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Rishi Sunak places an Eat out to help out sticker in the window of a business in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, August 2020
Rishi Sunak places an Eat out to help out sticker in the window of a business in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, August 2020. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/PA
Rishi Sunak places an Eat out to help out sticker in the window of a business in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, August 2020. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/PA

Is Rishi Sunak the most dangerous man in government?

This article is more than 3 years old

A serial backer of attempts to ‘get back to normal’ during a deadly pandemic, the chancellor’s strategy threatens lives

The biggest threat now facing the country is from new variants of Covid that are resistant to our vaccines. It is already clear that this is possible: Novavax’s vaccine efficacy is 95.6% against the original Covid variant, 86% against the current UK variant, and only 60% against the South African variant, for example. If one emerges that is even more resistant, we could be back to square one.

This could happen overseas, which makes quarantines at the border essential for now. But for as long as Covid is spreading at home, new variants can emerge here too. We are, in effect, part-way through a course of antibiotics, where finishing prematurely after symptoms have disappeared could allow the infection to return in a new, more resistant form. In this case, returning to normal after the worst “symptoms” of Covid – mass hospitalisations and death – and not bothering to “finish the course” by wiping it out altogether would create precisely the conditions Covid would need to mutate into a form we cannot eradicate with our vaccines.

This is why we should find so worrying the reports that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, considers it to be “moving the goalposts” to aim for full elimination of the virus, and thinks hospitalisations, not case numbers, are the measure to worry about. Lockdowns are not the only option, if we can keep case numbers down with less restrictive measures. But if we reopen prematurely, allowing the virus to take hold again in the younger population, we risk going back to square one. That would mean another year of disease, lockdowns and death.

It’s hard to draw firm conclusions from anonymously sourced reports, of course, but we don’t need to rely on one story to make a judgment about Sunak’s inclinations. He has form in underestimating Covid-19, and in pandering to shortsighted voices within the Conservative party who do not realise that premature reopenings will only make things worse in the long run. At the start of the pandemic, Sunak acted swiftly and effectively by introducing furlough. But ever since that point, has been the most powerful voice in government pushing for returns to “normal” before time, with disastrous consequences.

“Eat out to help out” is the most obvious example of this. Paying people to dine in at restaurants during a pandemic of a respiratory disease was obviously reckless even at the time, but Sunak made it a key part of his personal brand. Subsequent research has suggested that the scheme increased the spread of Covid significantly, contributing to the second wave. The Treasury has produced dubious evidence to counter these claims.

This was just one of many disastrous attempts to “get back to normal” last summer. As early as April, Sunak was promoting the idea that non-essential workplaces, which would’ve included inadequately ventilated ones, could be made “Covid-safe”, and he was reported as being one of the decision-makers behind the “Go back to work or risk losing your job” campaign that was floated in the autumn (before being quietly dropped).

He supported the decision to resume summer holidays without quarantines for returning travellers, and it now seems likely that holidaymakers returning from Spain brought new Covid cases with them.

Sunak was reported as having been the decisive voice in government against an autumn lockdown that might have brought cases low enough to make things like test-and-trace viable. The Sunday Times reported that Sunak’s opposition to lockdown led to sceptics such as Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell being invited to speak via Zoom at Downing Street.

By that point, Gupta had already speculated that Covid had a UK fatality rate so low that in fact it was mathematically impossible, given how many deaths had already taken place – she suggested numbers that would have required the UK to have a population of between 120 million and 360 million people. Heneghan had argued on 1 September that real circulation of Covid was “waning fast” and that PCR testing was just picking up “harmless virus particles”, and had written an article in early August entitled Why Covid cases in England aren’t actually rising that, with hindsight, looks foolish.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, was presiding over a policy that had given Sweden, at that point, a death rate five times worse than its neighbour Denmark and 10 times worse than Norway or Finland, and which has not allowed Sweden to escape a brutal second wave, contrary to Tegnell’s predictions. As we now know, Boris Johnson ultimately decided against locking down at that time.

Apart from the wild over-optimism about a virus that was still killing people every day, even at its lowest ebb, the consistent pattern here is of prioritising the short term over the long term. Sunak and his Treasury have repeatedly failed to grasp that spending money up front to eliminate the virus, or forgoing some economic activity and tax revenue, would avoid much greater losses in future. Of all the people in the Cabinet, the chancellor is the person who needs to understand these numbers and trade-offs the most.

This has led to Sunak attempting to end furlough last summer, before reintroducing it, leading some businesses to lay off staff unnecessarily. He now opposes payments for people self-isolating and unable to work, even though Dido Harding, the head of the test and trace scheme, has reported that up to 20,000 people a day who should be self-isolating are not doing so. His concerns are often presented as being on behalf of business, but he is the one who can expand fiscal support for them, and borrowing costs are unprecedentedly low.

Sunak’s failure to push for elimination of Covid last summer, when only 0.3% of Covid tests in the UK were returning positive results and some parts of the country had come close to eliminating it altogether, may have contributed to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and hundreds of billions of pounds of lost economic output. If he has still not grasped that the only way to get back to normal is to eliminate Covid, and argues for a premature reopening that lets a vaccine-resistant variant emerge, he may be about to make the biggest mistake of his life.

  • Sam Bowman is director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics

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