RE: LFTs at centre of Boris/Cummings war!24 Apr 2021 12:29
When the pandemic struck, the cheques written were huge – which is in part why Britain ended up with one of the world’s largest bills for Covid-19.
Take lateral flow testing, the so-called “moonshot” programme for constant rapid Covid tests. This was intended as a backup plan, if vaccines failed. But when the vaccine project worked, the lateral flow project has kept going nonetheless. Some ministers fear it is now “too big to stop” – a new category of spending inherited from the Cummings era.
This is why Cummings is almost certainly telling the truth when he says that he did not leak any text messages between the Prime Minister and James Dyson. He didn’t have to: copies of those messages were widespread, quoted in documents sent about tax breaks for those making ventilators. There are several officials in the Treasury who’d like these emails leaked, because of what the whole incident says about the ways Johnson and Cummings were making spending decisions at the time. Some £570 million was spent on ventilators that, in the end, were not needed because the worst predictions did not come true.
Mistakes can be made in a crisis. But the problem is that Johnson’s government has not escaped this panic cycle now. We still see hugely expensive decisions taken on the back of Sage advice that is not properly scrutinised, with a bias towards worst-case scenarios. Leaking emails showing discussion about ventilators (or bailout of the doomed Greensill Capital) could be a method of warning ministers against this. And perhaps persuade them not to repeat the same mistakes now with digital Covid ID cards, lateral flow tests or other expensive provisions that – on current Covid trends – simply are not needed.
There are those inside government who want lateral flow testing phased out, seeing it as a leftover from the Cummings era that isn’t needed now that almost everyone at risk of dying from Covid has been vaccinated. But to drop it would mean acknowledging an error. How to do that? Typically, you blame the old regime. So a kind of semi-official war against Cummings – portraying him as an exiled mad monk, out to destroy the Brexit government he helped create – was one way to do it.
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