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TIn their time last year, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty were completely unknown to almost everyone. Possibly even for some members of their own families. On their first outings to the Downing Street press conferences, both the chief scientific adviser and the medical director seemed somewhat hesitant to take center stage, very happy to give in to the prime minister.
So much so that Boris Johnson ended up ignoring his advice, leading to a second and third block.
Now they are both box office stars. In the confrontation between scientists and politicians, the geeks have prevailed.
They have been proven right and it is their version of the pandemic that is believed in by the public and, more importantly, the most sensitive parliamentarians. So Greg Clark was nervous and excited that coronavirus royalty would present evidence to the science and technology committee of which he is chairman.
“Thank you both for coming,” she said, trying to channel her inner Oprah.
“Thanks for having us.”
“No, thanks.”
Clark began by asking if the government’s roadmap out of lockdown was consistent with Sage’s advice. Vallance sighed. It was going to be a very long morning. Sage’s job, he noted, was simply to establish the principles on which decisions should be made.
It was the government’s job to decide on the actual measures for themselves. But yes, generally speaking, the government had bothered to take them seriously this time.
Graham Stringer de Labor thought he had detected a flaw in his thinking. Was “data, not dates” just an empty slogan?
Vallance sighed again. Er, no. The dates were simply the minimum period required to assess the full impact of the previous easing of restrictions. The first reliable moment to make sure the virus was as controlled as expected.
So the data, not the dates, was just an empty catchphrase, Stringer muttered under his breath, missing the point. Like Clark who wanted to know why, if the data was better than expected, we couldn’t unlock it faster.
Now it was Whitty’s turn to explain the reality of the situation. The faster we went, the more variables were added to the equation. And we would still need five-week intervals to measure the impact of the changes anyway. On top of that, it was easy to forget how quickly the situation could spiral out of control.
There wasn’t a country that he could think of that he wished he had unlocked at a faster rate. After all, it wasn’t like waiting until June was such a huge imposition when you consider how many people had already died and what else could go wrong in the meantime.
This set the tone for the remainder of the two-and-a-half hour session. Committee members would talk about ways to speed up the process, while Vallance and Whitty urged a more cautious approach.
While there may be no scientific basis in the government’s construction of the “rule of six”, it could well have been the rule of five or the rule of seven, they could be categorically certain that the zero incidence of coronavirus was a impossibility. .
So it was all about managing risk. No one could rule out a third increase later in the year, and if that happened, what would be reversible would be the government’s insistence that its roadmap was irreversible.
On that cheery note, the two megastars said their goodbyes. It had been a redone job by now. Everyone, including Boris, had been reminded of the consequences of ignoring science once again.
It has been a far less successful couple of days for the substitute students. On Monday, Helen Whately was forced to replace Matt Hancock to answer an unwanted urgent question about NHS pay; On Tuesday it was junior health minister Edward Argar’s turn to take the hit from Michael Gove when he was faced with an uncomfortable question about the government’s failure to publish all of its test and trace contracts.
Whately had reacted to her punishment by becoming more and more reserved and defensive in her responses. Argar tried the quite different approach of treating the entire occasion as a joke. No harm had been done. The government had simply tried to gather as much PPE as quickly as possible, so it was obvious to approach your peers and party donors first, as the department had their phone numbers on speed dial. It was just bad luck that some of the personal protective equipment was faulty.
Labor Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was not impressed. The court determined that there were more than 100 undeclared contracts outstanding three days after the prime minister had told the Commons that all the contracts had already been declared. Argar smiled broadly.
Oh those contracts! Those contracts did not count because the original court ruling that the government had acted illegally did not know of the other 100 contracts, so Johnson had not misled parliament because he had only referred to those known to the court. . Or something like that. He ended up promising that the government would try to do better in the future.
There, again, it could hardly be much worse.
