Eugyppius argues that the many thousands of Matt Hancock’s finger-flicking conversational exchanges leaked to the Telegraph do not provide evidence of a conspiracy.
His argument has much that is sound in it and I admire its tone. But in the great argumentative battle between cock-up and conspiracy as explanations of pandemic protocols, he comes down on the side of cock-up. The protocols were “driven by autonomous political and institutional forces rather than nebulous globalist conspirators”. In short, he claims:
Advisers and bureaucrats originally pushed for lockdown.
Once lockdown protocols were initiated, the Government and the media terrorised citizens to ensure they would comply.
Politicians used public panic as an opportunity for politicking.
Everything was really about politics, not science.
There was a feedback loop, whereby restrictions were introduced, strictly enforced, generating a fear in citizens which justified further restrictions and enforcement.
The politicians knew that there was no medical justification for the protocols, but allowed political imperatives to keep them in place.
After these arguments he concludes that the people responsible are not only “callous and evil” but also “really dumb”. Then he sets aside the first claim (“callous and evil”) to emphasise the second (“really dumb”). He says, and I paraphrase, that nothing meant anything, that no one had any idea of what they were doing, that all the policies were illogical, and that the politicians themselves were shallow abusive narcissists.
This is a fine, robust, amusing and invigorating argument. But it has two related flaws running through it.
The first flaw is that by emphasising “really dumb” over “callous and evil” he loses the necessary clarity of insisting that the policies were foolish and evil.
Folly and evil are different. Folly is a consequence of ignorance, and is forgivable, or exculpable. Evil is harder to forgive. (Jesus made it evident that forgiveness was only owed to those who were penitent and admitted their sin. The unrepentant should not be forgiven.) I think saying ‘it was only folly’ is to let the politicians off the hook. It is as if we are saying to ourselves that Hancock was a sort of 1960s seaside postcard character, of ‘How’s Your Father’ vintage, who was a bit of a lad, nice but dim, got everything wrong, but had a good heart. He sought more than his 15 minutes of fame, and quite remarkably ended up with more than half an hour.