common interest and a common geography, and not on social background or political worldview.

It was in my capacity as a parish councillor that I first met my predecessor, Angela Smith. I found her to be hard-working, sincere, thoughtful and helpful, and I want to thank Angela for the part that she played in securing an £8 million investment in the Fox Valley shopping centre, which has been responsible for significant regeneration in Stocksbridge and the surrounding area. In more recent times, Angela became known for her inclination to switch allegiances, being, at different times during 2019, a member of no fewer than five political parties or groups. I am heartily glad that the people of Penistone and Stocksbridge shared this enthusiasm for switching parties and in December elected me as their first Conservative MP. On the topic of Scottish migration, perhaps the Scottish Government would want to offer a visa to any of my constituents who want to complete the set and experience representation by the SNP, although I feel sure they would only require a temporary visa.

We have heard much about how we Conservatives won seats such as Penistone and Stocksbridge for the first time. Like my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, I understand that many people lent me their votes, and I take seriously my responsibility to deliver on the commitments we made. One of the most important of these commitments is the pledge to radically improve public transport in the north of England. When I was first selected as a parliamentary candidate, I began by going around our communities asking people what changes they would like to see, and public transport was raised time and again.

We desperately need to level up our northern transport and infrastructure. Public transport is not just about getting people from A to B; it connects people with well-paid jobs, training and education, hospital appointments and shops, and it prevents loneliness and isolation. Transport is the key to spreading opportunity and investment. That is why I am campaigning with the Don Valley railway group to see a Stocksbridge to Sheffield passenger train line reinstated and with Thurgoland Parish Council public transport working group to secure better rural bus services. I am delighted therefore by today’s announcement on funding for buses and trains, which demonstrates that this one nation Conservative Government are committed to an ambitious programme of levelling up.

Levelling up is not just about financial investment, bricks and mortar, and miles of train track. The national soul-searching of the past four years has demonstrated that there are areas of our country, particularly northern towns such as Penistone and Stocksbridge, that have been left behind—not just in an economic sense, although that is certainly the case, but in terms of how our communities and our culture are understood and valued as part of our national life. As I said, I have lived in the area my whole life, and that is by no means unusual. Our towns and villages are wonderful places to live, not least because of the strength and depth of community life. Social mobility should not mean having to leave your home, your family and your community to find work, training or investment. We do have ambition, aspiration and talent, but we are also rooted in a deep sense of place. We need opportunities right in the heart of our communities, and this Government’s initiatives, such as the towns fund and the shared prosperity fund, will help us to deliver.

I want to finish where I started. A quarter of a century on from when my interest in this place began, I still believe that politics has the power to bring change and that we should celebrate our history as a democratic nation—not a perfect history by any means, and one with many dark moments, but one where the trend has been towards progress and fairness. To continue this progress we must begin to heal the very real divides that have been exposed, between north and south, towns and cities, leave and remain, old and young. We need to find a way to recognise and value our differences while celebrating what we have in common as citizens of this great nation. However different our life experiences, our place of birth, our social background, we have a shared identity as human beings. Whether this identity derives from an acceptance of our intrinsic worth as people or a belief, like mine, that we are all children of the same heavenly father, we need to cherish what we have in common.

There are many different opinions in this country, and we have given each other many different labels, but the vast majority of us want to make this nation a better place for everyone who lives here. We may disagree, sometimes passionately, about how that should be done, but if we can respect each other’s motives and leave the labels behind, be slow to judge and quick to forgive, the healing will begin. December marked a fresh start for our democracy, and a fresh start for Penistone and Stocksbridge. I am honoured to serve this wonderful constituency, and I will work hard to deliver for all of my constituents.

Coronavirus realist

I might have coined a new expression there. Cates was not a Covid sceptic but rather a Covid realist in recognising how much damage lockdown and other measures did to the country.

She participated in the Coronavirus debate of June 16, 2021. This one concerned the extension of the Coronavirus Act 2020:

Following the science is an attractive and even comforting idea in a time of uncertainty. But—I say this as a scientist —we can no more follow science than we can follow history. Science gives us knowledge and understanding, but it cannot give us wisdom, and it is wisdom that we need to make what are essentially moral and political decisions about how we balance the short and long- term best interests of our whole society. I am saddened that we have lost—I hope only temporarily—that sense of balance.

Preventing death from covid seems to have become the principal purpose of our national endeavour, no matter the cost to our way of life. We have placed insufficient emphasis on the terrible long-term consequences of lockdown—poverty, unemployment, lost education, debt, undiagnosed cancer, loneliness, hopelessness and fear—and focused far too narrowly on just one set of metrics: the daily covid data. Even the most hardened libertarian would accept that, in a national emergency and in the face of significant threat to life, restrictions on our freedoms have been necessary and right, but with all vulnerable people having now been offered vaccination, the balance of risk has shifted.

Covid is no longer a substantial threat. The average covid mortality so far in June is seven deaths a day—seven out of around 1,500 daily deaths that we could expect in normal times. The number of people in hospital now stands at 1,177—some 37,000 fewer than at the peak in January. Thanks to the incredible efficacy of our vaccination programme, it is hard to comprehend how our hospitals could quickly become overwhelmed. The idea that we are still in a state of emergency is not supported by the evidence, yet significant legal restrictions on our basic freedoms are to remain, even dictating how many of our family and friends can visit us in our private homes. The restrictions we face are now out of proportion to the threat, so extending the measures sets a dangerous precedent.

We must learn to live with covid in the way that we live with so many other risks. Vaccines will never be 100% effective, just like seatbelts, smoke alarms or contraception, but it is vital to our autonomy and our identity as human beings that we are able to make our own choices and evaluations of everyday risks, as has been the norm in our country for generations. I have the greatest respect for Ministers, who have had to make unimaginably difficult decisions over the past year, but now is the time to restore a sense of balance, proportion and fairness, and to make a return to life in all its fullness.

In my final seconds, I want to say this: childhood should be a time that is care-free. Testing our children twice a week, making them wear masks when they are not at risk, and constantly reminding them that they may be a danger to people whom they love, is damaging them psychologically, and we have to stop.

Three months later, on September 21, the Backbench Business Committee granted her a debate about giving the coronavirus vaccine to children, which she introduced as follows (excerpted below). This took place in Westminster Hall, where additional debates take place:

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate, and draw Members’ attention to the three e-petitions that relate to this topic, which have amassed more than 100,000 signatures between them.

Vaccination has transformed public health over the last two centuries. As a science teacher, I remember teaching students about the amazing work of Edward Jenner, who famously developed the smallpox inoculation. Two hundred and fifty years later, vaccinations have again ridden to our rescue with the rapid development and roll-out of covid vaccines across the UK. The phenomenal success of the vaccination programme can be seen clearly in the data …

Those figures are a ringing endorsement of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s strategy to recommend vaccination based on the medical benefits and risks to the individuals concerned. The Government have repeatedly defended both this strategy and the independence of the JCVI, and resisted calls to prioritise the vaccination of teachers or police officers over those at higher risk of serious illness. That was the right approach, and the UK has led the world in falling rates of deaths and hospitalisations.

It was therefore surprising, to say the least, when the Government put political pressure on the JCVI to quickly reach a decision about the vaccination of children. On 3 September 2021, the JCVI announced that it was unable to recommend the mass vaccination of healthy 12 to 15-year-olds. The reason was that, although there are marginal health benefits of covid vaccination to children based on the known risks of the vaccine, there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms, such as the long-term effects of myocarditis …

There is no rush to roll out the vaccine to children. We know that children are not at risk from covid; teachers are no more at risk than the rest of the population; the vast majority of vulnerable adults have been vaccinated; over half of children already have antibodies; and there is no evidence that schools drive transmission …

It is widely known that access to GPs is challenging at the moment, and that presents challenges in this situation. It is widely understood that if a child can consent, contrary to parental consent, that is not a tick-box exercise; it is a matter for a medical professional to assess whether the child is competent to consent. If there are problems accessing GPs, there are clear issues here …

… instead of accepting the JCVI’s assessment and waiting for more evidence to emerge, the Government asked the chief medical officer urgently to review the decision based on the wider benefits to children, including from education. Last week, the CMO announced that he would recommend child vaccinations on the basis of these wider benefits.

That decision is a marked departure from the principle of vaccinating people for their own medical benefit, because those wider issues—educational disruption and concerns around mental health—are the consequences of policy decisions and are not scientific inevitabilities. Children in the UK have already missed more education than children in almost any other country in Europe, despite comparable death rates. Since January 2020, British children have lost on average 44% of school days to lockdown and isolation. That is not a consequence of covid infections in children, but rather a result of policy decisions to close schools and isolate healthy children.

… There is a much simpler way to stop harmful educational disruption, and that is to follow the advice of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and end the mass testing of asymptomatic children. This unevidenced and unethical policy is costing tens of millions of pounds a week—I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm the exact cost—and is continuing to disrupt education. Even the CMO acknowledges that a vaccination programme alone will not stop school closures. Perhaps the Minister could clarify how the Government intend to end educational disruption.

On the potential mental health benefits from reducing the fear of covid, it is not covid infection that is making children fearful; it is the uncertainty, frustration, loneliness and anxiety that they experience as a result of lockdowns and harmful messages such as, “Don’t kill granny.” Children need not fear catching covid, but they have every right to fear policy decisions that cause them significant harm, and sadly we cannot vaccinate against those.

Nonetheless, the decision has been made, and we have to be very clear that the risks to children, both from covid and from vaccines, are tiny. Concerns should now focus on making sure that the necessary safeguards are put in place as vaccination is rolled out … While I appreciate Ministers’ commitments, children already face discrimination in some schools over mask wearing and testing.

Vaccination must be a free and informed decision …  Parental consent must also be respected. Much has been said on this subject, but the heart of the matter is that parental responsibility and authority are foundational to society …

Throughout the past 18 months, “protect the vulnerable” has been our clarion call. We have rightly made significant efforts to protect elderly people and those who are particularly susceptible to covid, but children, who cannot speak out, do not own property, and have no legal agency, are also very vulnerable. Yet during the pandemic, we have asked this group of vulnerable people to make huge sacrifices to protect the rest of us. The harms of lockdown for our children are significant and, for many, will be irreversible: lost education, missed opportunities, abuse and horrific online harms. The number of children presenting in A&E with acute mental health conditions has risen by 50% since the start of the pandemic.

A climate of fear and uncertainty has robbed children of the structure, routine and security that they need to thrive and has placed on them a heavy emotional burden from inferring that they may be responsible for the deaths of those they love. We have pretended that online learning is somehow a substitute for being in schools, and closed our eyes to the consequences of social isolation for children and young people.

Of course, we should raise our children to take responsibility for their actions, but as adults we should always shoulder the greater burden. We have imposed absurd rules on our young people, right down to deciding whom they can play with at playtime and whether they are allowed to change for PE.

However, we have not seen that much action to urge adults to take responsibility for their own covid risk by, for example, losing weight or exercising—something that would have had a far greater impact on our rates of hospitalisation and death.

The lightweight Maggie Throup responded for the Government:

… My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge asked a number of questions. I reiterate that the CMOs sought advice from experts in the field; it was not just the information they had themselves. It is only right that, based on that advice, 12 to 15-year-olds are able to take up the offer of the vaccine in a fair and equitable manner.

My hon. Friend asked about disruption to education from the programme. NHS England already has plans in place for the mop-up programme, which is not likely to be on school sites, to minimise disruption to education and the rest of the immunisation programme …

It is important that we do whatever we can—use whatever we have in our toolbox—to make sure that children are able to continue with their education, and vaccination is one part of that. I know my hon. Friend is passionate, as am I, about making sure that children get a full education, and that the pandemic does not affect their futures. My hon. Friend raised several other questions and, if she will allow me, I will write to her in response to any I do not answer in my speech.

As is customary, the MP who introduces the debate concludes it. Cates ended with this:

To finish, I reiterate the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Chris Green): what is success? Where does this end? How do we get back to normal? I do not believe the vaccine roll-out among children will get us there. We need determined political leadership that puts the welfare of children front and centre, ends educational disruption and allows us to move forward with their future.

I will have more about Miriam Cates next week.

The Lockdown Files’ WhatsApp messages reveal political self-interest at the public’s expense

Over the past several days, I have been digesting The Telegraph‘s series about the pandemic, The Lockdown Files.

Readers who missed them can catch up on my posts here, here, here, here and here. That last post, from March 8, 2023, discusses then-Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock’s desire to ‘frighten the pants off people’ with the Kent variant at the end of 2020. Top civil servant Simon Case agreed that behavioural change using fear and guilt was paramount. Masks, as many Covid sceptics suggested at the time, were the most visible means of compliance — or submission — to Government diktats.

Top oncologist reacts

On Thursday, March 9, The Telegraph published a post from the UK’s top oncologist, Prof Karl Sikora: ‘Lockdown supporters called me a killer — they should be disgusted with themselves’ (emphases mine below):

Opposing the relentless raft of lockdown policies was a lonely and, at times, extremely unpleasant experience. Those of us who voiced concerns about effectively closing down a country were labelled as far-Right extremists who were happy to see millions perish to the disease. It was a disgrace, legitimised by low-grade politicians such as Matt Hancock who were far too interested in advancing their own public image. Thousands succumbed to the destructive, and often pointless, lockdown measures they pushed at every opportunity.

There will be no apologies from the baying lockdown mob – the damage has been done, the debate has mostly moved on and the inquiry may well become a total whitewash. The Telegraph’s lockdown files have done a great service in partially halting that march. 

… Many of those voices are now totally silent on the thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths related to lockdown delays and backlogs. I have no regrets in my opposition to a variety of lockdown policies and the language I used throughout the pandemic – I wonder if they can say the same?

We now know for sure that some decisions taken were based in PR and politics, rather than science and sense. When the Health Secretary is talking about “frightening the pants off everyone” with a new strain, those of us who voiced scepticism at the time about the language used can feel vindicated …

I’m desperate for a Covid inquiry whitewash to be avoided for one simple reason: this cannot be allowed to happen again. If we don’t at least ask the questions, when another pandemic, or the threat of one, comes around, lockdown cannot be the go-to option. The advisers who made the past recommendations cannot be used ever again.

… Routine healthcare for non-Covid conditions was effectively shut down to millions for months on end, and now we have thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths. What did they think would happen, honestly? 

My lockdown inbox was overflowing with desperate cancer patients whose treatment had been indefinitely postponed. I remember one case of a mother who had her chemotherapy cancelled, leading to her tragic death leaving behind three young children and a loving husband. And it’s not just cancer: cardiac issues untreated, blood pressure out of control, strokes uncared for, other preventative measures forgotten and of course soaring obesity. The post-lockdown crisis is across all aspects of healthcare, physical and mental. That is for those lucky enough to receive any medical support or diagnosis at all. Others were told to stay home and that’s exactly what they did – dying there without the care they needed and deserved.

To those of you who took a brave stand speaking out against various restrictions and policies – from me, a sincere thank you. We comprehensively lost the argument in the court of public opinion, but hopefully a small difference was made. I suspect the national mood may have significantly shifted over the last week. Sunlight is the best disinfectant after all, and spring is on the way.

That same day, Helia Ebrahimi, who had a mastectomy in 2022, told her story to the paper: ‘They said I’d lose a breast and maybe my life — but the NHS made me wait four months’:

In the UK, more than 5,500 women are diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma every year. But often their diagnoses are late. Sometimes too late. When it became clear how progressed my cancer was, my surgeon wanted to start treatment immediately. I was at The Royal Marsden in London, a standard bearer in cancer care that also benefits from charity funding. But even at the Marsden, the pressures on the NHS are inescapable. Especially last year, when the country was reeling from a Covid backlog and 327,000 people were on the cancer waiting list in England alone, with 34,000 people failing to get treatment within the Government target of 62 days – the worst backlog on record. Almost 10,000 people were still not receiving treatment within 104 days …

Ultimately, my husband and I decided we couldn’t wait, so I used my work health insurance scheme to cover most of the cost. My surgeon from the Marsden still performed the operation but at a private hospital, with theatre space.

An article about the waiting list times also appeared in The Telegraph that day, ‘Nearly half of cancer patients waiting too long for treatment, the worst on record’:

More than 7,000 patients did not receive their first treatment within 62 days following an urgent GP referral, official figures for January show.

Only 54.4 per cent of patients with an urgent referral were seen within the target time, against a benchmark of 85 per cent – the lowest on records dating back to 2009 …

It comes after NHS bosses admitted this week cancer recovery targets are likely to be pushed back another year to March 2024.

The article has more statistics.

It is interesting that there is no mention of the pandemic or the lockdown of the NHS to patients such as these. Equally interesting is Prof Stephen Powis’s response. Powis was also an adviser on pandemic policy:

Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said there had been “no let-up” of pressures, with staff facing “significant levels of respiratory illness in hospital, which came at the same time as disruption from industrial action”.

“Despite this, staff continued to deliver for patients, bringing down elective waits, treating more cancer patients and delivering more diagnostic tests for people than ever before,” he said.

Instead, he points to possible upcoming strikes by junior doctors:

He added: “The NHS will not stop in its efforts to bring down 18 month waits for elective care and bring down the cancer backlog, but it is inevitable that if the upcoming junior doctors strikes happen they will have a significant impact on cancer care and routine operations that were scheduled to happen.

“As ever, we will do all we can to limit the impact to patients.”

Early 2020: Persuading MPs through messaging

Going back to the start of 2020, chief Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock thought that Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign director could get ‘hawkish’ Cabinet members on board with the pandemic measures. A full lockdown began on March 23, 2020.

On March 2, 2023, The Telegraph explains how the two did it in ‘Dominic Cummings deployed election mastermind to reassure Cabinet hawks of public support for lockdown’:

they set up a meeting between Cabinet ministers and Isaac Levido in April 2020.

Mr Levido, an Australian political strategist and protegee of the former Tory aide Sir Lynton Crosby, was recruited to Downing Street in March 2020 to improve the Government’s Covid messaging.

He is credited with masterminding Mr Johnson’s 2019 election victory three months earlier and is a close ally of Mr Cummings.

In a conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Cummings on April 23 exactly one month after the imposition of the first lockdown, the former health secretary said his Cabinet colleagues should be told that more than half of voters either supported lockdown measures or thought they should be strengthened.

At that point, if we look at Boris’s words from March, the two or three weeks ‘to flatten the sombrero’ would have meant that a lifting of lockdown was in sight. Not so. England remained in lockdown until July 4 that year, with a gradual loosening in between for construction workers and, in June, schools.

Not surprisingly, in April, some Cabinet members were ready to lift lockdown, for obvious reasons:

… the conversation took place as some ministers were beginning to make the case, often in anonymous briefings to newspapers, that keeping lockdown measures in place for too long would have serious consequences for the economy and society.

It was unclear what polling Hancock was using. In addition, Isaac Levido stayed on board only for a few months before pursuing his own interests:

It is unclear which polling Mr Hancock was referring to in his messages to Mr Cummings, but research from a Cambridge University team led by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter in April 2020 showed 87 per cent of the public did believe lockdown should remain in place for at least another three weeks.

Mr Levido left Downing Street in July 2020 and founded Fleetwood Strategy, a public relations firm. He was later brought back into Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) as a strategist during Nadhim Zahawi’s tenure as chairman.

By late April, Mr Hancock had recently announced a testing capacity target of 100,000 swabs a day, and been criticised by Downing Street sources for an “irrational” and “arbitrary” approach to the pandemic.

“Hancock’s not had a good crisis,” one No10 source told The Telegraph at the time.

“The prime minister will say he has confidence in him, but it doesn’t feel like that.”

At this point, Boris was out of hospital recovering from his near-fatal bout of the virus. According to a WhatsApp message from Cummings shown in the article, he allegedly urged harmony:

“FYI Boris called a few people tonight to say — all these attacks [on] Matt, I want us to stick up for him etc,” he said.

Cummings’s approach to policy was similar to Hancock’s:

On June 1, the day schools began to reopen from the first lockdown, he suggested enforcing mask-wearing on trains and buses.

“I think we shd make it legally compulsory to wear mask on public transport (with only eg small child/disabled etc exception). It’s free, buys us some R, no real downside,” he said.

Lee Cain, the Downing Street director of communications, replied: “We need to bottom out enforcement etc – if we are doing it PM can drop it on Wednesday.”

The policy was announced three days later, and came into force on June 15.

How libertarian Boris became lockdown ‘zealot’

On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘How Boris Johnson veered from lockdown sceptic to zealot’.

The article explains how Cummings began to refer to the then-Prime Minister as ‘the trolley’. In other words, like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, he careered all over the place with decision-making during the pandemic:

New evidence suggests Mr Cummings was at least partially right. In WhatsApp conversations with ministers and officials, Mr Johnson veered between lockdown sceptic and lockdown zealot, as he reacted to the ever-changing data and advice.

The former prime minister would sometimes introduce an idea, only to abandon his stance even when others agreed with him.

Mr Johnson’s biggest internal conflict came over the three national lockdowns that were controversially imposed in 2020 and 2021.

A libertarian by nature, Mr Johnson repeatedly changed his mind over forcing people to stay at home depending on who he had been talking to …

In July 2020, Mr Johnson described the idea of a second lockdown as the “nuclear option”. In Oct 2020, he described the idea as “the height of absurdity”.

Yet in June 2020, when the country was still in the grip of the first national lockdown, Mr Johnson’s attitude seemed to be different …

He has always denied that his brush with death changed his mind on government policy.

The article includes screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges during that time.

Later in 2020, Matt Hancock began to find Boris’s vacillating exasperating:

At the end of Oct 2020, the then prime minister was wrestling with the decision of whether or not to put the country into lockdown for a second time.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Oct 21, in response to a question from Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, Mr Johnson described a second lockdown as “the height of absurdity”.

And on Oct 30, Mr Hancock was messaging Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, expressing exasperation that Mr Johnson appeared even more reluctant than Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, to take tough measures.

Less than a week later, Mr Johnson introduced a second lockdown, saying: “Now is the time to take action, as there is no other choice.”

It was claimed at the time that he had been “bounced” into announcing the lockdown after Michael Gove, the then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was accused of leaking plans for the lockdown to the media before Mr Johnson had made up his mind.

England entered a third semi-lockdown on Monday, January 4, 2021. Pupils had returned to school that day only to be told by the end of it that schools were closed for the forseeable future.

Hospitality venues, having lost out on Christmas 2020 bookings, were also severely affected during that time. Some never recovered.

Nor, indeed, had a significant number of schoolchildren. Mental health problems exploded during and after lockdown.

Schoolchild kills himself

On March 4, Isabel Oakeshott, to whom Hancock gave 100,000 WhatsApp messages which form the basis of The Lockdown Files, told us about a tragic case of suicide in ‘The dreadful consequences of Matt Hancock’s lockdown scare tactics’:

While Matt Hancock breezily discussed how to “frighten the pants off everyone” with a new strain, a boy called Mark was listening to the drumbeat towards another national lockdown grow louder in deepening despair.

It was December 2020, and the 15-year-old’s life had already been turned upside down by the pandemic.

A few months earlier, his mother Anna Marie had decided that they should move house because they couldn’t even go to the local park during the first lockdown.

She describes how over-zealous council officials had shut the playground, leaving her struggling to cope with Mark’s little brother, a hyperactive five-year-old …

Now, the family was in a better place in the North East, but Anna Marie had been unable to get Mark into a new school.

With “home schooling” now an easy default, education authorities shrugged that he could just study for his GCSEs online.

Unable to play football during the first lockdown, he started putting on weight. When other children returned to school that autumn, he became increasingly isolated – and frightened.

As Mr Hancock and his acolytes plotted to use a new strain of coronavirus to terrify the population, that fear descended into paranoia. Mark became so scared of the virus that he would not even open his bedroom window.

“His nails were bitten to the bone. He was literally frightened of the air. He wore a mask everywhere,” his mother says …

“We tried to keep the TV off, but we were being bombarded,” she says, of the prophecies of doom relentlessly pumped out by an acquiescing media.

“Mark knew we were going into another lockdown. The fear was the thing that affected him most. He was disconnected; distant. I didn’t know what to do.”

In December 2021:

Almost exactly a year later, when most of the population had been vaccinated against Covid but the Omicron variant prompted yet another fear campaign, he told his mother he was popping out to the shops – and never returned.

His body was found by dog walkers three days later, hanging from a tree.

Though he had never talked of taking his own life, his family had been prepared for the worst, after discovering that he had searched the internet for how to tie a noose …

An intelligent child, Mark had hoped to study computer science when he left school. Instead, his education came to a juddering halt …

After the harrowing discovery on Christmas Eve, Mark was cremated. His mother and siblings took his ashes to Seaton Carew Beach near Hartlepool, a place Mark loved. They scattered the ashes over the sand dunes.

“He went off on the wind,” Anna Marie says quietly.

Let not the lessons from this tragedy also blow away on the breeze.

“Frightening the pants off people” had truly dreadful consequences.

Oakeshott expresses thoughts I have had since March 2020 about Britons who had houses with gardens versus those who were trapped in flats along with our notional betters who were at the helm of this tragic decision-making:

Those responsible for “Project Fear” had no idea about the lives of people like Anna Marie and her children.

In their spacious houses, in leafy parts of London, with access to all the luxuries that made lockdowns quite tolerable for the better off, their own families were doing fine.

Hancock and his advisers were caught up in their own sense of heroism.

Mr Hancock and his advisers did not even try to imagine how the tactics they were gleefully discussing to achieve “proper behaviour change” would affect the most vulnerable in society.

Heady on the unprecedented power they had seized to control all our lives, they were caught up in the excitement of managing the day-to-day crisis and their own sense of heroism at their leading roles in the drama.

They were completely removed from the reality of lockdowns for those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum.

Judging from the total absence of any discussion about collateral damage in their WhatsApp messages, they had zero interest in hearing about it either …

Is Simon Case pondering his future?

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who is also the head of the Civil Service, has come under criticism for his WhatsApp messages revealed in The Lockdown Files.

Case’s messages show that he that he thought quarantining holidaymakers ‘hilarious’. He also thought that fear and guilt were appropriate tools to get the British public to comply with pandemic policies.

Conservative MPs were unhappy with what they had read in The Telegraph. On Saturday, March 4, the paper published ‘Tories accuse Simon Case of left-wing bias over Covid rules’:

Britain’s top civil servant has been accused of left-wing bias by senior Tories after he dismissed concerns about Covid rules as “pure Conservative ideology”.

Simon Case is facing questions over his political impartiality and conduct during the pandemic, following the emergence of leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph.

On Saturday Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was forced to declare that Mr Case, who is Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, retained his “confidence”.

Mr Case’s comment that Sir Alok Sharma, the then business secretary, opposed compelling hospitality venues to keep customers’ details because of “pure Conservative ideology”, have led to claims that he overstepped the mark of Civil Service impartiality.

At the time, Mr Case was the Downing Street permanent secretary in charge of the Civil Service response to Covid.

At various points during the pandemic, he appeared to side with Matt Hancock against other Cabinet ministers, including Mr Sunak, the then chancellor, who on one occasion he described as “going bonkers” over a policy that hospitality venues should keep customers’ details for contact-tracing purposes. Mr Case added that Sir Alok would be “mad” to oppose it.

Elsewhere, the leaked messages show that he joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms in quarantine hotels.

The criticism of Mr Case comes at a time when the Civil Service is facing increased scrutiny over its impartiality, after the decision of top mandarin Sue Gray to quit Whitehall and accept a job as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

Esther McVey, a former Cabinet minister, led the criticism of Mr Case’s conduct, saying: “This is the highest civil servant in the land letting the cat out of the bag by suggesting that one of the most centrist of Conservative MPs was pursuing ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply for questioning some of the lockdown rules.

“Leaving aside the fact that this is a Conservative government and so what would he expect from its ministers, if Mr Case thinks Alok Sharma was pursuing such a hard-line Conservative ideology it can only mean that he is yet another senior civil servant on the left wing of British politics.”

She was joined by fellow former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg who said the messages revealed that there was a desire from Mr Hancock and Whitehall officials to “lock us down and keep us locked down”.

“They seem to have enjoyed taking control of people’s lives,” he said, adding that the messages between Mr Case and Mr Hancock show that “they criticised the Chancellor and anyone who is not in favour [of stricter measures], then they tried to marginalise them” …

A third former Cabinet minister said Mr Case’s language is “inappropriate”, adding that civil servants are “not there to make judgement on people’s motivations. It just undermines people who are democratically elected. They are meant to be impartial, professional and objective”.

And a fourth said: “Sue Gray is clearly not the only party political civil servant who doesn’t like the Conservatives. She confirmed what many people thought – that the Civil Service is hostile to the Tory party. And this [Simon Case’s messages] just underlines it.”

However, civil servants also objected to what they have read about Case. One spoke to The Telegraph:

Jill Rutter, former Treasury mandarin, said she was surprised by the “casual callousness” of Mr Case’s remarks.

“The interesting thing is who does Case think he is working for?” she said. “Does he think he is there as a neutral broker to get all the ministers to a view they can accept? Or does he know what the PM wants and is helping him to achieve that outcome? Or is he just trying to achieve Matt Hancock’s objectives?” …

Case’s remarks were one of the more surprising revelations from The Lockdown Files:

The Lockdown Files piled further pressure on Mr Case after a string of difficult news stories.

He faced questions over his apparent role in clearing a controversial £800,000 loan facility for Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and he was also criticised over the partygate affair.

In one exchange with Hancock, Case seemed to doubt Boris Johnson’s honesty:

In another, from October 30, 2020, Case intimated that Boris — his boss — was seen to be untrustworthy:

By Monday, March 6, 2023, despite Rishi’s expressed confidence in him, Cabinet ministers were calling for Case’s departure for his ‘level of indiscretion’. The Times had the story:

Exclusive:

Cabinet ministers call for Simon Case to go after he criticised Sunak and Johnson in WhatsApp messages

‘Case is looking more and more ridiculous, I think he has to go. Rishi needs to clear him out. It’s the level of indiscretion’https://t.co/UAlu3u2ExW

— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) March 6, 2023

That day, The Financial Times had a story about Case on its front page, purporting that he was eyeing an ‘early exit’:

Tuesday's FT: Speaker McCarthy to meet Taiwan's leader in US to avert Beijing backlash #TomorrowsPapersToday #FinancialTimes #FT pic.twitter.com/R8oN4MVM9G

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) March 6, 2023

The article says, in part:

“I can’t see how Simon Case survives this, especially if there are more messages of his directly slagging off other ministers,” one senior Conservative backbencher told the Financial Times.

While friends of the cabinet secretary say that he has continued to receive support from his colleagues, he is also said to be “fed up”.

Among Case’s fellow officials, there is particular concern about his handling of “partygate”, which centred on rule-breaking in Downing Street and Whitehall during Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

One senior official said: “Simon didn’t stand up for his own people over partygate,” adding that junior staff were issued with fines for attending events happening on his watch.

Case has also drawn scrutiny for his knowledge of Johnson’s personal financial relationship with the chair of the BBC and for the government’s response to bullying allegations against Dominic Raab, the justice secretary.

Rishi Sunak’s spokesman declined to comment on the WhatsApp messages. Downing Street said: “The cabinet secretary has the confidence of the prime minister and that has not changed.”

An ally of Case said that they contained “casual language being used in a casual setting . . . There are a lot of Conservatives who dislike the civil service, but who can name only one civil servant.” Another ally of Case said that his “original sin was being young and talented and promoted to that job before he was grey”.

Another issue upsetting officials was the removal of Tom Scholar, the former permanent secretary of the Treasury, by Kwasi Kwarteng, who briefly served as chancellor in Liz Truss’s shortlived government. This was regarded as inappropriate over-reach by ministers. Case, however, is known to be wounded by the implication that he failed to support Scholar.

And yet:

A Cabinet Office insider said they considered a departure this year very unlikely.

Another senior official said: “The charge sheet is now so long against him, the only interpretation can be that the PM probably doesn’t want to get rid of him.”

However, The Financial Times had pointed the finger at Case on January 31 this year in ‘Simon Case: can the head of Britain’s civil service survive?’

Although he is a career civil servant, Case took a break to work for Prince William. The Prince highly recommended him to Downing Street when Boris became Prime Minister.

It seems as if Case picked up courtier-type habits:

One serving senior official said: “He operates as a courtier. His writ doesn’t run across Whitehall. He doesn’t seem to be in key meetings with the prime minister.” Another former permanent secretary in a major department said: “I don’t think he has any credibility left and really he should go.”

That said, he has his supporters:

… Case’s supporters insist that he is determined to uphold standards and that he retains the confidence of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister. They also argue that he has given the “best possible advice” and point out his job was not always easy during the chaotic premierships of Johnson and Liz Truss.

In the last days of Truss’s crumbling 44-day administration, he advised her to reverse parts of her disastrous “mini” Budget to stave off economic disaster, according to Downing Street insiders. They say he was also instrumental in coordinating with Buckingham Palace over arrangements for the Queen’s funeral.

Case’s supporters add that he hoped to serve at Sunak’s right hand until at least the next election, expected in late 2024. “Cabinet secretaries tend to change after an election,” said one.

Case became cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in September 2020 when Johnson sacked his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, after only two years in the post.

Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, was instrumental in bringing Case in. At the age of 41 he had held a range of roles in Whitehall and had been Prince William’s private secretary.

A series of scandals engulfed Johnson’s premiership, ranging from the financing of his flat refurbishment and the partygate scandal over Covid-19 lockdown-breaking gatherings in Downing Street, to the appointments of Zahawi and Sharp, which reverberate today. Case, as the prime minister’s most senior adviser, is inevitably in the line of fire.

The article goes on to enumerate the scandals.

Apparently, morale among civil servants began declining in 2022:

Case recognised the problem of falling morale last month in a memo to civil servants, saying that results from a staff survey were “heading in the wrong direction and show that you feel things have become worse”.

Returning to March 6, The Telegraph published ‘Simon Case branded “naive” by top civil servants over “embarassing” WhatsApp remarks’:

Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages, exposed by the Lockdown Files, reveal a “naivety” and “inexperience” that has damaged his reputation, current and former senior civil servants have said …

One former permanent secretary told The Telegraph that the messages showed “a certain naivety and to be honest inexperience”, adding: “It will hurt his reputation.”

The source said: “You should be a bit above the fray [as Cabinet Secretary]. I don’t know why he engaged in those sorts of exchanges. He didn’t need to.”

A former civil servant who advised prime ministers during a decades long career in Whitehall is understood to have found the exchanges highly unusual in their political nature.

The concerns also stretch into the senior echelons of the current civil service, with some insiders noting the pronounced difference in tone of Mr Case’s messages to senior scientific advisers such as Prof Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.

A senior Whitehall source told this newspaper of the Case messages: “They are really embarrassing. It is absolutely cringe-worthy. The things he was saying, the way he was saying them, the awful embarrassing chumminess of them all.”

Mr Case and the Cabinet Office have not responded directly to the contents of the leaked messages sent by Mr Case …

Mr Case became the youngest ever Cabinet Secretary when he was appointed to the role in September 2020 under Boris Johnson.

He had never headed up a government department as a permanent secretary before taking up the position, breaking with the experience of many of his predecessors.

Mr Case is onto his third prime minister, having served as Cabinet Secretary to Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and now Mr Sunak.

Fraser Nelson, The Spectator‘s editor who also writes for The Telegraph, made some excellent points in ‘Simon Case must take his share of the blame for chaotic lockdown decision-making’:

When Simon Case was made the youngest-ever Cabinet Secretary, Matt Hancock sent a message congratulating him.

“I think 41 is a good age to be in these very big jobs,” said the 41-year-old health secretary. By this time, both were wielding incredible power, overseeing the biggest suspension of civil liberties in peacetime.

The members of the “top team” WhatsApp group had started to see lockdown as a political campaign – with enemies to be identified, mocked and destabilised. The only person in the group in a position to lower the political temperature and insist upon sound government was Simon Case.

But The Lockdown Files show that, time and time again, he ended up as political as the politicians – in some cases, even more so. Some of the most outrageous comments on the files are his.

Like others, he started off quite moderate. But before too long he was revelling in the power to lock people up (saying he wished he could see “some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a Premier Inn shoe box”) and being just as gung-ho as the ministers he worked with. The civil servant became indistinguishable from the politicians …

His predecessor, Mark Sedwill, had clashed with Dominic Cummings about reshaping the Civil Service. Case, a former principal private secretary to David Cameron, had by then left the civil service and was working for Prince William.

He was called back to Whitehall to run the Government in a new, more buccaneering way: first in Number 10 and then running the whole show as Cabinet Secretary. There seemed to be an unspoken deal: Case would be given unprecedented power at a young age. In return, he’d be more likely than his predecessor to go with the political flow …

We know what other permanent secretaries might have done because they’ve made it public. Gus O’Donnell, who ran the Civil Service from 2005 to 2011, has pointed out the biggest architectural flaw.

Sage had far too much power, he says, and its reports should have been fed into a higher committee that would have made the decisions – not just on Covid, but factoring in economic and social damage. In other words, there would have been a cost-benefit analysis: a basic tool for public health interventions.

In The Lockdown Files, we see the prime minister appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred – thinking it’s 0.04 per cent, not four per cent. It’s easy to mock a Classics graduate for numeracy issues, but it raises another question.

He had Simon Case by his side: so why did Case not make sure the PM had all of these basic facts to hand? Or had Case, like Cummings, come to regard his boss as a “wonky shopping trolley” to be steered, rather than served? And if so, steered at whose direction? …

Simon Case could at least have addressed the abysmal state of Sage reports: opaque, confusing and – as it turned out in the omicron wave – staggeringly wrong. By then, JP Morgan ended up giving its clients far better Covid analysis than ministers were given by the UK Government, and these ministers (including Rishi Sunak) ended up phoning around contacts to find non-government (ergo, trustworthy) advice. Case presided over this shambles …

Prime ministers run the civil service, and they are ultimately responsible for any dysfunction. But Case should not have taken sides during the lockdown wars. He ought to have been on the side of basic government standards, of cost-benefit analyses and informed, properly-communicated decisions.

The Lockdown Files show that Britain ended up with a standard of decision-making far below what could or should have been. And for that, Case deserves his full share of the blame.

I will have a few more articles about Simon Case to share next week. Along with that comes political infighting over pandemic policy.

Fraser Nelson is right. This was an absolute shambles.

Karol Sikora is also right. This must never happen again.

Why the Conservative government can’t reform anything

At the weekend, I read three enlightening comments from a former civil servant who told Guido Fawkes’s readers why, with a great majority of MPs, the Conservatives cannot truly enact an agenda of reform.

His first comment is in response to this:

When they got an 80 seat majority the first things they should have done were strip down the House of Lords, streamlined the implementation of new laws and culled many of the civil service jobs.

Unfortunately, the government did nothing to take on these vested interests and Labour Party will only further reinforce the status quo and tie the hands of future governments.

The former civil servant says (emphases mine):

As I say repeatedly – HOW?

The MPs don’t get super powers to bulldoze over obstructions based on the will of the population. You go to White Paper to review (possibly [a] Royal [Commission] for this), multiple boards of review after this for the stakeholders impacted (guaranteed rights under law).

What you are proposing would have been a 3/4 year process MINIMUM. Boundary reform has taken a decade and has been watered down.

Then when you’ve done the relevant reviews etc. you have to hope that the High Court or Supreme Court don’t strike down the legislation (which they would).

The next commenter suggested that only direct action in the streets would resolve the most tenacious issues.

The former civil servant replied:

I think we will see direct action against activist judges and those who have been seen to have stopped ‘the will of the people’ the next time the Tories are in. I can see them shifting blame from the chamber onto the legislative stack, and it’s not going to go down well with some sections of society that their democracy is trampled upon by the judiciary in particular.

I expect a more populist anti-1mm1gr4tion Tory party will win a majority after a single Labour term, given trends we have seen in Europe as we cross crime and civic cohesion thresholds.

A third reader persisted with the Government’s notional ability to effect change:

Parliament sets the law, so the first thing you do is repeal all the delaying legislation, then you set the new law for civil servants.

It doesn’t take long if there is the political will to do it – as we saw with the Coronavirus legislation.

The courts have no power to strike down legislation if Parliament has passed that legislation saying they can’t.

This was the response. SC refers to the Supreme Court, HC the High Court, CS the Civil Service and WP the White Paper:

No, you keep saying this, it’s not true. You always make these statements and you are always wrong.

There is an established process, you cannot undermine this process with your own process, until your process has gone through that process.

In short, you cannot change how parliament functions without going through the way it currently functions. You cannot establish law that cancels out other law without it going through constitutional review if a point of order is flagged up. Critically, and Blair constructed it this way, you can’t legislate the SC out of existence without the HC then SC agreeing to it being legislated out of existence. The SC sits above HoC in terms of supreme constitutional power (even just as an arbiter).

The coronovirus legislation was ARGUED for and SUPPORTED by UK CS and all parties – it wasn’t just about the will of the Commons, the entire legistlative stack pushed in one direction and things went quickly.

So even with a majority in the Commons you still have all the other opposition parties briefed by UKCS to make points of order; the courts will step in before first reading after the WP is published.

There is no institutional will for major constitutional reform benefiting the UK public at a government framework level, as in all the supporting civic arms of government are anti-democratic in their function, and they act as a ‘check and balance’ for the democratic government in the rare case of an outbreak of populism. All the lessons that needed to be learned from Thatcherism have been brought on board and enacted. It is not happening again.

It is antithetical to any centralised bureaucratic structure to ease the passage of legislation that would undo the centralisation is has spent hundreds of years undertaking. There’s a gravity to it. You could replace the entire elected parliamentary Tory Party with radical libertarian de-centralisers but it doesn’t change the broad WILL (as you put it) of everything else. It just leads to a pro-democracy bias in ONE element of the process.

That is so depressing.

Tony Blair pulled a blinder. Even after he dies, any future Conservative government will remain trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

Would the British people — the salt of the earth types — take to the streets? These days, it seems unlikely, especially as police are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen. We saw that during the anti-lockdown demonstrations. The police don’t have time for burglaries, but they’ll have time for Joe Bloggs with a placard. We already know they prefer to investigate tweets rather than crime.

There must be, to borrow a Blairism, a third way. What that is I have no idea. Answers on a postcard, please.

The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series move onto coronavirus restrictions for schools; Matt Hancock strikes back

Yesterday’s post discussed the first release of The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files articles.

This was The Telegraph‘s front page on Wednesday, March 1, 2023:

Wednesday's Telegraph: Hancock rejected Whitty's advice on care home tests #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/EiKhM6kWMP

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) February 28, 2023

The fallout was huge, as we can see from Metro‘s front page on Thursday, March 2:

Thursday's Metro: Sickened By Hancock's Messages #TomorrowsPapersToday #Metro pic.twitter.com/CBrCBH7hFh

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) March 1, 2023

Parliamentary debate

I left off yesterday mentioning the Urgent Question (UQ) in the House of Commons from Labour’s Liz Kendall about The Lockdown Files.

Lightweight Helen Whately, whom Hancock often lumbered with ministerial responsibility for questions he should have been answering during the pandemic, represented the Government. She was Hancock’s Social Care Minister, which she resumed under Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant wrote an excellent parliamentary sketch of the UQ debate. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

Given the subject matter, Kendall might have at least concealed her glee a teensy bit … “And above all”, she said, glowering across the despatch box, “we need answers”. There was just one problem – the man in question was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, carrying the can was Whately, who professed herself “shocked and disappointed” by Kendall’s tone …

Whately stuck to the same talking points, delivered in a tone of reedy indecision; speaking of the “practicalities of implementation” and arguing again and again that the official Covid inquiry would prove a better forum for a “reasoned” discussion. Frazzled, waif-like, the Social Care Minister resembled a Victorian mudlark …

Soon the heckling began. “People died… unnecessarily!”, “You were warned at the time!” screeched Wes Streeting [Labour].

A few Tory backbenchers hit back. The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald KC complained of “trial by media and party politics”. (In Westminster? Sacre bleu!)

“Shameless politicking,” cried Dr Kieran Mullan of Crewe and Nantwich. Mullan demanded an apology from every Labour MP who’d accused Britain of having the worst death toll in Europe. He had a point – the opposition had flitted from years of clamouring for lockdown to launching a fleet of Captain Hindsights in very short order. At the same time, complaining about “politicking” in the Commons was a bit “no fighting in the war room”.

I wondered if, at some point, Helen Whately might crack, and begin a well-deserved rant: “I hate Matt Hancock! Why am I up here defending him? He ignored my care home warnings and scuttled off to do I’m A Celebrity, but not before handing over all his incriminating messages to a journalist!” Instead, she simply reminded the House once again of the importance of waiting for the public inquiry.

Who knows how long the public inquiry will take? We could experience more pandemics by the time it’s over.

GB News’s Tom Harwood says there is no end date:

‘The problem is there is no definitive end time for this inquiry…’

GB News Political Correspondent Tom Harwood discusses the lockdown files after WhatsApp messages between government ministers were leaked.

💻 GB News YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwF pic.twitter.com/UKuQzzfVdY

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 2, 2023

Hancock lashes out at Isabel Oakeshott

Many of us are eternally grateful to Isabel Oakeshott, co-author of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, who released 100,000 WhatsApp messages to The Telegraph.

Hancock is decidedly less so.

Oakeshott’s column for Thursday’s edition was ‘Matt Hancock can threaten me all he wants, our nation’s children must never suffer this way again’, which opened with this:

Of all the travesties and tragedies of the pandemic, the treatment of children is arguably the most egregious. Almost three years after the blind panic over the virus triggered the first ill-fated decision to shut schools, the casualness with which a generation of little ones were sacrificed so that politicians could continue to insist they were doing everything possible to “save lives” should still exercise every one of us. More than anything else, it is the appalling disregard for the wellbeing of young people – which should have been paramount– that has driven me to release these WhatsApp messages: even in the face of a threatening message from Mr Hancock at 1.20am on Wednesday – hours after the Telegraph published.

A Telegraph article about her appeared that day, ‘Isabel Oakeshott defends WhatsApp leak: “Anyone who thinks I did this for money must be utterly insane”‘.

She appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to answer questions from presenter Nick Robinson.

She told Robinson she was not going to get into a public spat with Hancock:

“Do you know what I’m not going to do, because it wouldn’t be pretty, is get involved in a slanging match with Matt Hancock.

“He can threaten me all he likes. There are plenty of things I can say about his behaviour, by the way, that I’m not going to do – at least not at this stage – because this is not about Matt Hancock. It is so much bigger than that.”

Pressed on the claim, which Mr Hancock denies, that he sent a threatening or menacing message to her, Ms Oakeshott declined to withdraw the claim.

“I’m saying that he sent me a message at 1.20am in the morning. It wasn’t a pleasant message.”

Hancock, as usual, had much more to say:

Matt Hancock has said he is “hugely disappointed” by what he said was a “massive betrayal and breach of trust by Isabel Oakeshott”.

In a statement, Matt Hancock added: “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach. All the materials for the book have already been made available to the Inquiry, which is the right, and only, place for everything to be considered properly and the right lessons to be learned.

“As we have seen, releasing them in this way gives a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda.”

“Isabel and I had worked closely together for more than a year on my book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office. Isabel repeatedly reiterated the importance of trust throughout, and then broke that trust.”

Mr Hancock continued: “Last night, I was accused of sending menacing messages to Isabel. This is also wrong. When I heard confused rumours of a publication late on Tuesday night, I called and messaged Isabel to ask her if she had ‘any clues’ about it, and got no response.

“When I then saw what she’d done, I messaged to say it was ‘a big mistake’. Nothing more.

“I will not be commenting further on any other stories or false allegations that Isabel will make. I will respond to the substance in the appropriate place, at the inquiry, so that we can properly learn all the lessons based on a full and objective understanding of what happened in the pandemic, and why.”

Oakeshott’s interview on Radio 4 clears up two other issues of speculation on Wednesday — payment from The Telegraph and breaking a non-disclosure agreement:

Ms Oakeshott denied any suggestion she was paid by The Telegraph for the messages …

“They did not pay me for the messages, I’ve been helping the Daily Telegraph with the investigation, you’ll see that I’ve been writing stories for the Daily Telegraph” …

“You broke a written legal agreement, a non-disclosure agreement,” Mr Robinson said.

Ms Oakeshott said it was a matter of “public record” that she had signed an NDA, and that the “public interest is far more important”.

She is not wrong.

The inquiry is supposed to start this month — March 2023 — but there is no indication as to when.

Hancock determined to close schools

Thursday’s articles from The Lockdown Files concerned education:

Thursday's Telegraph: Hancock's 'rearguard action' to shut down schools #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/OAVdqih33K

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) March 1, 2023

Gavin Williamson, former Conservative Chief Whip, was the Education Secretary at the time.

Although there is clear water between him and Hancock right now, they did agree at the time on one thing — teachers’ unions.

‘Teachers looking for “excuse” not to work during pandemic, said Gavin Williamson’ says:

Sir Gavin Williamson criticised both school staff and unions for their response to coronavirus, saying that the latter “really do just hate work”.

Sir Gavin made the comments in a discussion with Matt Hancock as school staff prepared for the re-opening of classes in May 2020.

Surely ‘October 2020’ (see below):

By this point, schools had been effectively shut for two months with only vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers allowed to attend in person. Ministers and teachers were planning for lessons to begin returning in June.

At the time there was a shortage of personal protective equipment and Sir Gavin said he had originally been told by officials that they could get this through the local resilience forums, composed of representatives from local public services, including the emergency services, and local authorities, but that the Department of Health had backtracked.

He contacted Mr Hancock to ask him to help unblock the request as it “will be very small demand as most schools will already have it and it is only aimed at the situation if a child is clearly ill”.

Mr Hancock agreed to help, noting that it was a “tiny amount” and it would only be needed when there were “no alternatives” …

The National Education Union (NEU) was a vocal critic of the Government’s handling of schools and had attacked ministers for a string of U-turns …

By the autumn, unions had made a number of demands including additional teachers, smaller classes and better access to tests for staff and students. Some were calling for exams to be cancelled for the second year running.

On the evening of Oct 1, the Telegraph released a front page confirming that Sir Gavin was planning to delay A-level exams for a few weeks.

At almost 10pm Mr Hancock got in touch with his Cabinet colleague, writing: “Cracking announcement today. What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are”

Sir Gavin responded: “I know they really really do just hate work” …

Of course, in Parliament and to the media, Government ministers and Boris Johnson praised teachers.

However, Hancock had to prevail over his peers heading other departments, including Education.

‘Matt Hancock staged “rearguard” action to close schools’ tells us:

Matt Hancock mounted a “rearguard action” to close schools despite Sir Gavin Williamson battling “tooth and nail” to keep classrooms open, leaked WhatsApp messages reveal.

Exchanges seen by The Telegraph reveal that the then health secretary battled the education secretary in late December 2020 and suggested it was “mad” that Sir Gavin was attempting to keep schools open.

Mr Hancock initially lost a Cabinet argument during which he tried to persuade the Prime Minister to close schools ahead of their return in January 2021.

After Boris Johnson sided with Sir Gavin, Mr Hancock told an aide: “The next U-turn is born” and added: “I want to find a way, Gavin having won the day, of actually preventing a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease in January. And for that we must now fight a rearguard action.”

Messages show that Mr Hancock immediately contacted Dan Rosenfield, Mr Johnson’s chief of staff, and began an attempt to have schools closed before children returned. He then provided his private email address.

As the planned reopening became increasingly chaotic over the following week, with U-turns on dates and testing requirements for secondary schools, Mr Hancock and his team said Sir Gavin was having to eat “humble pie”.

On Jan 4, after many younger children had returned to classes for a single day, Mr Johnson announced that schools would close and exams would be cancelled amid a national lockdown. After the closures on Jan 4, schools did not reopen until March 8, depriving nine million children of another two months of education …

December 2020 ramped up the tension between Hancock and Williamson:

Despite ministers including Matt Hancock saying that they were doing all they could to keep schools open, behind the scenes the then health secretary was running a “rearguard action” to keep pupils at home. WhatsApp messages reveal that while he was offering to help Sir Gavin to his face, behind his back Mr Hancock and his advisers were mocking him for “freaking out” and joking that he was having to eat “humble pie”.

The article includes several WhatsApp screenshots.

Interestingly, there is no trace of Hancock’s exchanges with Dan Rosenfield, at least for now:

His conversations with Mr Rosenfield do not appear in the conversations that have been leaked to the Telegraph. Mr Hancock instead provided his personal email address after the PM’s chief of staff agreed to discuss the issue with him.

It is unclear whether conversations on private email will be handed over to the forthcoming Covid inquiry, although Hugo Keith KC, the chief counsel for the inquiry,  said on Wednesday that witnesses have been encouraged to disclose “any informal or private communications”.  

Tens of thousands of children in the UK never returned to schools once they reopened. They are known as ‘ghost children’. No one knows what happened to them:

The Lockdown Files show that Mr Hancock’s push to shut schools was just one of a number of repeated instances where the interests of children were apparently disregarded in favour of restrictions. Many of the measures went against the counsel of scientific advisers.

The decisions made around children’s education were among the most controversial of the pandemic. Studies have shown that keeping children away from the classroom led to a rise in mental health problems and a decline in development. Some children lost more than 100 days of schooling because of closures alone.  

The Telegraph allowed Gavin Williamson to have his say, ‘Maybe I should have resigned when my plea to put children first was ignored’. I’m not fond of the man, but I do have empathy for him here:

What was most upsetting about closing down schools for a second time in January 2021 was that I felt it wasn’t done for the right reasons.

When the first lockdown happened, no one really knew what Covid was. It was such a new disease and the prevailing medical advice was that schools should close, so we obeyed it. There didn’t seem to be any choice about that at all. We had taken the view that we should follow the science.  

But data from November 2020 told us that only 0.1 per cent were absent from school due to confirmed cases of coronavirus. So in my mind, the evidence pointed to keeping schools open.

Despite the fact we’d dispatched close to a million laptops, it was children from disadvantaged backgrounds that would be impacted most significantly if schools closed again. That’s what I worried most about.  

I totally understood the need to protect the NHS but I also felt it was right to do everything we could to protect the futures of our young people.

The weekend before schools were due to go back after the Christmas holidays, we were being told it was absolutely okay for schools to return. That morning, you had Boris saying schools must stay open – only for that advice to completely change in a four hour period. By lunchtime, he was having to say that schools must close. 

The data that they’d received over the weekend indicated a surge, and suddenly the Government was having to perform a U-turn. It was absolutely crushing. It was one of the worst moments of the entire pandemic.

You understand you’re the one who has to carry the can for it, but it is devastating to be put in that position.

Looking back now, I wonder whether I should have resigned at that point. I certainly thought long and deeply over whether I should have gone then. I just felt so personally upset about it. Ultimately, if the medical experts were saying that’s what needed to be done then you’re torn even if – in your heart of hearts – you know the best place for children was in school.

I’ve always been a team player, but you often found that different departments had different priorities and you sometimes felt that what was said one day was very rapidly changing the next day.

… I felt the situation in January was different to that earlier on in the previous year, and I felt that the prioritisation of children should mean protecting their right to go to school.  

… I will never stop believing that arguing for schools to stay open in January 2021 was the right thing to do.

At all stages of the pandemic, we saw teachers, teaching assistants and support staff doing so much, caring for children, putting them first. Amazing work was being done in schools up and down the country.

I think all those who are passionate about education knew that children were best in the classroom – and I stand by this argument, as I hope others do too.

GB News panellists react

Dan Wootton is on a fortnight’s holiday with his relatives.

Patrick Christys was guest host on Wednesday, and, as ever, was a triumph.

The full video is here:

Highlights follow, beginning with Christys’s opening editorial, accompanied by an article in the second tweet:

‘How many people died so little Matty Hancock could get his little headline?’

Patrick Christys shares his thoughts on the lockdown files and asks: Does Matt Hancock have blood on his hands?@PatrickChristys | @MattHancock pic.twitter.com/5QjRqJhpnO

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

Patrick Christys: How many people died so little Matt Hancock could get his little headline?

💻 GB News YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwFhttps://t.co/GdsojoRfkH

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

The channel’s detractors say that GB News promoted the Government line during the pandemic. GB News did not start broadcasting until the June 13, 2021. Furthermore, it has always had an abundance of Covid sceptics, then and now. Tonia Buxton was and is one of them:

'Matt Hancock is a fundamental liar! He just lies to save his neck.'

Political commentator, Tonia Buxton, says Matt Hancock was 'never fit to govern' following recent leaked messages showing how the former Health Secretary ignored Covid test advice. pic.twitter.com/G4nyKmZGDk

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

A columnist from Conservative Home said that Hancock should not face a criminal investigation and advised us to wait for the results of the inquiry. Christys and the two panellists, one representing care home patients and the other schoolchildren, disagreed with him:

'This was a failure that extended much further beyond Matt Hancock himself.'

Assistant Editor of Conservative Home William Atkinson explains why he doesn't believe Matt Hancock should face a criminal investigation for his failures during the pandemic.

🤔 What do you think? pic.twitter.com/e1SER2sAbT

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

Barrister Francis Hoar, another Covid sceptic, appeared later to say that the Government failed ‘to protect the most vulnerable’:

'The Government got it entirely the wrong way round. They knew from the start that this was a virus that predominantly affected the very old and sick.'

Barrister Francis Hoar says the Government 'failed to protect those who were most vulnerable' during the Covid-19 pandemic. pic.twitter.com/DYK4wXjYxp

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

A member of the public, Tony Stowell, whose mother died in a care home during the pandemic, described his creepy encounter with Matt Hancock. Chilling:

That was intense
Thanks to Tony for being able to talk about it so well that one had a sense of what it felt like

— Andrew Sweeney (@UH60Andy) March 1, 2023

At the end of the show, Laura Dodsworth, yet another Covid sceptic, was named Greatest Briton for that day and Matt Hancock the Union Jackass:

Tonight’s Greatest Briton and Union Jackass…

🇬🇧 Laura Dodsworth
❌ Matt Hancock MP

🤔 Who is your Greatest Briton and Union Jackass? pic.twitter.com/wvx0VbYloQ

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 1, 2023

Well worth watching.

Why The Lockdown Files are crucial

Everyone has been commenting on The Lockdown Files, and rightly so.

The paper has a round-up of media personalities from both sides of the political spectrum giving their opinion, ‘Famous names react to The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files revelations’. All are positive.

Their columnist Allister Heath explained the importance of the revelations in ‘Untruth after untruth was peddled to justify the great lockdown disaster’:

Let’s face it: Whitehall has learned almost nothing from the fiasco of 2020-22. There has been no proper cost-benefit analysis of lockdown. We haven’t engaged in a genuine inquest, our institutions haven’t been reformed, and the official inquiry will take too long and risks being captured by an establishment desperate to defend its legacy. Sir Keir Starmer, favourite to be our next prime minister, was at one with the Government and Matt Hancock on lockdowns – his only criticism was that he wanted more of the same, faster.

This is why The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files are so important, and so clearly in the public interest. Given officialdom’s glacial progress, the free press has a duty to release information, accelerate debate and hold power to account.

One question in particular that should trouble all of us is why so many of the claims made during the pandemic turned out not to be true …

Or take the origins of the virus. Those who sought to explore whether it might have originated in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan were demonised, ridiculed or cancelled. Now, the director of the FBI has concluded that this is the most likely explanation. This begs a crucial question: would we have followed China’s methods – lockdown and extreme social control – had we imagined the Beijing authorities were covering up a Chernobyl-style disaster? Might we not have gone for a more voluntarist, Swedish style approach? Where are the profuse apologies from all those who tarred supporters of the lab leak hypothesis as “racist”, “Trumpites” or “conspiracy theorists”? …

Covid saw endless politicians, bureaucrats, public health officials, scientists, professional journal editors, Twitter activists, Left-wing broadcasters and especially big tech firms transmogrify into authoritarian censors. They thought that “following the science” meant that their role was to amplify whatever the public health establishment’s most risk-averse current consensus was, rather than to pursue the truth independently. They convinced themselves that dissidents were heartless, paranoid freaks. They went on a terrifying power and ego trip.

The lesson is clear. Even in a crisis, free speech and open inquiry must be nurtured: elite groupthink is too often wrong, and must at all times be scrutinised. Long live the free press.

I could not agree more.

The official inquiry will find The Telegraph‘s revelations difficult to ignore. Heads should roll — in time. I would also like to see prison sentences dished out to the greatest offenders.

UK news: Big Brother Watch uncovers Government interference during coronavirus pandemic

This week, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth exposé states how UK Government agencies tracked social media accounts of certain well-known Britons during the coronavirus pandemic to monitor opinions.

One of the Twitter accounts involved belongs to a publican who had not yet begun appearing on television.

2020: online dissent, abuses of power

Before going into that story, here are bookmarks I had filed under ‘Ministry of Truth’. It would seem that the name relates to a Twitter account which has since been renamed. This person has nothing to do with the aforementioned exposé, but the tweets reflect what was already on people’s minds.

Interestingly, all of these relate to the pandemic.

Looking back to April 2020, three weeks after the UK locked down, people were already discussing the egregious nature of lockdown and suspicion about any vaccine.

This is an informal poll asking what percentage of global deaths justifies a lockdown:

POLL: What percentage of global population mortality (deaths) from ANY pandemic justifies stopping the global economy and placing house-arrest style lockdowns on populations as governments have done with COVID19?

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 11, 2020

Nearly 80% of people did not wish to take a coronavirus vaccine, should one be developed:

If Bill Gates and his Globalist consortium come up with a coronavirus 'vaccine' will you take it?

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 11, 2020

By April 13, police were already entering people’s properties. In this case, there was no party going on, but the abuse of power was shocking:

GRAPHIC: Police smashed a residents door in looking for 'social gatherings'. The police are out of control. These Police should be prosecuted for criminal damage and abuse of power. Got given a right serve. #CoronaPolice #CoronaCops pic.twitter.com/ReF17tUrZy

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 13, 2020

The video went viral:

There is virtually universal condemnation of the police in this video. It has been seen over half a million times globally. Ridiculous to suggest police are in any way in the right by what they did as evidenced by the fact they literally ran the hell out of there. They knew.

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 14, 2020

On April 24, 2020, Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change suggested that state surveillance was ‘a price worth paying’ to stop coronavirus. Shocking:

AND HERE IT IS: The #CoronaAgenda

BBC: State surveillance 'a price worth paying' to stop Coronavirus. "The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, founded by the former prime minister, says it could offer an "escape route" from the crisis"https://t.co/VvQ0Utt5uI

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 24, 2020

By the end of April, we discovered that the WHO had coined the expression ‘New Normal’ on June 7, 2019:

Make sure you look at the date on the opening clip. The 'New Normal' was invented by the WHO – 7 June 2019.

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) April 30, 2020

In June 2020, despite lockdown in force, protests took place. In London, Metropolitan Police officers ran away from protesters after being pelted with objects:

WHITEHALL UK: Never seen anything like this. Police in full retreat, persued by the mob being pelted with objects pic.twitter.com/VuQOuuEiLB

— banthebbc (@banthebbc) June 7, 2020

2023: Ministry of Truth

On Saturday, January 28, 2023, Big Brother Watch sent an advance copy of their report to the Mail, which reported (emphases mine):

A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Military operatives in the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.

They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.

Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

But the most secretive is the MoD’s 77th Brigade, which deploys ‘non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries’.

According to a whistleblower who worked for the brigade during the lockdowns, the unit strayed far beyond its remit of targeting foreign powers. 

They said that British citizens’ social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.

Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering ‘disinformation’ and ‘harmful narratives… from purported experts’, with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to ‘scrape’ social media for keywords such as ‘ventilators’ that would have been of interest.

The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings. 

It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines.

The Army whistleblower said: ‘It is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population… monitoring the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated – it was simply fear.’

Last night, former Cabinet Minister Mr Davis, a member of the Privy Council, said: ‘It’s outrageous that people questioning the Government’s policies were subject to covert surveillance’ – and questioned the waste of public money.

Mail on Sunday journalist Mr Hitchens was monitored after sharing an article, based on leaked NHS papers, which claimed data used to publicly justify lockdown was incomplete. An internal Rapid Response Unit email said Mr Hitchens wanted to ‘further [an] anti-lockdown agenda and influence the Commons vote’. 

Writing today, Mr Hitchens questions if he was ‘shadow-banned’ over his criticisms, with his views effectively censored by being downgraded in search results. 

He says: ‘The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring, let alone protesting. 

Now is the time to demand a full and powerful investigation into the dark material Big Brother Watch has bravely uncovered.’

The whistleblower from 77 Brigade, which uses both regular and reserve troops, said: ‘I developed the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering any potential foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened.’

The source also suggested that the Government was so focused on monitoring critics it may have missed genuine Chinese-led prolockdown campaigns.

Silkie Carlo, of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘This is an alarming case of mission creep, where public money and military power have been misused to monitor academics, journalists, campaigners and MPs who criticised the Government, particularly during the pandemic.

‘The fact that this political monitoring happened under the guise of ‘countering misinformation’ highlights how, without serious safeguards, the concept of ‘wrong information’ is open to abuse and has become a blank cheque the Government uses in an attempt to control narratives online.

‘Contrary to their stated aims, these Government truth units are secretive and harmful to our democracy. The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation.’

A Downing Street source last night said the units had scaled back their work significantly since the end of the lockdowns.

The Mail‘s article also has the 77th Brigade member’s full disclosure as well as Peter Hitchens’s first-hand experience from that time.

It is ironic that a Conservative MP, Tobias Ellwood, is part of the 77th Brigade, which monitored another Conservative MP, David Davis:

Delighted to be promoted to LIEUTENANT COLONEL as a reservist in 77 Brigade!
An honour to continue serving in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces- the most professional in the world.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. pic.twitter.com/6IM40XGXSz

— Tobias Ellwood MP (@Tobias_Ellwood) September 30, 2018

Toby Young, also monitored, featured the Mail‘s articles on his website in ‘The 77th Brigade Spied on Lockdown Sceptics, Including Me’.

He pointed us to a Twitter thread from Dr Jay Bhattacharya, one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which the Establishment panned worldwide:

The UK military targeted @toadmeister and @ClarkeMicah for censorship for anti-lockdown views. "The most astonishing thing about the great Covid panic was how many attacks the state managed to make on basic freedoms without anyone much even caring…"https://t.co/qKhXkuKo7i

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) January 29, 2023

On Sunday, January 29, Spiked had a tongue-in-cheek title to their article on the exposé, ‘Warning: sharing a spiked article could get you in trouble with the government’:

Today, a report by Big Brother Watch has revealed the alarming lengths the UK government went to in order to hush up its critics. We now know that three government bodies, including a shady Ministry of Defence unit tasked with fighting ‘information warfare’, surveilled and monitored UK citizens, public figures and media outlets who criticised the lockdown – and spiked was caught up in that net.

This mini Ministry of Truth was composed of the Rapid Response Unit (RRU) in the Cabinet Office, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the army’s 77th Brigade. The 77th Brigade exists to monitor and counter so-called disinformation being spread by adversarial foreign powers. But, as a whistleblower from the unit told Big Brother Watch, ‘the banner of disinformation was a guise under which the British military was being deployed to monitor and flag our own concerned citizens’. The other bodies worked together to monitor ‘harmful narratives online’ and to push back on them, by promoting government lines in the press and by flagging posts to social-media companies in order to have them removed.

The public figures targeted by these shadowy units included Conservative MP David Davis, Lockdown Sceptics founder Toby Young, talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens. All of whom had warned about the consequences of lockdown and had raised questions about the UK government’s alarmist modelling of the virus.

Documents obtained by Big Brother Watch, using subject-access requests, reveal that Peter Hitchens was flagged for, among other things, sharing a spiked article. A cross-Whitehall disinformation report from the RRU in June 2020 notes that, ‘The spiked article was shared on Twitter by Peter Hitchens, which led to renewed engagement on that specific platform’. The RRU also monitored the level of public agreement, noting that ‘some highly engaged comments’ agreed with the article, while others were critical …

We desperately need a reckoning with lockdown, and with the lockdown on dissent that accompanied it.

Big Brother Watch announced their report with a summary of highlights, ‘Inside Whitehall’s Ministry of Truth — How secretive “anti-information” teams conducted mass political monitoring’.

Read that if you do not have time to peruse their full report.

Guido Fawkes also summarised the report on Monday, January 30:

Government Spent Millions Spying on Lockdown Sceptics https://t.co/g2MertwHPd pic.twitter.com/Ug0le8C9h4

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) January 30, 2023

Millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money went into this egregious surveillance. Imagine inadvertently paying to have yourself monitored by the state:

Your taxes were working to monitor samizdat dissident media like the @spectator during lockdown. Incidentally the "rule of six" was arbitrary not scientific. Via @BigBrotherWatch pic.twitter.com/kZGngG1ekq

— Media Guido (@MediaGuido) January 31, 2023

Unbelievable.

Will anything come of this? I certainly hope so, but I doubt it.

On Thursday, February 2, David Davis asked about Peter Hitchens during Cabinet Office questions:

David Davis: In 2020 we have evidence that the Cabinet Office monitored the journalist Peter Hitchens’ social media posts in relation to the pandemic. In an internal email the Cabinet Office accused him of pursuing an anti-lockdown agenda. He then appears to have been shadow- banned on social media. Will the Minister confirm that his Department did nothing to interfere with Hitchens’ communications, either through discussion with social media platforms or by any other mechanism? If he cannot confirm that today, will he write to me immediately in the future to do so? (903428)

Mr Speaker: Who wants that one?

Jeremy Quin (Cabinet Office Minister): It is a pleasure to take it, Mr Speaker. I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. He referred to the rapid response unit; what it was doing during the course of the pandemic was entirely sensible—trawling the whole of what is available publicly on social media to make certain we as the Government could identify areas of concern particularly regarding disinformation so that correct information could be placed into the public domain to reassure the public. I think that was an entirely reasonable and appropriate thing to do. I do not know about the specifics that my right hon. Friend asks about; I would rather not answer at the Dispatch Box, but my right hon. Friend has asked me to write to him and I certainly will.

They have an answer for everything.

Let no one think that Labour would have done anything differently. Labour fully supported the Government on everything coronavirus-related and said they would have gone further.