Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems. • The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• William Beveridge: The man to blame for Britain’s disastrous benefits system• This woman tried to fix childbirth. Instead she accidentally tortured millions• The money man whose gigantic error left Britain destitute• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country• The American psychologist who destroyed British families with sexist poison

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems.

• The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• William Beveridge: The man to blame for Britain’s disastrous benefits system• This woman tried to fix childbirth. Instead she accidentally tortured millions• The money man whose gigantic error left Britain destitute• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country• The American psychologist who destroyed British families with sexist poison

To talk of Broken Britain without mentioning Covid-19 is like talking about Attlee’s Austerity Britain without mentioning the Second World War. Almost every economic, health and social indicator got worse in 2020, at first temporarily and then permanently. Thousands of children stopped going to school and never came back. The number of people on hospital waiting lists shot above seven million and stayed there. The number of people on disability benefits rose and then kept on rising. People drank themselves to death in record numbers and continue to do so.

Public spending as a percentage of GDP is now 45 per cent, some six percentage points higher than before the pandemic. Public borrowing is stuck at around £150bn a year. Taxes are at their highest level since the 1940s and seem only likely to rise further.

The psychological make-up of the nation was permanently wounded. Infantilised by decree, the public held the prime minister personally responsible if they caught a respiratory virus. Facing economic reality became a mere option, just another “political choice”. Since neither the government nor the Bank of England has ever fully acknowledged the causal link between creating £450bn through quantitative easing in 2020-21 and having double digit inflation in 2022, the myth of the magic money tree lives on. What began with furlough and “free” tests was followed by Liz Truss’s energy price guarantee and Rachel Reeves promising to shield consumers from a rise in oil prices.

Who is to blame for all this? In large part, we can only blame the virus. Pandemics are expensive no matter how you try to deal them and there is still no consensus about how we should have dealt with Covid-19. To put my cards on the table, I think that if we were going to go into lockdown in 2020 we should have done it sooner but that we should have kept the schools open. I think the lockdown in November 2020 was premature at best and that both the first and third lockdowns went on far too long. At some point in the spring of 2020 the government’s approach changed from “flatten the curve” to a de facto policy of Zero Covid. This is what caused most of the economic and social damage.

No one is more culpable for this than Professor Sir Chris Whitty. In his defence, he would say – and has said – that advisers advise and politicians decide. There is certainly enough blame to go around for the Johnsons, Hancocks and Goves to take their share – as they did, alongside Whitty, in the Covid Inquiry – but it is a disingenuous excuse. Boris Johnson was plainly out of his depth dealing with a novel coronavirus whereas Whitty had spent his whole life studying infectious diseases and was the Chief Medical Officer. It was obvious from those early televised briefings that Johnson was deferring to Whitty. He had effectively delegated power. If Whitty said something, who was Johnson to gainsay it?

When he came to public attention in the early days of the pandemic, Whitty was as a reassuringly unflappable egghead with a deck of slides. There was trouble ahead, he warned, but most of us would be fine and the government had a plan.

Flattening the curve – i.e. allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed – was as much Whitty’s plan as it was anyone’s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in March 2020 he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was flat but the country would remain in lockdown for another two months. The belief that everything is more important than the economy and nothing is more important than “public health” had taken hold.  

Whitty seemed to become obsessed with the idea that epidemics are always halving or doubling. Since the only time the infection rate (the infamous R number) went down in the first 18 months of the pandemic was during lockdowns, this meant that he could always foresee the Tiber foaming with blood. The only solution was more lockdowns. Longer lockdowns. Lockdowns to prevent lockdowns. For the rest of the pandemic, every piece of advice from Sage, which was co-chaired by Whitty, was nudging the government towards that end.

Politicians decide, but their decisions are based on the advice and evidence given to them by experts. During Covid, the evidence presented appeared partial and excessively pessimistic and the advice seemed relentlessly illiberal. A few examples should suffice.

In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier. Things were worse in parts of northern England but local restrictions seemed to be working in the northwest and infection rates were falling in the northeast. Nevertheless, Chris Whitty appeared on television at Halloween with some graphs and Boris Johnson capitulated with a four-week lockdown. When that ended, Sage used out-of-date infection data to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.

In December 2021, the Omicron variant was causing renewed panic around the world despite all the evidence showing that it was significantly milder than its predecessors and that hospitalisation rates in South Africa, where it had originated, were a small fraction of what they had been before. On 15 December, more than a fortnight after the chair of the South African Medical Association told us that we were “panicking unnecessarily” about an “extremely mild” variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the “misinterpretation” of the South African data and saying: “I want to be clear, this is going to be a problem.” He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. “There are several things we don’t know [about Omicron]” he said, before adding inaccurately, “but what we do know is bad”.

It seemed like every effort was made to bounce Boris Johnson into a fourth lockdown that Christmas. It is to his credit that he resisted. It was not until 23 December that Sage finally admitted that Omicron was indeed much milder. In February, Whitty conceded that Omicron’s impact on mortality had been “much more muted” and was “essentially not visible”. The government spent £9.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.

Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain’s economy and inflict an injury to the nation’s psyche from which it has yet to recover. Weak politicians, flawed modellers and hysterical journalists should all be held accountable. But if the finger has to be pointed at a single individual, it is the man who has never apologised and who was knighted when in my view he should have been sacked. Chris Whitty, the softly spoken boffin, the unassuming technocrat, broke Britain with Powerpoint.

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