The right wing press has finally got what it always said it wanted from the Covid inquiry: a clear, forensic verdict on what happened. And having demanded it, they are now frantically misreporting it.
The report itself is not complicated. Hallett says the governments of the UK were late, complacent and chaotic. Too little, too late. An earlier lockdown could have saved tens of thousands of lives in England in the first wave alone. February 2020 was a lost month while Johnson’s No 10 stewed in its own toxic juices. Decision-making was shambolic, women’s voices were sidelined, and all four governments failed to grasp the scale of the threat until it was too late. There are a pile of recommendations about how to avoid repeating the fiasco. That is the spine of the thing.
Now watch what the Mail, Telegraph and Express do with it.
The Daily Mail screams “betrayal of our children” and turns one section on school closures into the whole story. You would never guess from that splash that the report explicitly says lockdowns were necessary, and that the problem was delay, denial and incompetence. In Mail-land, the inquiry has magically become an indictment of the very idea of lockdown, perfectly aligned with the columnists who spent four years insisting that asking people not to breathe on each other was Marxism in a mask. The fact that a timely lockdown could have meant a shorter one, or even avoided a full national shutdown, is quietly parked out of sight, because it ruins the libertarian morality tale.
The Telegraph, naturally, goes for cost. The front page frets about the inquiry “nearing £200m” and “facing a backlash”. After over 200,000 deaths and a documented chunk of those that need not have happened, the real outrage, apparently, is spending money finding out why. The comment pages moan that the report tells us “nothing new” and peddle the idea that lockdowns themselves could have been avoided, as if Hallett has finally vindicated the pub bore who spent 2020 tweeting about Sweden in between photos of his banana bread.
But again, this is simply the inverse of what the report actually says. It does not argue “if only we had never locked down”; it says “if we had acted when the warning lights were flashing, we could have locked down earlier, shorter, or possibly not at all, and saved tens of thousands of lives.” That is an indictment of sloth and magical thinking in No 10, not a love letter to the “let it rip” brigade.
Then there is the Daily Express, which has gone full pantomime villain: “Covid ruined Britain and shattered trust forever – one man is to blame.” There is a certain grim comedy in a paper that spent years cheerleading Johnson and Brexit now discovering, with horror, that the man they sold as a Churchill tribute act was actually in charge when all this happened. So the systemwide failure the report describes is repackaged as a simple whodunnit: one bad apple, guv. Pay no attention to the party that put him there, the ideology that sneered at expertise, or the media that treated public health as a culture-war game.
And lurking behind all this is a piece of recent history they would rather you forgot. When Covid was already ripping through the population, the great national dilemma, as framed by this lot, was not “how do we stop people dying”, but “will the Cheltenham Festival go ahead”. The Telegraph ran soothing pieces about the races “escaping suspension” and praised “defiant racegoers” putting a brave face on things. The Times tutted politely at the “panic” and leaned towards letting the show go on. The Sun trumpeted that the Gold Cup “WILL go ahead” despite “coronavirus fears”, with a bit of hand-sanitiser boilerplate at the bottom to keep the lawyers happy. Not one of them led a crusade to shut it down. Quite the opposite: they wrapped the whole thing in the language of Blitz spirit and national character, as if standing in a packed crowd shouting at horses were a public duty.
What unites all of them now is the desperate need to avoid the obvious conclusion. The people who ran Britain in 2020 – and the ecosystem that flattered them, excused them and put them there in the first place – failed catastrophically in a real crisis. They were too late to lock down, too chaotic to plan, too arrogant to listen, and too wrapped up in their own games to grasp that exponential growth does not care about focus group lines or racecourse hospitality.
You can see why that makes some editors uncomfortable. If the story is “we were governed by unserious people, in no small part because unserious newspapers helped make them”, then a few awkward questions start to follow. About years spent turning scientists into punchbags. About endless indulgence of “lockdown sceptics” whose numbers never added up. About the gleeful promotion of culture-war chancers whose only consistent principle was that any collective restraint is tyranny. About the fact that, when the virus was already seeded, their big contribution to national debate was to cheer on the crowds at Cheltenham and then pretend later that they had always been on the side of caution.
So the report must be reframed. It is not about tens of thousands of avoidable deaths; it is about “betrayal of our children”. Not about a state that reacted too slowly; about an inquiry that “costs too much”. Not about national institutions that rotted under the weight of party games; about one conveniently disposable former prime minister. The man who used to be paid hundreds of thousands a year by the Telegraph to knock out a weekly column, and is now on another fat contract with the Mail. No one outside his accountant knows the exact current figure, but it is not exactly minimum wage.
If you are generous, you could call this spin. In practice it is a second dereliction of duty. The first was in 2020, when much of the right wing press behaved like a fan club rather than a check on power while a lethal virus tore through the country and the bookmakers stayed open. The second is now, faced with a sober account of what went wrong, choosing again to protect the story rather than the public.
Hallett has done something newspapers used to believe in: she has looked at the evidence and written down what it shows, even though it is politically awkward. “Too little, too late” is not just a verdict on Johnson’s government. It is starting to look uncomfortably like a verdict on sections of our press.
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