Bring on the tittle-tattle

The current UK Covid Inquiry is seeking to find out what the government’s response was to the pandemic and will seek to establish whether there are lessons to be learnt. I feel I could confidently walk into William Hill’s and place a bet on ‘yes’ to the latter question. Indeed, that question goes to the very heart of what governments—in our model of democracy—are for. Unlike under dictatorships, doubt is allowed (perhaps even to be encouraged) to seep into the reckoning, and in that regard the big question might be how reasonable those doubts may be. Politicians love to say that their policies are evidence based, as if they were like detached scientists weighing up various factual criteria before forming their conclusions. In this regard, the current inquiry in the eyes of some has veered off course, it becoming more consumed with the abundant evidence of tittle-tattle, the inevitable consequence of little ego-princes (Cummings, Johnson, Hancock and a host of others less prominent) trying to outdo each other on social media. It is not surprising that the Inquiry should look at the social media feeds of these people, they were after all entrusted to make big decisions. It may turn out that they made the wrong call (many times) but for me the question is whether they took their responsibilities seriously. If the social media tittle-tattle reveals that they did not, then this has to be key to understanding the whole way our government fulfilled its duty to the public. In my view, the personal behaviour of these characters during the pandemic showed a careless, if not callous disregard for personal responsibility. The perhaps somewhat amorphous concept of ‘duty of care’ was exercised at best intermittently. One thing is however guaranteed: none of the principals will be in the least bit genuinely shame-faced about it. Any contrition will be carefully calibrated for effect.