Rishi Sunak’s claim about Covid lockdowns makes him look weak

The former chancellor’s leadership campaign has exposed his inexperience, writes John Rentoul

Sunak could have deflected questions about the early lockdowns and talked only about his heroic role in the Christmas rebellion of 2021 (POOL/AFP/Getty)

Why did Rishi Sunak proclaim himself an ineffectual opponent of lockdowns in his interview with Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator? It makes him look weak to say: “Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time.”

He was a member of the quad of senior ministers who made the most important decisions about the coronavirus response, along with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, Michael Gove, the cabinet office minister, and Boris Johnson, the prime minister. If he couldn’t persuade them that the policy was wrong – and Johnson shared Sunak’s instinctive scepticism about restrictions – then the best thing he could do about it now would be to shut up.

Instead, Sunak complained to Nelson that he couldn’t get the information he needed: “I was like: ‘Summarise for me the key assumptions, on one page, with a bunch of sensitivities and rationale for each one.’ In the first year I could never get this.” Presumably, the situation was more complicated than this, and it proved hard to agree on the “key assumptions”. Those arguments were much debated at the time, and it is no use Sunak whining now that he couldn’t get the information he wanted for a whole year.

For him, it is worse than useless: it makes him look weak. I don’t think he is. I think he and Johnson strongly argued their corner. He and the prime minister both challenged the figures produced by the scientific advisers. There were stories at the time of Sunak discomfiting Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance by knowing an appendix to one of their reports better than they did. Dominic Cummings’s revenge-driven exposure of Johnson’s WhatsApp messages revealed a restless and focused prime minister demanding to see the raw figures rather than the summaries.

In the end, though, Sunak and Johnson had to bow to a better case made by the advocates of restrictions in the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic. After that phase, Sunak rightly portrays himself as pushing the prime minister to foment the cabinet rebellion against the scientific advisers at Christmas last year: “I remember telling him: have the cabinet meeting. You’ll see. Everyone will be completely behind you… You don’t have to worry. I will be standing next to you, as will every other member of the cabinet, bar probably Michael [Gove] and Saj [Javid].”

So why has Sunak portrayed himself as an ineffective opponent of the early lockdowns? An aide of his told Politico that the revelations were not a long-planned intervention; the Spectator was just on the list of interviews to which the candidate had agreed and Nelson, a lockdown-sceptic, asked those questions.

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To which the response should have been: “But you didn’t have to answer them, you doofus!” Sunak could have deflected questions about the early lockdowns and talked only about his heroic role in the Christmas rebellion of 2021. He could have said that he thought the “fear” narrative went too far, and that, in hindsight, “it was wrong to scare people like that”. But he certainly shouldn’t have said the problem is that “if you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed”. There was no way that politicians could have ignored the scientific advisers, or hidden them away: Whitty and Vallance were critical in maintaining public confidence in the government.

Sunak’s interview with Nelson reveals his inexperience. He did shockingly well as chancellor, faced with a national emergency within two weeks of taking office, but he has been an MP for only seven years and his only experience of tough electoral politics was when he was chosen to speak for Johnson in the TV debates during the 2019 election.

Thus the leadership election ends in a multiple paradox. The long campaign has exposed Sunak’s weaknesses, just as it was intended to do, and as it failed to do in Theresa May’s case, with disastrous consequences for her and the Tory party in the 2017 general election.

Yet I still hold to my view that party leaders should be elected – quickly – by MPs alone. If that had happened, Sunak would be prime minister already, and many of his weaknesses would have remained hidden for the time being. Even so, I still think that he would be a better prime minister than Liz Truss.