London: Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, a finalist in the race to succeed Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and British prime minister, on Thursday spoke out candidly against the fear narrative and partial analyses behind the country's COVID lockdowns.
The 42-year-old former minister who was in charge at No. 11 Downing Street at the time revealed the behind-the-scenes goings on in the corridors of power for the first time in an interview with The Spectator'. While he does not argue that lockdown was a mistake, Sunak does reveal his many misgivings, a lack of proper factoring in of the trade-offs involved in completely locking down society and suppression of dissenting views within government.
In every brief, we tried to say: let's stop the fear' narrative. It was always wrong from the beginning. I constantly said it was wrong, he told the news magazine's editor.
Sunak was also critical of the public health posters plastered around the country at the time showing COVID patients on ventilators because it was wrong to scare people like that.
The British Indian Tory MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, who is going head to head with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in the party's leadership contest, reiterated that his intention to speak out now was not point a finger of blame and name anyone specific but to highlight the importance of learning lessons from the decisions that were made over the course of 2020 and 2021.
As the finance minister between February 2020 and July 2022, Sunak was the man in charge of the economic response and claims that ministers were not given enough information to scrutinise analysis produced by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) a group of independent experts advising the government on COVID related measures.