{"id":12664,"date":"2026-04-13T05:15:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T05:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/12664\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T05:15:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T05:15:11","slug":"boris-johnson-wrecked-britain-but-this-man-left-even-deeper-scars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/12664\/","title":{"rendered":"Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who broke Britain?<\/a>\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s\u00a0opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country\u2019s biggest problems.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0The historic blunder of one \u2018Tory toff\u2019 that means your council is utterly useless<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0William Beveridge: The man to blame for Britain\u2019s disastrous benefits system<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0This woman tried to fix childbirth. Instead she accidentally tortured millions<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The money man whose gigantic error left Britain destitute<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0You won\u2019t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country<\/a>
\u2022 The American psychologist who destroyed British families with sexist poison<\/a><\/p>\n

To talk of Broken Britain without mentioning Covid-19 is like talking about Attlee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a3150bn a year. Taxes are at their highest level since the 1940s and seem only likely to rise further.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpolitical choice\u201d. Since neither the government nor the Bank of England has ever fully acknowledged the causal link between creating \u00a3450bn 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 \u201cfree\u201d tests was followed by Liz Truss\u2019s energy price guarantee and Rachel Reeves promising to shield consumers from a rise in oil prices.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s approach changed from \u201cflatten the curve\u201d to a de facto policy of Zero Covid. This is what caused most of the economic and social damage.<\/p>\n

No one is more culpable for this than Professor Sir Chris Whitty. In his defence, he would say \u2013 and has said \u2013 that advisers advise and politicians decide. There is certainly enough blame to go around for the Johnsons, Hancocks and Goves to take their share \u2013 as they did, alongside Whitty, in the Covid Inquiry<\/a> \u2013 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?<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Flattening the curve \u2013\u00a0i.e.\u00a0allowing the virus to circulate while suppressing it enough to stop the health service being overwhelmed \u2013 was as much Whitty\u2019s plan as it was anyone\u2019s, but when he pivoted to supporting full lockdown in\u00a0March 2020\u00a0he essentially never looked back. By May, the curve was\u00a0flat\u00a0but 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\u00a0\u201cpublic health\u201d\u00a0had\u00a0taken hold.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In October 2020, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed. There were more empty hospital beds than there had been a year earlier<\/a>. 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<\/a>. 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<\/a> to justify putting nearly every English county into the top two tiers, thereby extending lockdown in all but name and crushing the hospitality sector.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpanicking unnecessarily\u201d about an \u201cextremely mild\u201d variant, Whitty appeared on television to warn about the \u201cmisinterpretation\u201d of the South African data and saying: \u201cI want to be clear, this is going to be a problem<\/a>.\u201d He argued that South Africans benefited from high levels of immunity, seemingly forgetting that the British had been repeatedly vaccinated for the last year. \u201cThere are several things we don\u2019t know [about Omicron]\u201d he said, before adding inaccurately, \u201cbut what we do know is bad\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s impact on mortality had been \u201cmuch more muted\u201d and was \u201cessentially not visible\u201d. The government spent \u00a39.3bn on lateral flow tests that winter.<\/p>\n

Whitty was not alone in pushing lockdowns at the drop of a hat. It took a team effort to lay waste to Britain\u2019s economy and inflict an injury to the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who broke Britain?\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s\u00a0opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1431,13,5986,1433,96,5987],"class_list":{"0":"post-12664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-boris-johnson","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-chris-whitty","11":"tag-covid-19","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-who-broke-britain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116395699308323476","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}