Collateral Damage:
The United Kingdom’s Lockdown Files

Recently-published private correspondence by Matt Hancock, who was the UK’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during the Covid lockdowns, reveals that he encouraged the government to “frighten” the public into submission to the measures, and that he found the requirement for travelers to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival “hilarious,” among other revelations.

2,718 words

The story is not about me, and actually it isn’t about Matt Hancock as an individual. The story is about collateral damage. — Isabel Oakeshott, English journalist

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies. — Fleetwood Mac

If there is one lesson to be learned from the recent Covid pandemic, it is that British public opinion is as dirigible as a child’s party balloon on a string. Just as when someone in a crowd looks fixedly up to the sky, followed by the chap next to him, repeated by the family next to him, until finally everyone is looking up at nothing, classic crowd psychology also applies to information. Divert the attention of a few, and you will get everyone’s attention, like aquarium fish following the alpha. There is no problem there as long as the information has integrity, which requires those who disseminate the information to also have integrity. But, as Orwell wrote of England, the United Kingdom is a family with the wrong members in control.

The story is a simple one: The British Health Secretary during the Covid outbreak was a man called Matt Hancock. He held a very hard line on lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination. He did a lot more, too, as has recently become clear. After the all-clear sounded on Covid — not that the elites wanted that to happen — Hancock hired a well-known political journalist, Isabel Oakeshott, to collaborate on a book called Lockdown Diaries, essentially designed to protect his legacy (note that the term “lockdown” originates with a tactic used on rioting prisoners). Hancock gave Oakeshott a tranche of WhatsApp messages between himself and various colleagues. After consideration, Oakeshott gave these messages to Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Actually, it was no gift. She sold the information, and we will revisit this salient fact.

America has the big league of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Elon Musk, and Matt Taibbi, and now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson, but it is hard to think of a bigger British info-drop than Oakeshott’s since the infamous “expenses scandal” of 2009. Both scoops went to the Daily Telegraph. Now, Oakeshott is not some wide-eyed, ingénue whistleblower. In terms of political journalism, she has been round the houses, and indeed round the House of Commons, for 20 years, having been a lobby journalist. The lobby press pack are Westminster’s inner circle, the British equivalent to the American journos who are forced to listen to Karine Jean-Pierre and her dogged attempts to drain language of any and all meaning.

Oakeshott is also well-connected politically. Her partner is Richard Tice, head of the Reform party, who some conservatives see as the cavalry, come to restore the values their natural party has abandoned. Tice is interesting because he has yet to choose the exact area of the political Right in Britain it is most to his advantage to occupy. This is not a cynical snipe. If you can’t operate in this way, you will never, ever be a politician. But with Isabel Oakeshott as your partner and, as it were, your partner, I suspect you would have an advantage.

And this is not an insubstantial risk for Tice politically, because the media, as we will see, went for Oakeshott rather than the real story, and guilt by association is a powerful proof of heresy. But I disagree with Oakeshott that Hancock is not the story. I think he very much is, and the story a study in narcissism and power, and the fatal chemical reaction between the two.

The first of Hancock’s indiscretions to hit the fan was the revelation that he suggested, in order to ensure lockdown compliance, the government should “frighten the pants of [sic] everyone.” A very English metaphor, but an unwise one for Hancock to employ. While Health Secretary Hancock was making the British people jump through hoops, he was filmed in a rather close business meeting with his aide, Gina Coladangelo. This was captured by CCTV in his parliamentary office. One assumes his wife — not Ms. Coladangelo, but rather the mother of his children — had a rather depressing week of television.

Meanwhile, her husband was not only talking about “deploying the new variant” to scare the British into submission, but deploying his talents in the bedroom with the rather toothsome Gina. No social distancing there, I suspect. Hancock left his wife and children when the scandal broke, but that was nothing compared to the wall of water that is hitting him at the time of writing.

In a manner reminiscent of the former Governor of New York, the mobster-like Andrew Cuomo, Hancock decided the fates of many of the elderly, the most vulnerable group, as the average age of death from Covid was 83. Hancock claimed to be “putting a ring around” care homes, where British old people effectively go to die, hopefully in the company of family. This would mean rigorous testing for anyone entering such a place. The messages — nicknamed the “Lockdown Files” by the Telegraph — reveal that Hancock ignored advice to test those going into care homes, with disastrous results. The governmental line was masks for all, closed schools, lockdowns, and untested injections for infants, while some of the elderly were effectively smothered in their beds.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

The decision to mask even the youngest was reportedly due to a reluctance by Hancock to have a political row with Nicola Sturgeon, the now-recently-departed First Minister of Scotland. This was not, of course, for the sake of political concord, but rather Hancock betting on what would make him look like a smooth political operator by not picking a fight during a usable crisis. It is contemptuous and cynical, but is apparently the factory default operating system for a new generation of British politicians.

And this is the mood music of these messages: one of utter contempt for the little people, and not them alone. Hancock and one of his cronies found the idea of compulsory 14-day hotel quarantine when entering the United Kingdom from abroad, when people would have to get off a first-class flight and go into “a shoebox at a Premier Inn,” to quote directly, “hilarious.” When it was suggested that the national mood favored reducing the quarantine period, Hancock said that the move would “make it look like we had made a mistake.” It stayed at 14 days. Nigel Farage broke his curfew by a few hours. Hancock suggested Farage be arrested.

And there were knock-on effects from Covid’s prioritization for the sake of political profile. While attention turned, frantically and far too late, to clinical testing of the various vaccines, there was a concomitant drop-off in testing of other medicines. We are used to hearing that this or that “is not a zero-sum game.” Medical testing is a zero-sum game. The more qualified people whose professional attentions are diverted to Covid vaccines, the fewer are available to work on other tests. So a bad case of flu is more important than cancer. Right.

From a large field, possibly the most scurrilous detail to emerge from the “Lockdown Files” is the case of the Member of Parliament for Bury in the north of England, James Daly. Hancock advised him that, if Daly did not vote in line with Hancock’s wishes over lockdown, funding for a project of Daly’s might be withdrawn. The project was a disability learning hub. I mentioned Andrew Cuomo as resembling a mafia capo, but this is a step up. What Hancock did was effectively to say, hey, nice little project to help those with special needs and learning disabilities you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. And so Hancock, a very bad man, coerced Daly, an apparently good man, into voting for lockdown by threatening to withhold funding earmarked for some of society’s most vulnerable people. Nice game.

Oakeshott’s version of the lockdown is simple: Boris Johnson was, according to former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, “pushed around by advisors.” This vacuum at the heart of government led to a situation in which, in Oakeshott’s words, “a small group of people seized power.” Hancock and his cronies effectively controlled the destinies of millions of people with nothing to guide them but their blind sense of self-importance. Narcissism is hardly a moral compass, although it is still a compass. It’s only that: Just as a magnetic compass always points north, so too that of people like Hancock always points at the mirror and sees themselves and their own ambition as true north. Lord Sumption — always worth listening to discern the UK’s political climate — also raised to an objection to “government by WhatsApp.” Government stooges love their technology and unquestioningly prefer it to the tiring business of an elected assembly, favoring an atomized, text message-based system of technocratic governance in which their own narcissistic pomposity can go unchallenged. These messages are the equivalent of America’s Presidential Executive Orders, but in miniature and confidential (absent journalists such as Oakeshott). Jacob Rees-Mogg, a highly respected member of the Cabinet and apparently a genuine Conservative, says he had no idea that any of the machinations Oakeshott has exposed were going on.

This is not a risk-free exercise for Oakeshott. Not only is she unlikely to be employed by any politician, or anyone at all, in the near future, but she breached a confidentiality agreement in the first place by handing Hancock’s messages to the Telegraph. Hancock messaged Oakeshott when he discovered the leak — at 1:20 AM — and told her she was making a “big mistake.” If he doesn’t sue, I would be surprised.

Oakeshott is a very precise thinker, with a prehensile intelligence you don’t often see in British journalists. This is because Right-wing journalists — and Oakeshott defines herself as right-of-center — have a freedom to explore political scenarios which Leftist hacks do not have. Cancel culture has worked against itself here, like Ouroboros, the mythical snake which devours itself.

The British press, predictably, attempted to deflect and divert the locus of the Oakeshott story and make it about journalistic ethics rather than abuse of political power. Cathy Newman, the Leftist activist masquerading as an impartial journalist who was famously skewered by Jordan Peterson, took the curious line of asking Oakeshott whether she was paid by the Telegraph for the “Lockdown Files.” Funnily enough, in the same week in the United States, Matt Taibbi was being questioned by Sylvia Garcia during proceedings of a Congressional Oversight Committee over the so-called “Twitter Files.” She asked the exact same question: Did Taibbi take money for his work? What does she think journalists survive on? Food stamps? Tax credits? A warm glow inside? Garcia even asked whether Taibbi had been paid to testify. That level of impertinence would have got you slung out of Britain’s House of Commons, but presumably Garcia was protected by the First Amendment.

In a perfect world, Isabel Oakeshott and Matt Taibbi would be receiving a shiny pair of Pulitzer prizes. As it is, the deep states in these journalists’ respective countries will be sharpening their knives. Taibbi, incidentally, paid for his investigative team and travel himself. Oakeshott has not revealed her fee, nor should she have to.

On the subject of Committee hearings, one of the many ways in which American politics as a legislative apparatus is superior to its British counterpart is the House Committee system. Not only do the likes of Anthony Fauci, Janet Yellen, and Merrick Garland, plus a whole host of woke potential judges, have to endure cross-examination by sharp men such as Matt Gaetz, John Kennedy, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Tom Cotton, but it’s televised. This doesn’t happen in the UK, which is a glaring omission, although that didn’t thwart Hancock’s determination to get himself on TV.

Instead of retiring into private life, and thinking himself lucky to have got away with his lies, deceptions, and half-truths, Hancock — or his agent — thrust himself into the tawdry British media limelight by appearing on one of the most representatively cretinous shows on British television: I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, in which he ate bugs and attempted to revive his public persona.

I have a very unscientific theory as to what the political class in Britain is becoming, and the best way I can describe it, albeit clumsily, is as quasi-autistic. Autists find it hard to empathize; it’s just that most of them don’t use that lacuna from positions of power. If they do, and they are of the wrong stripe in terms of personality, then they have been given a license to exercise their malevolent and narcissistic mischief on those in weaker positions than they are. Just as there was much talk of variants of the Covid virus, why should there not be variants of autism, high-functioning but free of conscience and empathy, solipsistic and devoted to the nourishment of its own reputation, like fleshly AI? I am a doctor, but not a clinician, so I have no real answer to that one.

This is not merely a tawdry and familiar tale of the arrogance and pomp of those in power. There was a very human level at which Hancock’s devilry operated. Oakeshott tells both of the many messages of support she has received from ordinary people, and of a truly appalling story — one of many — concerning a teenage boy so affected by the what the government had the insolent temerity to call “Project Fear” that he committed suicide. When Matt Hancock jokingly told one of his sniveling sidekicks that he wanted to “scare the pants off everyone,” he also scared one boy into the woods to tie a length of rope around both a tree and his own neck. And not just one boy. Mental health among the young suffered catastrophically during Covid, and suicide spiked. This is the “collateral damage” of which Oakeshott speaks.

And Oakeshott didn’t just spin out a few messages like a card dealer. This was a journalistically impressive feat for the sheer endeavor involved. Eight staff members at the Telegraph were presented with 100,000 text messages comprised of around 2.3 million words. For context, War and Peace is around a quarter of that length. It took two months to process and produce Oakeshott’s synopsis. Again, do the Cathy Newsoms and Sylvia Garcias of the world think that journos wade through this stuff on a pro bono basis? The Lockdown Files are also in the public interest, a concept the new Left find “problematic,” to use one of their favorite terms, and which they would like to see escorted from the building.

In the UK, a key litmus test as to whether a journalist releases sensitive and obtained information is the notion of its being in the public interest. Now, just as the US is seeing with the “Twitter Files” and the missing January 6 CCTV footage, what is in the public interest tends to equate with what the deep state doesn’t want the public to take an interest in.

The British deep state (everyone has one now, like the latest phone) has another method of defusing problems like this. As Oakeshott points out, the Covid Enquiry penciled in by the government is estimated to take ten years. The Swedes, who had no lockdown and impressively low infection and death rates, have already completed their report. As if we were not already bathing in hypocrisy, Jeremy Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been praising Sweden where he criticized them at the time.

This whole affair shows what seems an undeniable fact: There is a cold war between the ordinary people of the West and their own governments. Small battles are being waged, but expect the roar of ideological gunfire to get louder. One of those skirmishes is being fought by the Fourth Estate, and we must hope the victorious side has this sewn onto its battle-flag: Journalistic ethics should not be tailored to protect ruling interests, but should instead be devoted to the idea of the public interest. If not, there will be more collateral damage.

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