This time last year, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty were completely unknown to almost everyone. Possibly even to some members of their own families. In their early outings at Downing Street press conferences, both the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer appeared somewhat hesitant when taking centre stage, only too happy to defer to the prime minister. So much so that Boris Johnson ended up ignoring their advice, leading to a second and third lockdown. Now they are both box office stars. In the face-off between the scientists and the politicians, the geeks have come out on top.
They have been proved right and it is their version of the pandemic in which the public – and, as importantly, most sensible MPs – believe. So Greg Clark was both flustered and excited to have coronavirus royalty give evidence before the science and technology committee of which he is chair. “Thank you both for coming,” he said, trying to channel his inner Oprah. “Thank you for having us.” “No, thank you.” Clark kicked off by enquiring if the government’s roadmap out of lockdown was consistent with Sage advice. Vallance sighed. It was going to be a long morning. Sage’s job, he pointed out, was merely to establish the principles on which the decisions should be taken. It was the government’s job to decide on the actual measures themselves. But yes, broadly speaking the government had bothered to take them seriously this time round. Labour’s Graham Stringer thought he had detected a flaw in their thinking. Was “data not dates” just an empty slogan? Vallance sighed again. Er, no. The dates were merely the minimum period required in which to assess the full impact of the previous easing of restrictions. The first reliable moment to make sure the virus was under as much control as had been hoped. So data not dates was just an empty slogan, Stringer muttered under his breath, rather missing the point. As did Clark, who wanted to know why, if the data was better than expected, we couldn’t unlock down quicker. Now it was Whitty’s turn to spell out the realities of the situation. The faster we went, the more variables were added to the equation. And we would still need five-week gaps to measure the impact of the changes anyway. Besides which, it was easy to forget just how quickly the situation could get out of control. There wasn’t a country he could think of that wished it had unlocked at a faster pace. After all, it wasn’t as if waiting till June was that big an imposition when you considered the amount of people who had already died and what else could go wrong in the meantime. This pretty much set the tone for the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour session. Committee members would talk of ways to speed up the process while Vallance and Whitty urged a more cautious approach. While there might not be any scientific basis in the government construct of the “rule of six” – it could just as well have been the rule of five or rule of seven – they could be categorically sure that zero incidence of the coronavirus was an impossibility. So everything was about managing risk. No one could rule out a third surge later in the year, and were that to happen, what would be reversible was the government’s insistence that its roadmap was irreversible. On that cheery note, the two megastars took their leave. It had been job done again for now. Everyone – Boris included – had been reminded of the consequences of ignoring the science yet again. It’s been a rather less successful couple of days for the understudies. On Monday, Helen Whately had been forced into stepping in for Matt Hancock to answer an unwanted urgent question on NHS pay; on Tuesday it was the junior health minister Edward Argar’s turn to take the hit for Michael Gove as he faced an awkward question on the government’s failure to publish all its test-and-trace contracts. Whately had reacted to her punishment by getting ever more tight-lipped and defensive in her responses. Argar tried the rather different approach of treating the whole occasion as a bit of a joke. There had been no harm done. The government had merely tried to rustle up as much PPE as quickly as possible so it was the obvious thing to do to approach mates and party donors first as the department had their telephone numbers on speed dial. It was just bad luck that some of the PPE had turned out to be defective. Labour’s Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, was unimpressed. The court had found that there were more than 100 undeclared contracts outstanding three days after the prime minister had told the Commons that all contracts had now been declared. Argar broke into a wide grin. Oh those contracts! Those contracts didn’t count because the original court decision that had found the government had acted unlawfully hadn’t known about the other 100 contracts, so Johnson hadn’t misled parliament because he had only been referring to the ones the court had known about. Or something like that. He ended by promising the government would try to do better in future. There again, it could hardly do much worse.