September 16, 2023 - 12:15pm
Rory Stewart’s conversation with UnHerd’s Tom McTague, on the These Times podcast, is exceptionally interesting. Whatever your views on Stewart’s politics, he doesn’t sound like a politician: he is much too thoughtful and reflective and eloquent. In particular, he is willing to contemplate the tensions and contradictions in his worldview — between a high Tory romanticism and a technocratic respect for competence, between a love of liberty and an authoritarian reflex.
Tom did a great job in teasing out these contradictions — do listen to the whole thing.
One exchange jumped out at me, when Stewart was asked about the Covid lockdowns. Many will remember that he was one of the earliest to demand full national lockdowns and school closures — he made great play of it, and it is still quoted as an example of his good judgement (see last week’s Henry Mance interview in the FT).
But when Tom asked him if he still thinks they were a good idea, Stewart’s answer was equivocal at best. Am I reading too much into it, or does he hint that he is coming around to the view that they were a mistake at the end of this section? Here’s the full exchange so you can decide for yourself.
Tom McTague
You were early out the door on lockdowns. That is the most hyper-use of technocratic government that you can possibly imagine, right? The state tells you what to do on everything. There is a lot of controversy now about whether that was right, although you got a lot of benefit from it at the start. What’s your view on that now: were you right, or do you look at Sweden or somewhere like that and think you were wrong?
Rory Stewart
I think the jury to some extent is out. There’s no doubt that Britain was about the middle of the pack. In the end what Boris Johnson did, which was to be reluctant to lock down in the beginning and then extend the lockdown beyond what anyone could have imagined, seems to have put Britain about in the middle of the pack.
My instincts there — and you’re absolutely right, it’s a conflict within me — I have two instincts in government. One of them is: decentralisation, liberty, let people get on with things, the Government doesn’t know what it’s doing; but the other thing which comes out of “the Government doesn’t know what it’s doing” is get on with it, grip it, take a grip, make a decision, because the Government is just going to faff around.
Tom McTague
There’s a huge tension there. The Government is both useless and can’t do the small things, so you want it to do all the big things.
Rory Stewart
You’re completely right: it’s a huge contrast. And I think I’m coming down, as I reflect on this over three years, much more on the “get the Government out of the way, decentralise, delegate down”.
If Stewart has indeed concluded that the lockdowns were a net harm, and example of the wrong instinct in government, it would be helpful for him to spell it out, given that he was such a vocal proponent of them.
is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
freddiesayers
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SubscribeIDK. He sounds like any typical mediocre politician to me. Guys like him will always lock down. They see no upside in running against the herd. If lockdowns fail, and they did spectacularly, you simply say we did what everyone else did. It’s not like the WHO, or anyone else, is jumping up and down congratulating Sweden for a job well done.
Lockdowns were the greatest crime against humanity since WWII. 165 million people slipped back into poverty and guys like Stewart still don’t understand the utter devastation they inflicted on the world.
Half a billion were quoted worldwide many years ago as having moved into poverty. Are you talking about Canada? Do you know how many people slid further into poverty in Africa? South America? The decay and fallout still continues.
I think 500 million was the total number of people living in poverty. Since 2020, an additional 165 million have been pushed into poverty – less than $2 US a day. I think the total is now about 700 million.
https://www.undp.org/publications/dfs-human-cost-inaction-poverty-social-protection-and-debt-servicing-2020-2023
“Lockdowns were the greatest crime against humanity since WWII.”
Millions of people in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans may beg to differ, to say nothing of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The vaccination programme may prove to be a greater crime, but the jury’s still out on that one.
You guys have lost the plot completely.
So we just wave away 165 million people pushed into poverty? Nothing to see here?
165 million people pushed into poverty. That number is staggering.
I think mediocre is too high praise for him-he’s as thick as mince and incapable of thinking other than in very simplistic ,linear terms .
I think the jury to some extent is out.
Yeah-so says the mouthpiece of big government ,incapable of independent thought and assessing the evidence.Its difficult for me to hide my total contempt for this pious lightweight.
I completely agree. The media seems to have decided somehow that he’s a cut above your average politician, going on about how fresh his ideas are etc, but frankly, to borrow a phrase, he sounds like he’s somewhere in the middle of the pack. Bang average politician.
What worries me about this is that by saying Britain was “at the centre of the pack” he appears to be offering a defence along the lines of “everybody else did it too” — which is the go-to response of all mid-wit, jobsworth politicians to this disaster. He sings to be a politician of great intellect, moral clarity, and nuanced awareness — but only in low stakes esoteric areas of policy.
Social proof. Part of the original argument to take us into lockdowns.
It’s the “go-to response of all mid-wit, jobsworth politicians” to pretty much everything these days: “our European friends are doing x, y, and z so we should too”.
If it was just our European friends it wouldn’t be quite so bad. What happened with COVID was everybody blindly following the Chinese Communist Party before they’d even seen if it what they were doing worked.
So easy on reflection, yet in the moment when thousands of people are needlessly dying, the opposition and the media are screaming for lockdowns, then who is going to stick their neck out and say ‘we’re not locking down like the rest of the world, we think it’s the correct approach’?
I think this is fair. In the early days, we didn’t know enough about this disease. I think we knew much more by April, certainly by June.
Somehow Sweden managed it? Loads of people said lockdowns were a bad idea, that’s why there was the need for such a large censorship operation to wipe them off the internet.
Fundamentally, leaders don’t get to say “well others did it” to defend bad decisions. They aren’t selected to average out other countries decisions and do the same thing.
But realistically, expecting the sort of people selected by existing political parties to be able to make correct decisions in the face of hysterical civil servants and public sector Karens is asking too much. You need Elon Musk types in charge, the sort who get told “you can’t do that, that’s impossible” and just laugh before showing them how to do it.
No-one needs Elon Musk types in charge. The whole point is we don’t need anyone in charge who thinks they are good at being in charge or has some kind of divine right because they’ve pushed themselves forwards politically or because they’ve amassed ridiculously large amounts of money. We ourselves are in charge of our lives and need to stop expecting some madman or other to take decisions for us.
Anders Tegnell?
You may think he doesn’t sound like a politician but what he gave there was a typical politicians non-answer and then deflection.
He still wants to be PM? God help us.
If Stewart is starting to recant, I doubts it’s due to any Damascene conversion. The ambition still burns hot inside, and he can see which way the dice are falling. Remember, politicians don’t “lead us” they follow us.
The lust for power and entitlement over us repulsive “ordinary hard-working people” will be just as insatiable as ever. He yearns to have the “PM” tick on his CV as an entry visa to the Davos / WEF set, where he really thinks he belongs.
This is not a “quirky and thoughtful politician” This is another greedy aspiring Global Elitist scrabbling on the bottom rungs of the ladder of un-earned entitlement, like a rat in a sewer.
What worries me about this is that by saying Britain was “at the centre of the pack” he appears to be offering a defence along the lines of “everybody else did it too” — which is the go-to response of all mid-wit, jobsworth politicians to this disaster. He sings to be a politician of great intellect, moral clarity, and nuanced awareness — but only in low stakes esoteric areas of policy.
This is the problem exactly. Go along to get along. The CDC and the WHO set the tone, and everyone else in the west just followed along. We know from the WhatsApp files that Hancock and crew were more concerned about the appearance of doing good, rather than actually doing good.
‘centre of the pack’ could simply mean it was not an unreasonable response. It might well have been a mistake but that’s not the same as saying the response at the time, given it’s novelty, was not unreasonable.
I’m not going to listen to the adverts over and over, to get to the section mentioned, but according to the text, it looks like no, he did not say that.
I think his view is as everyone concedes, that the initial lockdown was too delayed, for a thing that was just bound to happen whether it was really a good idea or not. And the later ones were unnecessary.
The British economy was in a weak condition and the British population has an idealised and I would say very stupid expectation of what government can do for them. So substantial damage has been done.
But if you want to see a country profoundly changed by long lockdowns, go to Australia. Half the work had been done by John Howard’s government who post 9/11 had managed to make Australians way more scared than they should have been of terrorism, and then associating that with illegal people smuggling. Post covid, the job’s fully done. Australians are compliant, stupid and scared 24/7.
I agree that Stewart is unimpressive and finding it hard to see anything in his pronouncements as indicating anything other than a man who if elected, will be as mediocre as those he seeks to supplant.
Woof, no, there are hundreds of millions of people who certainly do not and never will “concede” that, because it’s totally wrong.
The evidence here is crystal clear I’m afraid. Lockdowns achieved nothing. They never could have done and this was both known and knowable at the time. They represent total, complete and absolute failure.
You’re right. That’s exactly what he’s saying. I’m not really understanding the comments saying otherwise as it seems very clear.
To recap: he says something self-contradictory and incoherent, it isn’t even clear who he’s referring to in his first statement about “get on with it, make a decision”. McTague to his credit calls that out immediately, at which point Stewart admits that now he thinks, in hindsight, the government was wrong to force COVID countermeasures on everyone (i.e. he was wrong).
I have to admit I don’t follow Stewart and haven’t listened to the interview. It’s hard to be motivated now. It seems everyone says this guy is super smart and sharp, but every time I see a quote from him he comes across as badly informed and/or confused. I mean this quote is utterly damning, right? How can a politician speak so incoherently about one of the core justifications for his job’s existence?
Rory always puts himself on whichever side he thinks is winning.
So the thugs who run the Unherd censorship program decided to delete this comment. No idea why this would be deleted.
“They initially told us the death rate was 3.4%, an absolutely absurd rate that was quickly discredited. The death rate was different for age groups, but I think it ended up being more like 0.034%.”
‘Delegate down?!’
I love that.
We live in a world full of managers. Delegating tasks and in the very same moment moving the responsibilities attached to those tasks onto someone else.
Here in the US we are already de-centralized. The various States pretty much went their own ways, some never even had indoor masking in shops, etc.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether there will ever be an honest reckoning of the results. It’s a perfect natural experiment, but so far all I’ve seen is spin and political bulls**t.
The author is reading too much into it. What Stewart said was that Boris was reluctant [slow?] to lock down, and then extended the lockdown ‘beyond what anyone would have imagined.’ There were in fact, several lockdowns, which arguably wouldn’t have been so necessary if Boris hadn’t allowed the genie out of the bottle, beyond the ability of test and trace [which Boris screwed up] to control it, by his delay. Boris has a lot to answer for. As for the jury still being out, that’s exactly what the Swedish covid enquiry said, to put things in perspective.
Mayors/FM’s and their media enablers were bullying Boris and made it easy for him to make awful decisions. They demanded more lockdowns. Discomforting the hated (but elected) Boris Johnson came before the entire national well-being.
They and the weak Tories deserve our ever-lasting contempt.
I recall Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pointing to the images from Italian hospitals and declaring it to be the first duty of government to save citizens lives . Hard to not give in to the pressure.
That’s fair. That moment passed pretty quickly and calmer heads should have prevailed.
More lockdowns were the result of Boris dithering earlier on. No one bullied him into locking down, the infection and death rates made it unavoidable.
They initially told us the death rate was 3.4%, an absolutely absurd rate that was quickly discredited. The death rate was different for age groups, but I think it ended up being more like 0.034%.
I think I recall the death rate in the UK pre vaccine, was about 2%. This translated into 220,000 covid related deaths, calculated using standard methods. That’s a lot. The lockdowns were pre vaccine, of course.
2%of what?
Fair question, I should have been more explicit. I’m talking about the case fatality rate which is the proportion of confirmed cases which end in death. When the pandemic was at its worst, in 2020, that was estimated to be 2-3%. My sense is that if it really was this high, it didn’t remain so for long, however, a low percentage of a high number equals a lot of deaths. The case fatality rate of Spanish flu, a century ago was estimated at 2-3% but it killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide.
The problem is though that when these high percentages were bandied around the powers that be had no idea how many cases there were. So the denominator of the percentage fraction was an unknown so no reliable death rate could be calculated. What was known was that the numbers of people under 70 who died were relatively small and they are now paying a ridiculous price for mass groupthink.
You’re right that in the beginning we didn’t have a clear idea of the numbers of people infected or how many would end up dead, but then how could we? We had to wait for the death certificates to mount up to get a clear idea. The fears at the very beginning of the pandemic proved to be exaggerated, but what were the scientists and politicians meant to do, ignore the evidence of Italy and other countries, and in the knowledge that we were next, throw caution to the wind and hope for the best? Boris’ dithering and carelessness cost us one of the highest death rates in the world as it was. we had 220,000 deaths in a year from the virus. You’re right that most victims were over eighty [ninety percent] but it’s not fair to dismiss 200,000 deaths so lightly. That’s not groupthink, that’s at best calamity, or in my opinion, culpable neglect.
The standard methods yielded incorrect conclusions.
Why?
“which arguably wouldn’t have been so necessary if Boris hadn’t allowed the genie out of the bottle, beyond the ability of test and trace”
This is pure fantasy.
No country succeeded in suppressing the virus. Eventually, everyone caught it, several times, lockdown or no lockdown, vaccine or no vaccine.
Sweden is the only country I can think of that got it right.
For the record, Sweden’s death rate was twice that of that of its locked down Nordic neighbours The Swedes allowed the virus to rip through elderly care homes, just as we did. Sweden’s economy did worse that locked down Denmark’s. Plenty of countries succeeded in suppressing the virus [to varying extents]: the Czech republic, Slovakia, Greece, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Senegal etc. You can check all this by looking at these countries covid policies, and then looking at their death rates. The point is that there was a window of opportunity to control the virus with test and trace and proper border controls while infections were few enough to make that possible, thus buying time for the development of vaccines. Boris pretended to do all this, but in reality botched it, hence our death rate was as dreadful as Bolsenaro’s Brazil. Once the vaccines were rolled out, the virus was far less lethal. There’s evidence for you. I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.
Sweden was hit hard during the first wave. However, its excess death rate during the three pandemic years — the increase in mortality from 2020 through 2022 compared with the loss of life during the previous three years — was lower than any other European nation.
The year 2020-21 was a pre vaccine year. During that year Sweden’s death rate was twice that of its Nordic neighbours, so it can’t be the lowest in Europe at that time. By November 2020 Swedish hospitals were [like ours] on the brink of collapse and their elderly care homes had seen very large numbers of deaths. The govt. responded with limits on the size of public gatherings, mandatory mask wearing on public transport, closing schools to over 13s, etc. Vaccine rollout in Sweden started in early spring 2021. Once a sizable proportion of the Swedish population was vaccinated, we can’t claim that Sweden’s death rate [whatever it was] had anything to do with it’s lockdown policy.
You simply can’t use Covid deaths as a measure, because this is interpreted differently in each region and it ignores deaths caused by Covid mitigation measures. There are different ways to interpret excess deaths as well. However, in 2020, 2021 and 2022, Sweden had one of the lowest excess deaths rates, using a variety of ways to measure this.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-deaths-a-look-at-the-data/
Sweden did great compared to almost all other countries. Remember what that means: the models, the understanding, it wasn’t there. None of the assumptions you’re basing your understanding of the virus on held true.
Test and trace was worthless everywhere, it had no impact at all. Nothing did. This has been extensively analyzed and there’s no doubt about it which is why nobody talks about it anymore.
You’re making some very big claims without giving any evidence, so here’s some. Lets compare covid deaths in different countries. UK, botched test and trace, botched lockdowns, botched entry controls, 229000 deaths. US 1,175000 deaths. All the other countries in the list had effective test and trace, lockdowns, and entry controls, to one extent or other: S. Korea 36000. Australia 22,700. Vietnam 43000. Israel 12600. Denmark 8600. Singapore 1875. N. Zealand 1475. I could go on.
You’re correct in stating that at the beginning, the models and understanding weren’t there. So what do we do to protect our people in the face of a new virus, to which we have no immunity, for which we have no treatment, which is hugely infectious, which is killing tens of thousands of people, and which will reach our shores in two weeks time? We take steps to protect our people. We can see the states that did this and those that didn’t.
Using straight Covid deaths is not a very informative way of comparison. There are too many confounding factors, like population density, age of the population, health etc. Even Covid deaths per 100,000 is not very informative. That’s why excess deaths should be used – you’re measuring the per capita increase in deaths for each country. The rate of increase for each country is compared to the rate of increase of other countries.
If you’re suggesting that a single set of statistics don’t tell the whole story, then I agree with you, there is more to this than stats. But lets look at excess deaths. The UK excess deaths were 180 per 100,000. US excess deaths were 182 per 100,000, these were not the worst excess death figures on the planet, but lets look at excess deaths of countries that effectively locked down etc. New Zealand -50 excess deaths per 100,000: Taiwan -25: S. Korea -9: Singapore -7. Now lets compare Sweden, poster boy of anti lockdowners with its close neighbour Norway. Swedish excess deaths 102: Norway -19.Food for thought. My source for this the Economist magazine. Before I go, the confounding factors you mentioned relating to straight covid deaths would also apply to excess deaths, wouldn’t they? It would also tend to make Swedish figures look less impressive, I believe.
It must also be remembered that the UK was recording as a covid death anyone who had tested positive for Covid within 28 days of death. So you could have been run over by a bus and still been a Covid statistic.
The issue for me was that the response to the virus never changed even though we learnt more about it over time. The politicians had no get out plan and painted themselves into a corner.
The UK response to the virus constantly changed. Boris doesn’t plan, he reacts, changes his mind, hopes for the best, and covers his tracks in a load of blather. Boris botched his first lockdown and was forced into a second lockdown as the disease got out of control. That was the pattern, botched lockdowns inevitably leading to more lockdowns, Boris doesn’t do emerging evidence because he never learns. We should have had a plan, other countries did, and got off more lightly than we did. If someone with diabetes or a degree of heart failure, who can reasonably expect to live years more, gets covid and dies, then its reasonable to assume the covid has carried them off. The 28 day diagnostic rule has been a standard one for years, it wasn’t dreamt up for covid.
Even large island nations like Australia and New Zealand felt the impact.
Over interpretation here. He indicates Boris took too long to initiate the first Lockdown and hence it was longer than it could have been. The issue of the subsequent Lockdown in winter 20-21 not really covered. They are distinctly different as by Lockdown 2 we knew much more and had had time to prepare.
Stewart can the hold the view an initial Lockdown essential, but that we over-extended and also that one’s instinct should be to avoid such Govt interference at all costs without being inconsistent. Probably where alot of us are when reflecting.
I think virtually everyone supported two weeks to stop the spread, but we clearly understood the nature of the disease shortly later, and yet the lockdowns persisted.
We, like Sweden, were in de facto lockdown long before it became official policy. Just look at the cliff-edge drop in use of public transport in London in the two weeks before lockdown began. It was enough to ask people to stay at home if they could, and to put the fear of god into them if they didn’t.
The absurdity of lockdowns is they weren’t really even lockdowns. The only people who could truly isolate were retired people living at home and people working at home. People working outside the home would go to work, come home and spread the infection to anyone in that home, including those with compromised health.
And all pro lockdown clowns need to explain how people producing, packaging, distributing and retailing food were somehow exempt from covid virus?
If they could work and were not dropping dead in significant numbers why the rest of the population could not work?
Utter nonsense and fraud.
Initial outbreak – 2 wks insufficient JV, but an earlier and shorter Lockdown was possible. It’s also debatable if the Lockdowns could have been a bit more region/area specific – although one assumes the reason they didn’t go that way was because deemed too difficult to administer such variability.
We didn’t understand what treatments worked for some wks. For example we didn’t start proning patients until mid April. There remains alot of ignorance about what it was like in an acute hospital setting the first few wks when overwhelmed. Unpalatable for some to recognise, but it was the predominant reason countries had Lockdowns.
Lockdown 2 much more debatable IMO
“It’s also debatable if the Lockdowns could have been a bit more region/area specific – although one assumes the reason they didn’t go that way was because deemed too difficult to administer such variability.”
They proved the difficulty in Lockdown 2. Remember the village with two pubs, one open and one closed, simply because the relevant administrative district boundary ran through the middle of the village. Madness.
No it wasn’t
Lord Jonathan Sumption KS, and many on this forum certainly did NOT support the ‘lockdowns’.
It was patently obvious that the venal Cummings and chaotic Boris were in an advanced stage of abject FUNK!
Both were, and still are, a disgrace to England’s good name.
Yes, a short lockdown was justified until we understood the disease. The failure to isolate the care homes was a much bigger error.
I disagree, we should have waited until the facts were clear, as Lord Jonathan Sumption KS did.
“More haste, less speed” as we used to say.
We understood it well enough before lockdowns: the old and sick were at risk; most others people weren’t.
The idea that nobody could have known needs to die. SARS-CoV-2 was an ordinary respiratory virus that acts like all the others do, and this was known from day one, including by the scientists that birthed it. The idea that we started from a blank canvas here is a popular idea, but it’s not true.
Lockdowns were explicitly written off by public health planning exercises before 2020 because it was obvious they wouldn’t work. These viruses can move large distances on air currents and remain infectious. They can float in clouds for long periods. People can generate these clouds without getting seriously sick. You can’t stop the spread of a virus like that with 21st century tech, it’s impossible.
Laugh out loud. Do you know how small a virus is?
Yeah, I think that’s reasonable. We were at a time where a government has to ‘do something, do anything’ or consign itself to irrelevance. And a government as bad as we had was going to take was going to take a ‘centre of the pack’ option.
What do you mean, “consign itself to irrelevance”?
If we’d stuck to the Swedish approach, the left wing media would have carried on ranting, but impotently.
With his combination of character and “stonking majority”, Boris was well placed to pursue a Keep Calm and Carry on approach. He tried it for a while, before caving.
There was no need for daily briefings. There was no need for Nudge Units. There was no need for mass testing. There was certainly no need for lockdowns.
And where is Mr Johnson and his stonking great character these days?
I fear that silence in the face of crisis is very dangerous for any government, particularly in this era.
Even in cases where it would be better to do nothing.
There are factors in Sweden that favoured their approach, including low population density and a taciturn national character.
Doubt that could have worked, in London and the SE particularly.
Rich white comfortable middle-class Oxbridge bloke still banging on about “lockdowns”.
It was his one shot at experiencing “tyranny”, and by God we’re never going to hear the end of his part in the, er, “struggle”.
What a bunch of hyper-ventilating cissies.
https://ayenaw.com/2021/10/23/tyranny-tourism/