“They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.”
I’d give this article an A+ for the ending alone.
And a special commendation for the remainder. Excellent stuff, thank you Mr Lloyd.
And I’d always assumed Tony Hancock was the only comedian of that name: turns out I was mistaken. Has Matthew tried standup yet, do we know? At least he’d be harmless doing that gig.
Entertaining article in a Guardian, snarky anti-government way, but for this comment alone, you can talk a long walk off a short pier, Will.
“There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.”
I don’t know a single elderly person who demanded this, and trust me I am well into that age range. And you don’t have to be terribly old to remember Marr and Alan Johnson laughing and joking during the customary Labour knee-trembler on the BBC couch, during one the worst flu epidemics in living memory.
What I do know is a large number of journalists, many driven insane by their dislike of Johnson (understandable, but not part of their job description) demanding more lockdown and restrictions generally. All on the basis of Chinese propaganda (China, for crying out loud) and a data monkey with a track record of total failure turning information into society destroying nonsense via a spreadsheet.
Where are YOUR apologies? How are YOU going to make it up to the young?
No idea where you live but my experience is completely different.
Great majority of people, including old happily complied with lockdown.
How would you otherwise explain empty trains and underground in London till at least end of May 2020?
And it was not because of Police stopping people (at least not in West London).
Hi Andrew – sorry if not clear from my rant. I absolutely share your experiences re compliance. Noted re West London 🙂
I’m talking more about the initial demand for extreme measures that would inevitably disrupt learning for the young, exacerbate mental issues, delay non-Covid treatments and (at least in the case of my son) caused several months unemployment. No benefits other than what I could provide, but hey I needed “to make it up to him”.
A broader explanation of my feelings: The UK does not exactly lead the field in terms of national health, not to mention demographic issues into which I will not go – we are where we are (or were). Suffice to say, we were never going to have a “good” pandemic whether we’d locked down, sooner, harder or whatever.
The generation that Will is getting at are likely to have had parents who experienced war and actual austerity in the years after. Most of them respect what others went through before and consider themselves very fortunate to have lived through a period of relative peace and prosperity.
The last thing “the old” would have wanted was the sort of blanket restrictions that deprived “the young” of the sorts of prospects and lives that they were fortunate to enjoy. Now I have heard the likes of Lineker/Vine spout nonsense which to my mind amounts to a call for inter-generational discontent (I could use stronger language). It’s rubbish, unhelpful and needs calling out. Will’s not quite gone there but it’s close enough for me to want to put the alternative view.
I’m being hard on the journalists but along with Mayors/”First Ministers” they have a lot to answer for in their herd response and I will never forget it or let them off the hook.
Today we have people both young and old who still feel incredibly uneasy about going out – even double jabbed and boosted. So I still wear a face covering if the situation requires it. Personally, I think it’s largely theatre but it takes me no time to do it and if it helps one person recover confidence in adapting back to normal life then I have no problem with it. It’s a matter of personal choice for me and I don’t expect others to follow.
Thanks for reading the post and taking the trouble to respond.
To plagiarise Kipling:-
“I could not dig, I dared not rob:
therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my tales have proved untrue
and I may face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
mine angry and defrauded young?”
FWIW, I took this statement to mean something like “the lockdown fanatics used the elderly as rationale to nut-punch the young without having to actually walk us through how that would work out in the long run.” Maybe I’m wrong though.
Don’t expect the media to critique the media (who undoubtedly whipped up the needless lockdown frenzy with their scare-mongering, context devoid “reporting”. Anyone under 40 should truly despise and hate the UK media for the financial debt they have incurred on their behalf.
Michael Hollick
2 years ago
Hancock was the speaker at my other half’s college reunion six years ago. I thought he was something of a joke. A man without qualities. Nothing I’ve seen since has changed my opinion, except that having such a vile, hollow individual in a position of power is anything but funny.
All he has ever had to offer the country is his ambition. It would be comforting to think that he will spend the rest of his life reflecting on his abject failure and the misery he has caused to millions. Failing that, I’d settle for life imprisonment.
I was unable to visit my mother in her care home for 10 months. She died, “of covid” (despite having tested negative days before she passed away). I said goodbye on WhatsApp. I wasn’t even permitted to view her body, such was the calamitous over-reaction overseen by Hancock.
Me, and many thousands (millions?) of others, have suffered at the hands of this man. He is worthy only of contempt. And while I appreciate the laughs this article has given me, it offers little compensation. He is contemptible.
True. It’s invariably the man or woman at the top who calls the shots. Your anger towards the Minister or the police or the military etc is mis-directed. It’s Johnson, and Trudeau in my depraved Canadian setting, to be blamed. Their Ministers are merely shields.
William Murphy
2 years ago
Surely what two years of COVID taught us that we never again let people like Hancock or Johnson anywhere near any public office. It is a measure of the disfunction in the current political system that we have elections such as Johnson versus Corbyn, with both radically unfit for the job.
Great article, though it left out my favourite deranged Hancock episode. At one point (around May 2020) he was plainly unhappy with the degree to which the public was obeying the ludicrous lockdown. So there he was on TV, threatening to lock us up 24/7 and not even let us out for our graciously permitted one hour of exercise. Even top security prisoners are permitted one hour of exercise.
Someone must have forced Matt to take his tablets, because we heard no more of it. Perhaps the police advised him that they were too busy flying drones spying on people walking their dogs, or arresting people for heinous crimes as walking in the park while drinking a Starbucks mint tea.
In a perfect country, drinking Starbucks tea would indeed be a criminal offense.
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
“A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.”
Indeed, the first thing I heard about this matter from Boris Johnson, i.e. attempting to reach “herd immunity” the natural way, made me very hopeful for Britain. This is how the Swedes did it. It would actually have been relatively easy to handle COVID. This is how:
You have a new respiratory disease going around that is so infectious, it even spreads during a complete lockdown. It spreads via animals and constantly mutates. You can’t wait it out, and you can’t effectively vaccinate against it. Luckily, it mostly kills old and already sick people. The only thing you can do is accept that it will spread, and protect those who are most vulnerable.
How do you protect those groups? By making those who spread it the most (i.e. the young) immune via their airways. You achieve this via infection, and only infection.
So what’s the plan? First, you test anybody who enters a hospital or retirement castle. Second, you provide clean, well-fitted masks for those who require self-protection. Third, you leave the rest of society alone, but provide medical support to those who have severe disease, so they don’t die alone at home before they realize the gravity of their situation.
After about one year, the mobile population will be vastly immune, so that there will the usual spread of respiratory diseases. The spread within hospitals and retirement castles will have been minimized.
What you do not do is:
Lock people at home, force them to wear a mask, and make them get an injection that doesn’t prevent spreading a disease. Because now you have sick, but vaccinated people who have contact with older members of society, so you never realize that they are spreading the disease. Now the mobile part of society has not had their natural “boosters” via a yearly contact with other respiratory diseases, in effect making their immune systems generally outdated, and leading to higher cases of other diseases and the coronavirus. It turns out public policy was exactly the opposite of what would have saved us two years of needless, life-destroying, soul-crushing trouble.
Yes, you are right, but great majority of people believed in covid restrictions.
What is politician going to do in democracy when MSM are calling you murderer of grannies daily?
Lets stop creating myth of plucky Brits fighting dictatorial government over covid restrictions.
Brits were most supportive of covid measures in whole of Europe.
Agreed! It was the most sickening spectacle ever seen, or at least since the death of the Dianna person.
Five hundred years and more of the bulldog spirit, gone for ever and replaced by a supine, whimpering, terrified demos!
How on earth did ‘we’ make such people? And is there any hope for the future?
There was widespread public support but only because a wicked combination of the Chinese Communist Party, evil people with commercial interests, and our deluded / corrupted politicians and “journalists” scared the living daylights out of them.
The politicians, civili servants, and media people who knew that something was up but went along with it and compounded the fear because they lacked lacked the courage and integrity to do anything else will not, if they a modicum of conscience, sleep soundly for the rest of their lives.
As the earlier post suggested, Johnson could have grown a spine. BTW Canadians were just as smug about what a gallant bunch of lockdowners we are, fighting to be first in line for multiple vaccinations, but characteristically polite of course, eh?
andrew harman
2 years ago
Best article I have read on here for some time (I have been a little disillusioned of late to be honest).
I don’t know who is the biggest oddball to have been a minister in recent times, Hancock or Gove.
Men clearly don’t. Women have to because it is our lavatories, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, sports teams and prisons that are being invaded. Clearly you don’t care about women either.
“I can’t articulate exactly why, but some sparkle has gone.”
Unherd came to prominence in 2020 with its reasoned, balanced coverage of lockdowns and of the BLM riots. It was a welcome counterweight to the msm propaganda.
As the initial crisis phase of the pandemic has passed, they are becoming more of a general interest magazine that attempts to include opinions not often heard in the broader media (and that’s fine). In the process, however, they’ve inevitably lost focus. It’s hard to bring that edgy energy to a wide range of issues, some of which are much less important to most people than others.
I also suspect Unherd initially attracted a certain reader demographic, largely center-right and suspicious of government overreach, who now start to feel disconnected from the new Unherd.
If you look on Unherd’s youtube channel, their interviews on covid and lockdowns often get several hundred thousand hits, whereas most other interviews receive an order of magnitude fewer hits. I suspect Unherd faces a significant challenge defining itself as a general interest magazine. That category is already crowded.
I continue subscribing for the time being because Unherd still provides some excellent articles, but there are now a significant percentage of articles I skim and forget. We’ll see how this magazine develops over the coming year. I’m increasingly turning to substack for the type of content that really interests me.
Agree – think I laughed throughout the whole read!
Mark Burbidge
2 years ago
“They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character”
The national character seems to be one of unthinking, non-questioning compliance. So depressing.
JR Stoker
2 years ago
Moderately funny in a snarky sort of way; but woefully inaccurate.
I ceased to take it seriously in any way when I read that Neil Ferguson’s paper was “controversial”. He presumably means “utterly inaccurate and misleading”?
Peta Seel
2 years ago
“the bus drivers, cabbies and chefs contracted the virus, then died.” Later on in the article the author points out that the median age of death from Covid is 83. I had no idea that was the median age of bus drivers, cabbies and chefs. As a devastating deconstruction of Matt Hancock the article is good, if cruel – though Hancock probably deserves it for the cruelty he inflicted on the British people under the cover of Covid, especially the young and the old.
The best decisions are made when there is an open debate with different ideas and solutions put forward and discussed, but that no longer seems to be the way either in parliament or the media. It makes life much easier to follow the crowd and be politically correct..
You may recall that in the early phase of the Scamdemic UnHerd was a superb source of heretical ideas. An absolutely splendid forum, totally at odds with the spurious opinions of the ‘good and the great’.
Would that it were still so, but sadly the dead hand orthodoxy and censorship are now prevailing.
Chris Bradshaw
2 years ago
Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown.
A bit like the French Resistance, by 2026 117% of people will claim to have opposed them.
Was it only 117%? I had heard it was more like 213%.
andrew harman
2 years ago
I dislike Hancock and what he did as much as anyone but quite a few posters on here are missing the point. It is essentially a semi-satirical pierce with a sober sting in the tail.
I think there are also some who react like a whipcord when a piece does not wholly conform to their own opinions.
Tony Lee
2 years ago
An awful lot of effort to be pored into a short story about whom there is no dissent as to his uselessness. I don’t really get the point of articles like this and find the rather smug 20/20 hindsight vision rather vapid and somewhat smug. Yes Hancock’s half hour went on for too long, but it’s not as though he operated alone, is it? And most of the so called experts were even more spectacularly wrong about just about everything, including journalists.
Why not pick on someone your own size, unless that’s what you did……
Mike Fraser
2 years ago
The article is amusing but does illustrate a fundamental truth. The scrutiny of The Media and Social media and their interminable criticisms, not always “fact checked”, makes it highly likely that most of those who put themselves forward for the challenge of this lowly paid and thankless political task, will not be the intelligent, decisive yet flexible, leaders, for which we crave. Hence the general inadequacy of most of our politicians. We do indeed get what we vote for.
Francisco Menezes
2 years ago
What a beautiful picture at the top. Very fitfties Parisian style. Could be a French president leaving the Elysee in a voiture de luxe during spring rainfall. Very poetic. Now to mirror this. Who fell from grace in the Byzantine Empire had his tongue ripped out and his nose cut off. He who has no tongue cannot speak in public. He who has no nose cannot make a public appearance. Just in a sentimental mood, today.
Jesse Porter
2 years ago
Who, actually, chooses leaders? Or do they escape, on demand, from the Loonie bin?
Jim Davis
2 years ago
SARS-CoV-2 was never “a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat. “ It was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan lab rat.
Marianne Vigreux
2 years ago
Thankyou! Brilliant rendering of utter shameless incompetence; I laughed out loud at one point – but really should’ve be crying out in savage indignation: this isnt a soap but reality
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Good article, the only objection being the ridiculous headline, like unfortunately too many on UnHerd. The fate of an over-promoted second rate politician (who is not currently residing in the Gulag) is hardly a ‘tragedy’, even stretching the meaning of the word to its limits!
John Vaccaro
2 years ago
Enjoyable article and that’s to be congratulated as the content is centred around Matt Wancock.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
He won an amateur horse race, first time out, at Newmarket, which is more than 99 pc of the ToylitTory oiks could manage, always turned up at our Hunt meets, and replied to e mails, and was, I recall, a charming and bright neighbour….
Anyone brave enough to get on a horse gets my vote
Christopher Barclay
2 years ago
Tragedy is the story of a great man or woman who is brought down by his or her failings. There was never anything great about Hancock. Or Johnson. Or Cameron. Or Osborne. What is remarkable is that Oxford University is not embarrassed to have these men as former students. I can only presume that is because they are run by the same people who for a decade and more have ignored intelligence reports about Chinese and Russian intentions and taken money from hostile foreign powers.
David Simpson
2 years ago
We are actually in the asylum
Zorro Tomorrow
2 years ago
No supporter of Hancock, you’d think he was the PM from this, but he’s gone, in politics time for quite a while now now, replaced by a worse nonentity inflicted upon us by diversity. One of three up there at the top spoiling our way of life, our finances and our health. There’s another, weeping about polar bears and a trace gas who is clearly out of his depth as well.
Mentally hamstrung teenagers? Who was running Education when the parents were at school? If kids were damaged by a few weeks off school they weren’t going far in life anyway. People used to go to night school; Americans still do if they want to get on.
These so called journalists, wise after the fact, patronise us with their hindsight but never discuss who would have done better, then, now and in future. What next? Extracts from Wikipedia and Google how NLAWS broke the Russian advance. Easy money.
Lennon Ó Náraigh
2 years ago
Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat
There are no cave bats anywhere near Wuhan, as other commenters here have pointed out.
Graeme Laws
2 years ago
Has the author read the Intergeneration Foundation report that he airily presents as gospel? This organisation starts with a point of view and then assembles the data to support it. A quick scan reveals that the report ignores the fact that a very large number of people of all ages pay no income tax at all. It also ignores the fact that young people with jobs and debt normally benefit from inflation, which is the most efficient method of income redistribution yet invented. Worse still, it doesn’t spend much effort pointing out that inflation demolishes savings and occupational pensions.
In short, the article is witty, but lazy.
Steve Elliott
2 years ago
Why is it a tragedy and whose tragedy is it?
Nicholas Taylor
2 years ago
May be worthwhile reading https://theconversation.com/did-the-covid-lockdowns-work-heres-what-we-know-two-years-on-176623 which confirms the (to some) rather obvious point that having lots of people together in close contact results in more infections. As an aside – this does not have to mean lots of people together in one room. They could be shuttling about between different rooms – or hospitals, care homes etc – to the same effect. Even better if those rooms are full of vulnerable people.
Yes and if Gavin Williamson can get a Knighthood then Matt must surely follow.
William Shaw
2 years ago
An article that is cruel in places, nasty in others, with a large dollop of half truths and finger pointing.
How easy it is to sit behind a keyboard and criticise others.
Tom Scott
2 years ago
Not sure why an amount of energy was spent in trying to belittle soneone.
“They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.”
I’d give this article an A+ for the ending alone.
Not to mention, “a nation of poppies wearing poppies”.
And a special commendation for the remainder. Excellent stuff, thank you Mr Lloyd.
And I’d always assumed Tony Hancock was the only comedian of that name: turns out I was mistaken. Has Matthew tried standup yet, do we know? At least he’d be harmless doing that gig.
“Wuhan cave bat”
Entertaining article in a Guardian, snarky anti-government way, but for this comment alone, you can talk a long walk off a short pier, Will.
“There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.”
I don’t know a single elderly person who demanded this, and trust me I am well into that age range. And you don’t have to be terribly old to remember Marr and Alan Johnson laughing and joking during the customary Labour knee-trembler on the BBC couch, during one the worst flu epidemics in living memory.
What I do know is a large number of journalists, many driven insane by their dislike of Johnson (understandable, but not part of their job description) demanding more lockdown and restrictions generally. All on the basis of Chinese propaganda (China, for crying out loud) and a data monkey with a track record of total failure turning information into society destroying nonsense via a spreadsheet.
Where are YOUR apologies? How are YOU going to make it up to the young?
Well said. Incidentally, the majority of people I see still wearing the useless masks are college-age. It’s become their totem.
No idea where you live but my experience is completely different.
Great majority of people, including old happily complied with lockdown.
How would you otherwise explain empty trains and underground in London till at least end of May 2020?
And it was not because of Police stopping people (at least not in West London).
Hi Andrew – sorry if not clear from my rant. I absolutely share your experiences re compliance. Noted re West London 🙂
I’m talking more about the initial demand for extreme measures that would inevitably disrupt learning for the young, exacerbate mental issues, delay non-Covid treatments and (at least in the case of my son) caused several months unemployment. No benefits other than what I could provide, but hey I needed “to make it up to him”.
A broader explanation of my feelings:
The UK does not exactly lead the field in terms of national health, not to mention demographic issues into which I will not go – we are where we are (or were). Suffice to say, we were never going to have a “good” pandemic whether we’d locked down, sooner, harder or whatever.
The generation that Will is getting at are likely to have had parents who experienced war and actual austerity in the years after. Most of them respect what others went through before and consider themselves very fortunate to have lived through a period of relative peace and prosperity.
The last thing “the old” would have wanted was the sort of blanket restrictions that deprived “the young” of the sorts of prospects and lives that they were fortunate to enjoy. Now I have heard the likes of Lineker/Vine spout nonsense which to my mind amounts to a call for inter-generational discontent (I could use stronger language). It’s rubbish, unhelpful and needs calling out. Will’s not quite gone there but it’s close enough for me to want to put the alternative view.
I’m being hard on the journalists but along with Mayors/”First Ministers” they have a lot to answer for in their herd response and I will never forget it or let them off the hook.
Today we have people both young and old who still feel incredibly uneasy about going out – even double jabbed and boosted. So I still wear a face covering if the situation requires it. Personally, I think it’s largely theatre but it takes me no time to do it and if it helps one person recover confidence in adapting back to normal life then I have no problem with it. It’s a matter of personal choice for me and I don’t expect others to follow.
Thanks for reading the post and taking the trouble to respond.
West London was empty and soulless before lockdowns 😉 😛
To plagiarise Kipling:-
“I could not dig, I dared not rob:
therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my tales have proved untrue
and I may face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
mine angry and defrauded young?”
FWIW, I took this statement to mean something like “the lockdown fanatics used the elderly as rationale to nut-punch the young without having to actually walk us through how that would work out in the long run.” Maybe I’m wrong though.
Don’t expect the media to critique the media (who undoubtedly whipped up the needless lockdown frenzy with their scare-mongering, context devoid “reporting”. Anyone under 40 should truly despise and hate the UK media for the financial debt they have incurred on their behalf.
Hancock was the speaker at my other half’s college reunion six years ago. I thought he was something of a joke. A man without qualities. Nothing I’ve seen since has changed my opinion, except that having such a vile, hollow individual in a position of power is anything but funny.
All he has ever had to offer the country is his ambition. It would be comforting to think that he will spend the rest of his life reflecting on his abject failure and the misery he has caused to millions. Failing that, I’d settle for life imprisonment.
I was unable to visit my mother in her care home for 10 months. She died, “of covid” (despite having tested negative days before she passed away). I said goodbye on WhatsApp. I wasn’t even permitted to view her body, such was the calamitous over-reaction overseen by Hancock.
Me, and many thousands (millions?) of others, have suffered at the hands of this man. He is worthy only of contempt. And while I appreciate the laughs this article has given me, it offers little compensation. He is contemptible.
Oh dear Michael. If only life imprisonment was severe enough. Not even with hard labour, breaking rocks into ever smaller pieces.
Your understandable anger is misdirected.
Responsibility lies unequivocally with the PM , not with his buttock squeezing Proconsul.
True. It’s invariably the man or woman at the top who calls the shots. Your anger towards the Minister or the police or the military etc is mis-directed. It’s Johnson, and Trudeau in my depraved Canadian setting, to be blamed. Their Ministers are merely shields.
Surely what two years of COVID taught us that we never again let people like Hancock or Johnson anywhere near any public office. It is a measure of the disfunction in the current political system that we have elections such as Johnson versus Corbyn, with both radically unfit for the job.
Great article, though it left out my favourite deranged Hancock episode. At one point (around May 2020) he was plainly unhappy with the degree to which the public was obeying the ludicrous lockdown. So there he was on TV, threatening to lock us up 24/7 and not even let us out for our graciously permitted one hour of exercise. Even top security prisoners are permitted one hour of exercise.
Someone must have forced Matt to take his tablets, because we heard no more of it. Perhaps the police advised him that they were too busy flying drones spying on people walking their dogs, or arresting people for heinous crimes as walking in the park while drinking a Starbucks mint tea.
In a perfect country, drinking Starbucks tea would indeed be a criminal offense.
“A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.”
Pretty much bang on the money.
If only…
Yes, if only Boris had possessed a spine.
Indeed, the first thing I heard about this matter from Boris Johnson, i.e. attempting to reach “herd immunity” the natural way, made me very hopeful for Britain. This is how the Swedes did it.
It would actually have been relatively easy to handle COVID. This is how:
You have a new respiratory disease going around that is so infectious, it even spreads during a complete lockdown. It spreads via animals and constantly mutates. You can’t wait it out, and you can’t effectively vaccinate against it. Luckily, it mostly kills old and already sick people. The only thing you can do is accept that it will spread, and protect those who are most vulnerable.
How do you protect those groups? By making those who spread it the most (i.e. the young) immune via their airways. You achieve this via infection, and only infection.
So what’s the plan?
First, you test anybody who enters a hospital or retirement castle.
Second, you provide clean, well-fitted masks for those who require self-protection.
Third, you leave the rest of society alone, but provide medical support to those who have severe disease, so they don’t die alone at home before they realize the gravity of their situation.
After about one year, the mobile population will be vastly immune, so that there will the usual spread of respiratory diseases. The spread within hospitals and retirement castles will have been minimized.
What you do not do is:
Lock people at home, force them to wear a mask, and make them get an injection that doesn’t prevent spreading a disease. Because now you have sick, but vaccinated people who have contact with older members of society, so you never realize that they are spreading the disease. Now the mobile part of society has not had their natural “boosters” via a yearly contact with other respiratory diseases, in effect making their immune systems generally outdated, and leading to higher cases of other diseases and the coronavirus.
It turns out public policy was exactly the opposite of what would have saved us two years of needless, life-destroying, soul-crushing trouble.
Yes, you are right, but great majority of people believed in covid restrictions.
What is politician going to do in democracy when MSM are calling you murderer of grannies daily?
Lets stop creating myth of plucky Brits fighting dictatorial government over covid restrictions.
Brits were most supportive of covid measures in whole of Europe.
Agreed! It was the most sickening spectacle ever seen, or at least since the death of the Dianna person.
Five hundred years and more of the bulldog spirit, gone for ever and replaced by a supine, whimpering, terrified demos!
How on earth did ‘we’ make such people? And is there any hope for the future?
There was widespread public support but only because a wicked combination of the Chinese Communist Party, evil people with commercial interests, and our deluded / corrupted politicians and “journalists” scared the living daylights out of them.
The politicians, civili servants, and media people who knew that something was up but went along with it and compounded the fear because they lacked lacked the courage and integrity to do anything else will not, if they a modicum of conscience, sleep soundly for the rest of their lives.
As the earlier post suggested, Johnson could have grown a spine. BTW Canadians were just as smug about what a gallant bunch of lockdowners we are, fighting to be first in line for multiple vaccinations, but characteristically polite of course, eh?
Best article I have read on here for some time (I have been a little disillusioned of late to be honest).
I don’t know who is the biggest oddball to have been a minister in recent times, Hancock or Gove.
I agree with your disillusioned comment. I can’t articulate exactly why, but some sparkle has gone.
There seems to be a lot of articles about trans and identity issues recently
That no normal person cares a jot about
Men clearly don’t. Women have to because it is our lavatories, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, sports teams and prisons that are being invaded. Clearly you don’t care about women either.
We all care about that bit. It is the theatrical posturing of a microscopically minor group that is getting tiresome.
Caterham or Pirbright?
“I can’t articulate exactly why, but some sparkle has gone.”
Unherd came to prominence in 2020 with its reasoned, balanced coverage of lockdowns and of the BLM riots. It was a welcome counterweight to the msm propaganda.
As the initial crisis phase of the pandemic has passed, they are becoming more of a general interest magazine that attempts to include opinions not often heard in the broader media (and that’s fine). In the process, however, they’ve inevitably lost focus. It’s hard to bring that edgy energy to a wide range of issues, some of which are much less important to most people than others.
I also suspect Unherd initially attracted a certain reader demographic, largely center-right and suspicious of government overreach, who now start to feel disconnected from the new Unherd.
If you look on Unherd’s youtube channel, their interviews on covid and lockdowns often get several hundred thousand hits, whereas most other interviews receive an order of magnitude fewer hits. I suspect Unherd faces a significant challenge defining itself as a general interest magazine. That category is already crowded.
I continue subscribing for the time being because Unherd still provides some excellent articles, but there are now a significant percentage of articles I skim and forget. We’ll see how this magazine develops over the coming year. I’m increasingly turning to substack for the type of content that really interests me.
I think it’s partly because some of our more colourful commenters have either stopped commenting or been banned
(probably the latter.)
There’s usually at least as much knowledge, and often more fun, in the comments as there is in the articles.
You are correct, the ‘new’policy is that all controversy is to be banned. The terror of litigation knows no bounds.
I miss them
What about the man from another era… the one in the suit with lots of children in suits. Rees-Mogg?
To use the vernacular, a “nutter”.
This piece made me laugh out loud at least three times due to the writer’s wit – a rare feat for an article on this subject.
Agree – think I laughed throughout the whole read!
“They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character”
The national character seems to be one of unthinking, non-questioning compliance. So depressing.
Moderately funny in a snarky sort of way; but woefully inaccurate.
I ceased to take it seriously in any way when I read that Neil Ferguson’s paper was “controversial”. He presumably means “utterly inaccurate and misleading”?
“the bus drivers, cabbies and chefs contracted the virus, then died.”
Later on in the article the author points out that the median age of death from Covid is 83. I had no idea that was the median age of bus drivers, cabbies and chefs.
As a devastating deconstruction of Matt Hancock the article is good, if cruel – though Hancock probably deserves it for the cruelty he inflicted on the British people under the cover of Covid, especially the young and the old.
Lord Jonathan Sumption mentioned medium age death figure within six months of the start of the Scamdemic.
He was instantly vilified.
The best decisions are made when there is an open debate with different ideas and solutions put forward and discussed, but that no longer seems to be the way either in parliament or the media. It makes life much easier to follow the crowd and be politically correct..
You may recall that in the early phase of the Scamdemic UnHerd was a superb source of heretical ideas. An absolutely splendid forum, totally at odds with the spurious opinions of the ‘good and the great’.
Would that it were still so, but sadly the dead hand orthodoxy and censorship are now prevailing.
A bit like the French Resistance, by 2026 117% of people will claim to have opposed them.
Was it only 117%? I had heard it was more like 213%.
I dislike Hancock and what he did as much as anyone but quite a few posters on here are missing the point. It is essentially a semi-satirical pierce with a sober sting in the tail.
I think there are also some who react like a whipcord when a piece does not wholly conform to their own opinions.
An awful lot of effort to be pored into a short story about whom there is no dissent as to his uselessness. I don’t really get the point of articles like this and find the rather smug 20/20 hindsight vision rather vapid and somewhat smug. Yes Hancock’s half hour went on for too long, but it’s not as though he operated alone, is it? And most of the so called experts were even more spectacularly wrong about just about everything, including journalists.
Why not pick on someone your own size, unless that’s what you did……
The article is amusing but does illustrate a fundamental truth. The scrutiny of The Media and Social media and their interminable criticisms, not always “fact checked”, makes it highly likely that most of those who put themselves forward for the challenge of this lowly paid and thankless political task, will not be the intelligent, decisive yet flexible, leaders, for which we crave. Hence the general inadequacy of most of our politicians. We do indeed get what we vote for.
What a beautiful picture at the top. Very fitfties Parisian style. Could be a French president leaving the Elysee in a voiture de luxe during spring rainfall. Very poetic. Now to mirror this. Who fell from grace in the Byzantine Empire had his tongue ripped out and his nose cut off. He who has no tongue cannot speak in public. He who has no nose cannot make a public appearance. Just in a sentimental mood, today.
Who, actually, chooses leaders? Or do they escape, on demand, from the Loonie bin?
SARS-CoV-2 was never “a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat. “ It was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan lab rat.
Thankyou! Brilliant rendering of utter shameless incompetence; I laughed out loud at one point – but really should’ve be crying out in savage indignation: this isnt a soap but reality
Good article, the only objection being the ridiculous headline, like unfortunately too many on UnHerd. The fate of an over-promoted second rate politician (who is not currently residing in the Gulag) is hardly a ‘tragedy’, even stretching the meaning of the word to its limits!
Enjoyable article and that’s to be congratulated as the content is centred around Matt Wancock.
He won an amateur horse race, first time out, at Newmarket, which is more than 99 pc of the ToylitTory oiks could manage, always turned up at our Hunt meets, and replied to e mails, and was, I recall, a charming and bright neighbour….
Unfortunately he was a very necessary sacrifice to sate the anger of the prurient British mob, some of whom infest this very site.
Anyone brave enough to get on a horse gets my vote
Tragedy is the story of a great man or woman who is brought down by his or her failings. There was never anything great about Hancock. Or Johnson. Or Cameron. Or Osborne. What is remarkable is that Oxford University is not embarrassed to have these men as former students. I can only presume that is because they are run by the same people who for a decade and more have ignored intelligence reports about Chinese and Russian intentions and taken money from hostile foreign powers.
We are actually in the asylum
No supporter of Hancock, you’d think he was the PM from this, but he’s gone, in politics time for quite a while now now, replaced by a worse nonentity inflicted upon us by diversity. One of three up there at the top spoiling our way of life, our finances and our health. There’s another, weeping about polar bears and a trace gas who is clearly out of his depth as well.
Mentally hamstrung teenagers? Who was running Education when the parents were at school? If kids were damaged by a few weeks off school they weren’t going far in life anyway. People used to go to night school; Americans still do if they want to get on.
These so called journalists, wise after the fact, patronise us with their hindsight but never discuss who would have done better, then, now and in future. What next? Extracts from Wikipedia and Google how NLAWS broke the Russian advance. Easy money.
There are no cave bats anywhere near Wuhan, as other commenters here have pointed out.
Has the author read the Intergeneration Foundation report that he airily presents as gospel? This organisation starts with a point of view and then assembles the data to support it. A quick scan reveals that the report ignores the fact that a very large number of people of all ages pay no income tax at all. It also ignores the fact that young people with jobs and debt normally benefit from inflation, which is the most efficient method of income redistribution yet invented. Worse still, it doesn’t spend much effort pointing out that inflation demolishes savings and occupational pensions.
In short, the article is witty, but lazy.
Why is it a tragedy and whose tragedy is it?
May be worthwhile reading https://theconversation.com/did-the-covid-lockdowns-work-heres-what-we-know-two-years-on-176623 which confirms the (to some) rather obvious point that having lots of people together in close contact results in more infections. As an aside – this does not have to mean lots of people together in one room. They could be shuttling about between different rooms – or hospitals, care homes etc – to the same effect. Even better if those rooms are full of vulnerable people.
This article is a pointless as Hancock.
Yes and if Gavin Williamson can get a Knighthood then Matt must surely follow.
An article that is cruel in places, nasty in others, with a large dollop of half truths and finger pointing.
How easy it is to sit behind a keyboard and criticise others.
Not sure why an amount of energy was spent in trying to belittle soneone.
Because it boosts their self-esteem.