471. Rory Stewart: How the Government Tried to Silence Me on Lockdowns

Why did Boris Johnson and the British government not only fail to listen, but actively try to suppress early warnings about the pandemic? How did groupthink and optimism bias cripple the UK's response? And is Britain's government structurally too slow to handle future threats like AI and Putin's increasing aggression in Europe? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via get.revolut.com/z4lF/therestispolitics, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. __________ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:02Rory Stewart?

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• 1:18Rory Stewart?

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• 1:33Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying. If you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona, Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:03Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go. NordVPN.com/RestIsPolitics. That's NordVPN.com/RestIsPolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 3:17Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to an emergency episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:20Rory Stewart?

  And me, Roy Stewart.

• 3:22Alastair Campbell?

  And it's an emergency about an issue that we have talked about many, many, many times before. Covid-19. And on the back of the official inquiry report, which has revealed something we definitely knew. Chaotic, incoherent leadership of Boris Johnson. But maybe even deeper than that, a sense of an entire system that wasn't properly equipped to deal with this, and as a result of which many people died who otherwise might not have done.

• 3:51Rory Stewart?

  And we're tackling this because firstly, it's a reminder of the incredible harm that this imposed, the deaths. People who lost loved ones unnecessarily. It's now clear from this report. The incredible impact that Covid turned out to have on our economy, on education, on mental health. And more than that, I think we're talking about this because this is huge lessons for the British government. We did not respond well, and by we, I mean politicians, civil servants, expert advisory panels, the media, the opposition. And if we don't sort it out, we're going to face other existential crises in the future.

• 4:31Rory Stewart?

  Conflict, technology, other pandemics, and we won't respond well to them either. I mean, the headline is that the government did too little too late. And that if Boris Johnson's government had acted even a week more rapidly, they could potentially have made the lockdown even shorter, even avoided the necessity of a lockdown at all if they'd got there early enough, and potentially saved 23,000 lives. So this is really big news. And it's interesting, sort of getting a sense of how much people are concentrating and whether we're really drawing the big lessons, because the big lessons are, in my experience, the whole system failed.

• 5:15Rory Stewart?

  Boris Johnson, definitely, who was an obvious buffoon, who wasn't competent to do this. But actually, I'm afraid, in the end, a lot of the medical establishment, particularly around the chief medical officers, the chief scientific advisers, got key calls wrong. Departments got key calls wrong, devolved administrations were slow. And actually, I'm afraid, other political parties and other journalists were not quick enough to start sounding the alarm bell. We were very, very deferential and smug.

• 5:48Alastair Campbell?

  I think there's something about, even though people say they don't like politicians, they don't listen to politicians. I think there's something about when there is a sense of a real crisis, they actually maybe listen too much. If you remember those briefings that Johnson and Hancock, Matt Hancock, did most days for quite a while. And this is pre our meeting up to do the podcast, Rory. I was in my Instagram daily rant mode. And I was ranting about the extent to which the media weren't holding them properly to account, that they were saying things which were clearly borderline untrue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I know you're a sort of blow your own trumpet sort of person,

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  but you actually were one of the very, very, very small number of people who publicly, and I think as I remember, I could be wrong, but the only parliamentarian I remember, actually going out there very, very strongly, much earlier, saying, the only way to deal with this now is lockdown.

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  It is patently clear from all the way around the world that we need to act today, today, today, today. And it was an amazing experience because what you suddenly realise is if you break with the consensus, you are attacked from a lot of very different directions. So government finally locked down, I think in about sixteenth of March, and I was beginning to make speeches on this twenty fourth of February. So I guess three weeks in advance, I gave an interview to the Today Programme, for example, I think on twenty fifth of February. And that was when I really saw the extent of abuse you get if you start breaking line, because the Today Programme was then getting calls from the government saying, how dare you interview Rory Stewart? I'd said, look, I'd been the Secretary of State responsible for the response

• 7:29Rory Stewart?

  to Ebola, and therefore I was very much in touch with the WHO, the World Health Organisation, and I had a very strong sense that we were too complacent. In fact, I'd worked with Chris Witty, who went on to be the Chief Medical Officer over Ebola. And I was very, very worried that the plans we had in place were old, they were twenty eleven plans for flu, and that they were making all the wrong assumptions about this disease. And my general instinct, I don't know whether this is something that you found in government, is that the tendency of government is to be too slow and indecisive. We tend to think, let's just wait, the costs of action are very high, you know, the scientists maybe are disagreeing, why don't we just give it a new few more weeks, commission another report?

• 8:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the one that that makes me think of is foot and mouth, you know, way back in the day. But I remember we were in Canada, when we got the first report of a case, Jean Chrétien, Canadian Prime Minister's, I remember saying to Tony, get a grip of that fast, that could really be bad. And we have this situation where the then MAF, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, felt they would be undermined if Number Ten took it over. And the truth is, we should have taken over straight away. And that, I would say, is, I mean, people can have whatever criticisms they want of Tony Blair, but when something like that happened, he wanted to grip everything.

• 8:46Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas what you had from Johnson, and this, this was obvious to us all at the time. And yesterday I was listening to one of the radio shows where they were playing all the clips of him at those press conferences, you know, I've been out and I've been shaking hands with people in the hospital and you know, carry on. And of course we should go to Cheltenham, of course we should carry on with our football and all the rest of it. Just sort of thinking that his sort of ridiculous boosterism would get us through this. Then you had Matt Hancock, who seemed just to be kind of enjoying the centre of attention-ness of it. Um, you know, and sadly another hundred and fifty seven have died every day this is happening. And no real sense of a, of grip and strategy. But what do you, what do you, I always get a bit depressed and maybe this is back to, back to too many such experiences.

• 9:29Alastair Campbell?

  When you have these reports and say, you know, and we'll learn the lessons and make sure this never happens again. But we never do seem to learn.

• 9:35Rory Stewart?

  No, we don't because um, some of the lessons are very fundamental things about the psychology of government. So optimism bias, group think, I mean, all the various things. In fact, actually Jonathan Evans, uh, the ex head, head of MI5 has talked quite perfectly about this in other contexts. We have a real tendency in general in government to assume that this is the British government. We're very professional, we've got it all fixed up. And you can see in the text going back and forth that when Hancock and Johnson and Cummings are asking questions, often the answer is we've got, you know, the best preparedness plan in the country. And there's a real smugness in British government. We, we have it, I'm afraid, in the British military often too. Best army in the world, et cetera.

• 10:18Rory Stewart?

  And the general view was that we had the best public health system in the world and everybody else was learning from us. And sure enough, we were going around the world telling other people how to do their job. We find it very, very difficult to think. And actually, I think, to be fair to the ministers, when you challenge, if you're Matt Hancock or whatever, and you say to the system. Are you sure you've got this right? Um. You will often get people saying, no, no, it's all under control. Now, that that leads to a different problem, which is amateurism in government. I mean, we talk about endless reshuffles. We talk about the lack of qualifications. The reason that Angela Merkel was much better than Boris Johnson, partly she had a scientific training, partly in personality.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  She was prepared to spend six, seven hours sitting around a table, being honest about what she didn't know and learning about these quite complicated things. You know, I mean, it it wasn't obvious at all. And to be fair to Chris Witty, who was the chief medic officer, or Patrick Balance, who was the chief scientific officer. There were a lot of uncertainties, right? They were disagreeing about very technical issues. How many people would get infected from one person? How long the incubation rate was? How long the virus would remain in your body? How long it would remain in your body before you infected? What the mortality rate was? So, you know, you could have a mortality rate saying, you know, three percent of people who get it will die. But then it will turn out that actually it's nine percent of people over ninety and

• 11:44Rory Stewart?

  less than one percent under twenty one. You're trying to work out what you can do. Is it even possible to lock down the country? So one of the things I picked up when I started digging into this, and I was digging quite early, end of January, beginning of February, is the assumption in Britain is that you couldn't lock down. Assumption was China can lock down, but, you know, we're a liberal democratic country and they'll never put up with it. And then there were other real problems, which is when I was talking to the people right at the top of Public Health England. And I remember because they were calling me to tell me essentially to to shut up and stop causing trouble. One of them said to me, look, Rory, um, the fact is, we may have to just try to smooth the curve here, which meant, uh, let's allow more people maybe to die earlier.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  And that might lead to fewer people dying later because we will land the peak of the virus during the summer, not in the winter. And I said, what do you mean by this? I mean, this in a sense where ministers come in. And in the end, it turned out what it meant is. We're going to allow quite a lot of old people in practice to die now rather than more people dying later.

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  Quite a hard thing to go out and say publicly.

• 12:51Rory Stewart?

  And that's exactly what I said. So I said, well, what do you mean by this? And he said, well, I mean, statistically, a lot of these old people are going to die in the next couple of years anyway. So it doesn't make much difference whether they die in the few months, the next couple of years. And it was at that point I said, you have a moral problem here. I can't hear that. The public can't hear that. You can't explain that publicly. And I think you need to have a very, very serious conversations by government about this kind of reasoning. Which point this professional said to me, okay, Rory, maybe, you know, if you were Prime Minister, we could follow that lead, but that isn't the judgment that that our prime ministers made. Anyway, what I'm trying to say, I suppose, in a very complicated way is we think about it as following the science, but it isn't really about following the science.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  It's how much economic costs you prepared to bear. Are you prepared to shut down schools? Are you prepared for lots of old people to die earlier, potentially to save more younger people later? These aren't things the scientists can decide. These are things only a prime minister can decide.

• 13:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I, I, so they kept saying they were following the science, when in various places they clearly weren't. Because I think you, and you mentioned the role of the media. I think that because of the theatre of the thing. And once we were all locked down and we're all sort of at home and it became one of the highlights of the day, you know, watch the briefing. I don't know what the figures were, but I'm pretty sure they were quite high. And watch the briefing partly because you want to know the news, you want to know what's going on. You also want to know if there's anything that we, the people, are meant to be doing. And I think what happens in those circumstances, and you could read this sometimes in Whittian Valance's body language, you could read them. Sort of essentially, they were sticking to facts and alongside it was essentially political judgment.

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  And in Johnson's case, often just downright nonsense. And, you know, the one thing I think this, this report surely does is put a page to any of this crap that the Tories talk about, maybe we need to bring back Johnson. You know, the idea that this guy's legacy now, one Brexit and two. People dying who shouldn't have died and it's got to be on him.

• 14:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so the Johnson point I think is is important because I think it also applies to Donald Trump, who was a very, very bad Covid leader, and I think it would imply to someone like Nigel Farage or God forbid Tommy Robinson or somebody taking over. The point is that modern campaigning style, populist campaigning style is

• 15:05Alastair Campbell?

  Doesn't work in government.

• 15:06Rory Stewart?

  No, because it's all about simplification, it's all about easy answers. And when you're dealing with Covid, you need a prime minister who's going to say, well, what is the latest data from Wuhan? Is it different from yesterday? What exactly are the Danes doing? Why are they doing that? What are the Swedes doing? Wait a sec, Italy has just gone under with all its hospitals. How come we've got seven flights a day coming in from Milan if the infection's there? What do you mean that we're going to have to build extra freezing and mortuary facilities at the hospitals, right? But this requires somebody like Angela Merkel, who is interested in science.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  Serious.

• 15:45Rory Stewart?

  Understands disagreement, understands that scientists don't have all the answers, is prepared to take a curious interest in other countries. And that's not what's helped by modern styles of governing.

• 15:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also what Johnson wanted to do constantly, this was during his we're world beating phase post Brexit. He wanted to be sane the whole time, we're doing better. He still does it with his nonsense about, you know, we did the vaccine faster than everybody else. And I also think on the media point though, I'm afraid, I think I've told you before, Fiona and I, our first rave of the day is usually about the fact she wants to listen to the Today Programme and I want to listen to some music. And so today, David Frost, Lord David Frost, who is a total buffoon, who is only a known figure because Johnson appointed him to be his Brexit negotiator, which he did a catastrophically bad job. He was twice in the first hour discussed on the Today Programme because he's written a piece in The Telegraph.

• 16:38Alastair Campbell?

  Saying this is a terrible report, like which he probably hasn't read. So and then who do they have on as the voice of the government, Michael Gove, Michael Gove, who who had this extraordinary line about, you know, the thing is, when you get into the crisis, you can't expect it to run like a Jane Austen novel. I don't even know what that means. And this was in response to the stuff about a toxic culture. And the other thing, I I think it'd be a good thing if we stopped and parts of the media stopped platforming Cummings as well as some great sage. He was a massive part of what went wrong. They should all just bugger off, shut up and stay out of public life.

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  Final thing, maybe to transition to the bigger point about how we run our government and why we're bad at crises. You're right about all that. Boris Johnson was a very, very poor appointment. Matt Hancock was consistently overpromising and underdelivering. So he was consistently saying, we've got this, we've got the best plan, we're going to do this, and it just wouldn't happen. Cummings eventually noticed the problem. In some ways, I was on his side when it came to calling out how slow people were being. But the way in which he did it was unbelievably abusive and disruptive and undermined the system and included briefing against the Prime Minister continually through it. But there's also the problem of the layer

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  below, because I've talked about the fact that Patrick Vallance was saying he thought that a lockdown was neither necessary nor desirable.

• 18:06Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  You had Chris Witty essentially saying that he didn't think, and you know, it's understandable he thought this. I mean, I remember a conversation again on the 13th of March where I said, surely we should try to slow the spread, suppress this because a vaccine might become available. And the answer then was, no, no, a vaccine's not going to become available. We know this for two, three years. And actually, of course, credit to Johnson, credit to the government, they got vaccines in place and there was amazing scientific change vaccines. But there's also the stuff we don't talk about because it's easier to attack these buffoons like Johnson. The Deputy Chief Medical Officer of England.

• 18:44Alastair Campbell?

  Jenny Harris.

• 18:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, was out there on the 10th of March saying Rory Stewart has no idea what he's talking about. There's no evidence of massive work.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  Worse than that, Rory. Worse than that. And this is worse than group thing. I remember one of my rants was about the fact that, do you remember this? She did an interview with Boris Johnson in one of the big rooms in Downing Street, which was a conversation which they put out and got massive coverage at the time. Where he was sort of asking her about, you know, whether we had to do things like wash our hands every five minutes, whether we should be doing Cheltenham, whether we should be doing this. And she absolutely was just playing back to him the message that he's been he'd been putting out. Now, whether that was and and she cannot have believed that.

• 19:22Rory Stewart?

  Oh, no, I think I think she did. I mean, this is where the group think comes in. I think Johnson was, in a sense, following the scientific advice, but what he was not doing is being curious and challenging it. So she she genuinely believed, and I think she said this in the attack on me, she said there was no point in masks and there's no point in lockdown.

• 19:38Alastair Campbell?

  That's right. There's no there's no evidence that masks would would slow it down.

• 19:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, but but if, look, I'm not remotely scientific, but if I can remember at the time thinking, this is just a sort of propaganda exercise to tell us something that may or may not not be true. What they're not providing is any data that tells you where they're making those judgments. And of course, we were surrounded by in other countries, people.

• 20:04Rory Stewart?

  People wearing masks.

• 20:05Alastair Campbell?

  People wearing masks and what's more, moving towards lockdown.

• 20:09Rory Stewart?

  And and and days before, I mean, so that you could see Denmark was moving, South Korea was moving and we weren't. So let's just expand it out maybe to to bring this to to probably what matters most now, which is the future, future pandemics, but other things, the threat from Russia, who knows, threat from Trump's US, threat from AI.

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• 22:14Rory Stewart?

  My general sense is British government, that's probably true of most European governments, are too slow and too complacent. So let's look at Ukraine. I mean, you have raised Radek Sikorski saying to us, Poland genuinely believes Russia has a very significant chance of at least invading the Baltic or coming into Poland, that firebombs are going off in our premises, private residence, we're doing nothing about it. What is actually happening, my guess is, the government increased the spending on defense, but we're not ready for war. There's no real sense of urgency. There's no real sense that somebody's actually saying to BAE Systems, "Oi, start building $1,000 drones that can be updated 120 times a year on the software." No, probably we're doing some slow, risk averse procurement contract for a $20,000 drone

• 22:59Rory Stewart?

  with five updates a year. And if you really worked backwards from what would happen if Putin went into the Baltic, broke the NATO Article 5 guarantees, countries like Britain and Germany are critically irresponsibly not responding. Just so with AI, if AI is literally about to completely transform our employment landscape, could pose an existential threat to us, could make us completely dependent on Trump's America for security and economy, we're not responding with that degree of urgency. And so I think this COVID thing, I think it's a very good report, as usual, at describing what went wrong. What it's very bad at is explaining how government systems get it wrong. The absence of, you know, what you call red team or challenge. How do you build into government systems?

• 23:44Rory Stewart?

  Somebody to say to the MOD, oi, this is not quick enough. This is ridiculous. We can't do this in five years, 10 years. We've got to do it this week.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  I can, I can, I think part of the issue is that I can remember when we were in government, that occasionally somebody would have a, somebody had an idea to do kind of scenario planning. And, and, and most times I was thinking, oh God, I can't, I really cannot take a day out to do this, let alone tell Tony he should. And I think there's a lot of that goes on. So you send junior people to go and sort of plan. I did actually talk to a minister recently who told me they had a, I don't know if it was an away day or away half day or whatever, where they were looking at different military scenarios and, and planning a response on a what if basis. And actually what, because, and what they said was that actually it was amazing how real it felt once you got into it.

• 24:34Alastair Campbell?

  So you can do those things, but, but I, I think the complacency point is the one that, that you've, that is right. We, we do these things and of course it was a different governments and our Keir Starmer can stand up and say, I welcome the report and thank you for this and very good points. And we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do that. Added to which I was with somebody last night who knows quite a lot about this pandemic world. So that in terms of what might happen in a pandemic, COVID 19 was, was not.

• 25:00Rory Stewart?

  Relatively mild.

• 25:00Alastair Campbell?

  It was relatively mild. And then I guess the other thing that I did hear that Chris Wermel, the, who was then a health, now the cabinet secretary was getting a bit of kicking as well.

• 25:11Alastair Campbell?

  And so I, I think what you have is we're just, we're just not dynamic enough in our systems and our planning and our appointments and our recruitments. So you mentioned AI there. We talked about this on the main podcast last week, that everywhere you go outside government. Into business, into academia, wherever it might be, people just sort of say, this thing is happening now. It is massive, it is changing this, it is changing that. We don't know what the consequences are going to be. Then you get into government, you talk to people in government, and other those who are specifically working on this, you don't have a sense that that's where the debate is.

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 25:45Alastair Campbell?

  So that, so your point about government being day to day, short term, let's get through tomorrow. And of course, when you have a media that covers it in the way that our media does, so like yesterday, it was big news, the Covid inquiry.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  Will there be really be much debate going forward? So then we're on to the next thing.

• 26:04Rory Stewart?

  And, and about what? So I, I, I'm really struck by this because of course the media will concentrate, you know, maybe on kicking Cummings or Johnson. But the media is not very interested in really getting into the weeds of why British government is really slow to react. And, and partly there's a lack of expertise. Um, I was completely shocked during this. I was called by one of the most senior BBC journalists. Right at the middle of this, when I was calling for lockdown, before the lockdown. And I tried to argue, and they said, to be honest, Rory, I didn't do much science at school. I'm not very confident with this stuff. And it was quite clear what they were focusing on was the number ten politics. They were not actually interested in my saying, this is what's happening in Denmark, this is the transmission rate.

• 26:49Rory Stewart?

  This is what Dr Ferguson is saying in terms of his modeling. As soon as he said that, they were switching off. And the parties, I, again in parliament, often felt, I felt this on Afghanistan, I felt this on Covid. It's remarkable sometimes how the opposition doesn't criticize, how easy it is for the government to say, this is a national emergency, you know, it's disloyal to criticize. So I was then, I just, when this was happening, I just left parliament, I was running to be an independent mayor of London. And my Lib Dem opponent, presumably pressured by people, put out a big tweet saying, it's completely irresponsible of Rory Stewart to be questioning Boris Johnson's Covid policy at this period. We all need to sit together. I got Daily Mail journalists ringing me saying, you know, you really can't do this.

• 27:33Rory Stewart?

  This would be like criticizing the British government during the Second World War. You can't. So doubts and discord. Of course, ridiculous.

• 27:41Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 27:41Rory Stewart?

  In fact, what Churchill was doing during the Second World War was exactly pointing out that Chamberlain wasn't doing the right thing. And if he hadn't done that, we would have been in a much worse situation.

• 27:48Alastair Campbell?

  I I had a a version of the same thing because I was doing these, I was going, Fiona and I were taking the dog for a walk every morning and I was just getting my phone out and venting at Instagram. And a lot of it was about just feeling that the that Johnson, that Hancock, the way the whole thing was being presented to the public was just catastrophically bad. I remember a a piece on my blog about twenty things that I would do to improve their communications. And and as a result, I then started to get lots of calls from media.

• 28:16Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 28:16Alastair Campbell?

  Television, radio, et cetera. And it was really interesting. I remember one of them being described as one of the few voices criticizing the government's handling.

• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 28:25Alastair Campbell?

  And I thought, what?

• 28:28Alastair Campbell?

  Everybody I talked to, these are shambles. But of course, what they meant was one of the few voices that was in that political bubble.

• 28:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Alastair Campbell?

  And look, and maybe I was sometimes over the top about Johnson, but I think this report shows up why we should never ever have unserious people at the top of government. He's not a serious person. He's a he's a he's a buffoon. He's a player and he's an actor. Um. And I I think that the the other thing I I thought was interesting as well, by she was very tough on Rishi's eat out to help out. Um. Basically said that was, you know, not borne out by the scientific evidence that that was a good idea to do, clashed with the then public messaging. So it just adds to that sense that even the ones that you think are a bit more serious were actually falling victim to exactly the same phenomenon that you're talking about.

• 29:14Rory Stewart?

  To finish, clearly, there are still a huge debate about lockdown, about when it was done, how it was done, the incredible damage to the economy and children's education. So almost certainly hundreds of billions of pounds worth of debt came out of that. In fact, one of the reasons why the government is in such trouble that it's borrowing is because of our COVID response. Sweden didn't follow this compulsory lockdown and its economic performance was better. So a lot is resting on people like me and the authors of this report saying, if we had locked down earlier, I think three weeks earlier, they say even a week earlier, we actually could have made the lockdowns much shorter and much less damaging.

• 29:56Alastair Campbell?

  And possibly avoided the second one.

• 29:58Rory Stewart?

  And possibly avoided the second one. And this over the second one, if we put a circuit breaker in very quickly, we could have opened up much more quickly. So we've got to get out of the black and white. There's a, as usual, there's a sort of pro lockdown, anti lockdown world. What I'm arguing, the report's arguing, is that actually, if you're decisive and you're quick and you're clear and you act early, actually you don't need to have quite as long a lockdown. But my goodness, we needed to do it because all the evidence was there. We had no testing facilities in place. Our hospitals were not ready, our care centres were not ready, our vaccines were not ready. Obviously, in that situation, safety first, lockdown quick and early to buy yourself a bit of time and try to work out what on earth's happening. And then by all means,

• 30:41Rory Stewart?

  reopen schools, reopen the economy in a thoughtful way. Johnson consistently did the very worst thing. He blithered around. He said, I've seen these oriental style viruses before, you know, they've usually turned out to be nonsense, right? And then actually kept the lockdowns in for too long, brought them in too late. He neither went, Sweden take it on the chin, nor did he do what people like me were pushing for, which was quick, early and decisive. He did the worst of all worlds. The most actually ultimately damaging in terms of death and the economy.

• 31:14Alastair Campbell?

  My final point, I was in a school this morning and it's really interesting how when you go into schools at the moment, how much they are still talking about the impact upon kids of the changes to their lives at that time and how a lot of kids are still struggling with that. And I think it does partly explain the kind of seamy explosion in mental health issues amongst young people.

• 31:33Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's terrifying. So I think, I think, you know, whatever the rights or wrongs of it, policy aside, horrible in terms of the deaths. And there are some very, very moving victim statements at the beginning of this report about people losing both their mother and their father in a couple of days. The impact on children's education and and mental health. And then this massive impact on our economy.

• 31:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we seem to be recovering more slowly than than other comparable economies.

• 32:02Rory Stewart?

  But we but we really, I think, need to try to learn a much more difficult lesson, which is how do you build a governmental system that isn't vulnerable to amateur, ill-informed ministers, group think complacency, because if we don't,

• 32:18Rory Stewart?

  Russia, AI, and the next pandemic will do much more damage again.

• 32:21Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Well, well done, Rory. Well done for being ahead of the curve at the time. Um, and for banging away in the way that you did. Let's hope that the next time there is a pandemic, we do handle it better because one thing's for sure, there will be one. See you soon.

• 32:34Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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