My lengthy look at The Telegraph‘s March 2023 series The Lockdown Files concludes today and tomorrow.

My most recent post examined the decline in the communications of British Government officials and advisers: from professionalism to infighting.

What can we learn from The Lockdown Files? Several things.

Who else would have published the WhatsApps?

Just days after the first instalment of The Lockdown Files, MPs from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation interviewed News UK chief operating officer David Dinsmore, Guardian head of news Nick Hopkins, Daily Mirror editor in chief Alison Phillips and DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright.

Press Gazette has a good recap of the session, available to view on Parliamentlive.tv.

Had The Telegraph not published the WhatsApps and their context, would any other newspaper have stuck its head above the parapet?

It seems unlikely there would have been such an in-depth examination elsewhere (emphases mine below):

Bosses at Sun and Times publisher News UK, Mail publisher DMG Media, the Mirror and The Guardian have indicated they would have published, or seriously considered publishing, Matt Hancock’s Whatsapp messages …

Asked by Labour MP Kevin Brennan whether he would have published Hancock’s messages, News UK [Murdoch’s media empire] chief operating officer David Dinsmore initially said: “You’d need to ask the editors” …

Asked the same question Nick Hopkins, head of news at The Guardian, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation: “I think we would have considered it.

“We’d have looked at the material on its merits. I think we would have probably, if we were going to publish it, done it in a slightly different way.”

Daily Mirror editor Alison Phillips, gave a more decisive answer, saying: “I mean, The Telegraph and Isabel Oakeshott do have an anti-lockdown agenda. We didn’t – we were on the side of caution in terms of lockdowns.

“However, I do think those Whatsapp messages are in the public interest, and we would have used them.”

DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright agreed: “I agree with Alison, I think they were very much in the public interest. We don’t really know the exact nature of this nondisclosure agreement [binding Oakeshott], which you would have wanted to see.

“But I’m afraid it gives a unique insight into the way government works and how the government handled the pandemic.

“I wouldn’t like to be in the position of having turned it away.”

Wright did say however that he had some “qualms” about how the story was handled by The Telegraph.

How Government works

As DMG Media editor emeritus Peter Wright said above, The Lockdown Files showed us how the Government works.

On March 6, The Telegraph‘s Sherelle Jacobs had an excellent article on the subject, ‘Like Watergate, The Lockdown Files show how the state really operates. It’s chilling’:

… perhaps the strongest parallel with Watergate is that our political class has lost its moral credibility. Regardless of one’s take on whether No 10 went too far or not far enough in tackling Covid, surely everyone can agree that the state’s operations seem suffused with humdrum nihilism. It is there in the amused crusades to “scare the pants” off people. It is in the deadpan mocking of holidaymakers locked up in quarantine (“hilarious”). It is in the remorseless dedication to “the narrative”. And it is there in the constant references to public “compliance” as if the public were not self-possessing individuals, or even vulnerable citizens, but rather slaves to a bureaucratic machine.

To be fair, there is a whopping difference between Watergate and The Lockdown Files. The fact is that no crime was committed when the country locked down three times with a reckless disregard for the consequences. Ironically, the only breach of law occurred when members of the ruling class broke their own wretched Covid rules. Nor is there any whiff of a cover-up, save for the row over parties at No 10.

But that difference makes The Lockdown Files all the more disturbing. All excesses of state power that occurred during the pandemic were permitted within the realms of the Western political system; the sovereign may at any time suspend the rule of law for what it deems the greater good. The pandemic merely exposed the workings in extremis of liberal democracy.

The Lockdown Files reveal something even more chilling: namely how the people and the state are in lockstep, as we inch towards a new kind of authoritarianism …

But The Lockdown Files also show how zealously the state threw themselves into implementing draconian measures, once it had decided at HQ that lockdowns were the correct populist call. We have come to learn how Hancock conspired to “sit on” scientists, who he denounced as “wacky” or “loudmouth” for defying the official lines. We must digest the knowledge that civil servants insisted the “fear/guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the dubious third lockdown. Just as unedifying is the revelation that, in the run up to this lockdown, politicians seized on a new variant as a tool to “roll the pitch with”. Perhaps most galling is Patrick Vallance’s advice that the Government should “suck up the media’s miserable interpretation of scientific data” to then “overdeliver” in an atmosphere of cranked up fear.

The question is, how did we get into such a mess? My own view is that the rot at the top is reflective of moral angst below. Modern society is simply unable to grapple with the question of how to balance two things – bare life and quality of life. In that ethical vacuum, politicians can only plot, deflect and wage war for control of “the narrative”.

… the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what we simply refer to as life: zoē (the biological fact of life) and bios (the way life is lived). The loss of the distinction reflects how modern society has come to prioritise survival over a life lived with meaning; and how Western governments, in their pursuit of power, come to “place biological life at the centre of… calculations”.

This is a dilemma society simply refuses to confront. Journalists are more comfortable examining the parts than the whole. Thus they prefer to pick over Isabel Oakeshott’s “betrayal” of Hancock than broach the greatest of philosophical questions. Those pro-lockdowners who are of a more reflective disposition prefer to cogitate on the supposed dark side of freedom than look in the eye humanity’s inhuman face. On the other end of the spectrum are the Covid deniers who would rather pretend the virus never existed than admit that preserving a certain quality of life for children might mean allowing significant numbers of elderly deaths.

Not even the greatest living philosophers can show us the way out of the moral maze – and thus political dilemma of our time. Until we face up to this conundrum, we are stuck, and we are blind. And so when something like The Lockdown Files comes along and power shows us that it is both the jailer and the mirror – we will fail to truly see.

The leaders we possibly deserved

Taking Sherelle Jacobs’s observations a step further, did we get the leaders we deserved because we cannot think critically and cannot distinguish between surviving and living?

Quite possibly.

The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley explains a few practical truths in ‘Matt Hancock was the lockdown champion Britain deserved’:

… how … did this man of marginal ability and dubious character become health secretary? One answer is that when he took the job, in 2018, it wasn’t considered very important. 

The health service was devolved and self-governing; Jeremy Hunt [current Chancellor], Matt’s predecessor, limited his day-to-day responsibilities to wearing an NHS badge. Hancock’s innovation was to take that badge and stick a rainbow flag on it (because when you’re lying on a hospital trolley, bleeding to death, it’s a comfort to know that the A&E you’re not being treated in is inclusive and diverse).

We have to blame Brexit, too. Leavers, like me, were so obsessed with “getting it done” we were willing to park other issues, like health reform, and vote for a team that wasn’t the best. But … Remainers must also take responsibility for opposing Brexit so doggedly that they pushed half the country into the arms of such incompetents. Matt was a Remainer, though it probably wasn’t one of his convictions. He hasn’t got any of those. Yet.

There’s a running theme in the Lockdown Files of Westminster contempt for the so-called “hard-Right” of the Conservative Party, characterised as libertarian, even pro-virus. Enthusiasm for lockdown was about saving lives, absolutely; yet in the deepest recesses of our political id it was also Remainers’ Revenge. Not in the sense of it being narrowly motivated by Brexit but because it allowed bureaucrats and experts who felt spurned by populism to re-flex their muscles – and a large number of Britons who felt discombobulated by the politics of the past few years (however they’d voted) to “take back control” via a giant reboot of culture and society. Lockdown was popular. Many people have never left it.

When Boris considered lifting some of the restrictions in the summer of 2020, he was warned that it would be “too far ahead of public opinion”, which probably favoured tougher regulations for longer. One might speculate that Matt was the health secretary Britain deserved because he largely did what we wanted. A more thoughtful individual who questioned the science, moved cautiously and visibly U-turned on policies when they didn’t work would not have provided the reassurance we craved …

This was the politician who, at the height of his career, opened an empty hospital [a Nightingale] that would never be used – a hollow man in the hollow ward, a saga that leaves one wondering how much of lockdown was necessary and how much was simply a bromide?

Continuing on the same themes is James Rogers, who wrote a March 6 article for Conservative Woman: ‘Hancock circus masks Johnson’s coup against democracy’:

… it is clear that Hancock behaved as he did only because the Johnson government – which became a regime – enabled him. Whitehall had a clear strategy to do whatever it wanted; naysayers would be ignored and cast as paranoid trouble-makers.

The Johnson Regime seized extraordinary powers and escaped all scrutiny, save for castigation by Labour, the BBC and Guardian for being ‘too slow to lock down’. They would not take their boots off the people’s throats for 18 months, nor would they seek to pacify their minds; they treated us like farm animals, and sadly many of us behaved like sheep.

Fifteen years earlier, even Tony Blair’s government acknowledged the need for parliamentary supervision of a government that had invoked emergency powers. When it updated the relevant legislation – Emergency Powers Act 1920 and Civil Defence Act 1948 – it passed the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA), which imposed a ‘triple lock’ of conditions that would bind an ‘emergency government’ to submit its strategies and diktats to parliament every 30 days. Not the Johnson Regime: it swept the CAA aside, and introduced the Coronavirus Bill.

The Johnson government had an 80-seat majority. There would have been no piece of reasonable legislation that it could not have got through. Instead, it chose to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, and govern by ministerial decree for 18 months. What occurred in spring 2020 was a brazen, ultra vires coup.

The justification by Michael Gove and Penny Mordaunt was bizarre. They stated that C-19 was an emergency that demanded bespoke legislation, but since there was sufficient time for it to be drafted, it was not appropriate to use the CCA which applied to immediate emergencies. However, by the same token, the situation was so ‘urgent’ that only one day could be spared for debating the Coronavirus Bill. (How was a 350-page Bill drafted in five days?)

Rogers raises several pertinent points for the official coronavirus inquiry, which was supposed to have started in March 2023, by the way. Hmm. How’s that going? Answer there came none.

Some of his points follow:

1. The Johnson government ignored the Cabinet Office convention that for ‘emergency powers’ to be invoked, the nation had to be faced with a ‘catastrophic emergency’. There was never any ‘catastrophe’, nor was there any ‘emergency’, nor any risk of such, only the semblance of such created by the government and MSM. Here is a link to ONS figures on C-19 fatalities in 2020. Deaths from C-19 with NO pre-existing condition (England) 4,169; (Wales) 294. That’s fewer than 4,500, with an average age of 82.5 years.

2. The same convention holds that ‘emergency powers’ must be relinquished as soon as the reason for invoking them diminishes. The Johnson Regime held these powers until autumn 2021. Almost certainly, the government desired to maintain the ‘emergency powers’ so that it could push through the untested jabs with an ‘emergency use authorisation’.

3. The government awarded itself £266billion of our money to spend as it saw fit, with no parliamentary scrutiny whatsoever. Matt Hancock was empowered to use our freedoms to promote his career and an unseen Cabinet Office agenda.

4. The government co-opted the MSM (with more than £500million of our money). They were told not to ask awkward questions at this ‘vital time’ and complied with enthusiasm.

5. In WWII it was a criminal offence to spread fear, negativity and a defeatist attitude. In 2020-21 it became government policy, one that was prosecuted with great intensity. I know of one person who was so alarmed in spring 2020 that she took her own life.

9. Then came the jabs. In browbeating, bullying and bribing the populace, the government behaved with contempt for medical ethics. It abandoned the principle of ‘informed consent’, and in mandating jabs for care workers (and attempting the same for NHS staff) the government acted illegally, contravening the Public Health Act 1984 s.45E.

10. Perhaps most worryingly, the government hobbled the courts. In 2020 Simon Dolan’s applications for a judicial review of the government’s actions were twice tossed out by our judges – the same judges who a year earlier had chastised Johnson’s proroguing of the Commons in order to uphold the ‘primacy of parliament’.

… What happened in 2020, 2021 and into 2022, can only be regarded as a coup, and it has been habit-forming, as Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng can attest.

Now, in spring 2023, Johnson has walked, never to be held accountable, while the jackass Matt Hancock is being set up as the patsy. The Cabinet Office goons are still pulling the strings. They are giving us Hancock in the hope that if the common man sees his public execution, the government, indeed the whole establishment that brought us a 30-month nightmare, will not be pursued.

What is being released seems carefully controlled with the intention of provoking ‘social outrage’. Hancock himself is clearly rattled, and has been demanding immunity from prosecution. However I doubt that anything that shows the Johnson Regime’s policies were grossly unscientific will be released. Unless we are shown internal messages or documents that admit that lockdowns didn’t work, masks were useless and vaccination was pointless because natural immunity trumped anything a jab could achieve, the ‘Hancock Files’ are essentially froth …

Hancock will get his comeuppance, I am sure, but the most pressing questions that need answering are: a) Why did the Johnson Regime execute a coup? b) Why was this consistently ultra vires conduct never scrutinised in parliament or by the press? If we do not insist on protecting our democracy, we will lose it – the World Health Organisation will see to that.

Interestingly, parts of the Coronavirus Act 2020 still remain — and would take primary legislation to repeal. Why?

‘COVID-19 Response: Living with COVID-19’ on the Government’s website says:

There are a number of permanent provisions within the Coronavirus Act 2020 which would require new primary legislation in order to repeal. Some of these provisions are still necessary to support the recovery from the pandemic, including:

• • a. Section 11: Indemnity for health service activity: England and Wales. This provision ensures that any gaps in indemnity cover for NHS clinical negligence do not delay or prevent ongoing care. Without this, NHS Resolution would be unable to pay legitimate clinical negligence claims, leaving clinicians exposed to the full cost and patients without compensation.
  • b. Section 75(1): Disapplication of limit under section 8 of the Industrial Development Act 1982 (IDA). This provision ensures that the financial limits set out in section 8 of the IDA do not hinder the allocation of vital Government schemes for businesses such as the Help to Grow scheme, the Automotive Transformation Fund, and the Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme (OWMIS).

The Government is committed to removing unnecessary provisions from the statute book as soon as possible and will look for opportunities to do so as the Government’s legislative programme proceeds.

Once the Government has received the conclusions of the COVID-19 public inquiry, it will consider whether further changes to public health legislation are needed. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and any outstanding provisions in the Coronavirus Act 2020 would be in scope for this work.

The Government will also work with the Devolved Administrations [Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland], who have used their specific powers within the Coronavirus Act during the pandemic, to help transition provisions into devolved legislation where necessary.

Also puzzling is what appears to be a further extension of the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Extension of Powers to Act for the Protection of Public Health) Order (Northern Ireland) 2023, ‘laid before’ the Northern Ireland Assembly — which has not met for many months — on March 23, 2023 and came into force the following day. It was signed by Peter May, ‘A senior officer of the Department of Health’. How does that work? The Alteration of Expiry Date section says:

2. Section 48 of, and Schedule 18 to, the Coronavirus Act 2020 do not expire at the time when they would otherwise expire and expire instead on 24th September 2023.

MPs kept in the dark

Hope might lie in a group of Conservative MPs who are either lockdown rebels or did not receive requested information from the Government about the pandemic.

On March 5, The Telegraph posted ‘Project Fear’s “psychological warfare” must never be repeated, say lockdown rebels’:

Sir Charles Walker, who was a leading member of the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative backbenchers, said that he was distressed by the leaked conversations.

“What makes me so angry is the evils and the psychological warfare we deployed against young people and the population, all those behavioural psychologists,” he told The Telegraph.

“And there needs to be a reckoning. We need to understand and fully appreciate the damage that those sorts of campaigns did.”

Sir Charles lamented Parliament going “missing in action” as most MPs waved through dozens of Covid restrictions with little debate.

He said: “Those voices that raised concerns were just othered. We were positioned as being anti-lockdown, Right-wing headbangers. And actually wanting to do the right thing isn’t Right-wing.

“We did terrible things to youngsters. We did terrible things to a large number of people. We need to make sure we never do those things again” …

Craig Mackinlay, the Tory MP for South Thanet, added: “An artificial climate of fear was created, which has led to all the corollary outcomes that many of us, particularly in the Covid Recovery Group, were concerned about.

“Ongoing negative health issues, education issues – and not least the destruction of our economy, as one crackpot idea after another found its way onto the statute book.”

Sir John Redwood, another member of the Covid Recovery Group, said the tactics ministers used “always backfire, they always mislead and they don’t lead to good government”.

Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland Office minister who led revolts against restrictions as a backbencher, retweeted 19 tweets he sent while lockdowns were in place.

His posts set out both the economic and mental health damage caused by restrictions and called for a new Public Health Act, including reform to modelling.

Esther McVey MP laid out her concerns for The Telegraph in ‘The inconvenient questions the Covid inquiry must answer’:

Who could have guessed that Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages would be so revealing and painful? The Lockdown Files have laid bare the extent to which ministers, civil servants and scientists were allowing political machinations rather than the scientific evidence to drive the catastrophic moves to inflict lockdowns, masks and more on the nation. My hope now, as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery, is that these revelations will prompt the kind of robust debate on Covid policies that we should have had in 2020-21.

One would hope that the official Covid inquiry would provide a platform for that discussion …

But I fear that interrogation may not happen. There is a major risk that we will end up with an inquiry that focuses disproportionately on small details, such as whether a lockdown should have happened a week earlier, rather than the untold damage done to the nation from the best part of two years of restrictions … 

Along with other MPs and peers, I have already urged Baroness Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, to consider a wider range of voices, in order to avoid it being a whitewash. The inquiry needs to go beyond the direct costs of the disease itself and quantify the losses from the unintended, but very real damage that Covid policy has done. It also needs to ask perhaps the least convenient question of all: should we have stuck to the original pandemic plan, which didn’t advocate mass lockdowns?

Indeed, I still haven’t heard a good answer to the question of why the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011, which was revised in 2014, was seemingly discarded in 2020 without good reason. Lockdowns were never part of the plans or those of 27 other European countries, all of which were published by the European Centre for Disease Control on Feb 5, 2020 …

Moreover, we must not forget that the severity of the disease ended up being much lower than our politicians had made out …

The inquiry might also wish to ask, in light of the revelations in the Lockdown Files, why it seems that the system of government can be manipulated by a couple of overzealous ministers or officials. And it should analyse how much was done just for the sake of appearing to do something, leading to many unnecessary restrictions. These are not easy matters, but they made a great deal of difference when it mattered.

As one of only a handful of Tory MPs who has consistently spoken and voted against Covid restrictions, it has been quite obvious to me that our cure has been worse than the disease. The Covid inquiry should take views like mine seriously, but will it have the courage to do so? I once again urge Baroness Hallett to find the integrity and boldness she needs to assess the policy of lockdown and other mandates honestly and fully.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was Leader of the House during the pandemic — as such, a Cabinet member — said that he was unaware of evidence for a reduction in quarantine time.

‘Jacob Rees-Mogg: We were denied evidence we needed to make anti-lockdown case’ tells us:

Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he was never told that the Chief Medical Officer believed it would be possible to reduce the number of days people had to self-isolate after contact with a positive Covid case …

Reacting on GB News, Mr Rees-Mogg said that he would have argued in favour of a reduction had he known.

The former leader of the House of Commons said four senior ministers made all key Covid decisions and that other Cabinet colleagues were not shown the evidence they needed to make an anti-lockdown case.

Mr Rees-Mogg said: “I was in the Cabinet at the time and I didn’t know that Chris Whitty was saying that we could perfectly safely reduce the quarantining period.

“Otherwise I would have been saying: ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’

“That wasn’t what was being briefed to the Cabinet. We were getting briefed that the decision had been made, that it was going to remain; and then it was finally reduced under great pressure.

“The enthusiasm for locking people up was something that was not shared with the rest of the Cabinet – or the evidence!”

He said such decisions were made by a so-called quad of Boris Johnson, the former prime minister; Rishi Sunak, then the chancellor; Mr Hancock; and Michael Gove, then chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

He added: “It was decided by the quad, and I think the then chancellor Rishi Sunak was making the case for easing lockdowns.

“When I spoke to Boris during this period, I was inevitably making the case for easing lockdowns, but I wasn’t in the quad.

“There were Cabinet discussions but by the time we got to those discussions, most of those decisions had already been made. We had a pre-Cabinet briefing for those of us who weren’t in the quad basically to tell us what had been decided” …

Liz Truss, another Cabinet member at the time, said the same thing last year.

The article continues:

Mr Rees-Mogg agreed with the suggestion that the lockdowns had a “calamitous” impact on the country’s mental health and economy.

He said: “I agree. We must never do this again. When it first started, I was not in favour of emergency legislation. I was in favour of the Civil Contingencies Act, which has much greater parliamentary scrutiny, and happens on a UK-wide basis, rather than the devolved authorities.

“The devolved stuff was ridiculous. If you lived on the Welsh border and you went into Wales, you were at risk of being arrested. It caused great confusion. It should have been done on a UK-wide basis, and then it would have required very regular parliamentary votes, whereas we had six-monthly votes to decide whether to extend it or not.”

The former Cabinet minister said he had no sympathy for Mr Hancock over the way the WhatsApp messages had come out.

“I think if you’re in public life, you must expect that things about you come out into the public arena,” he said …

“I’m very against the creeping privacy law – another thing we’ve got from the human rights courts – because I believe in freedom of speech, and if I’ve done something or I’ve said something, people should be entitled to report it.

“And bear in mind politicians spend most of their time – particularly if you look at the WhatsApp things of Matt Hancock – trying to get good impressions of themselves. It’s only fair that when there’s something critical, it’s printed.”

Asked whether all MPs are as obsessed with their appearance and how they come across as Mr Hancock, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “I think Matt takes it to an extreme.

“My view in government is that if you do the right thing, if you do a good job, you’ll get good PR for it – and that’s much more important than painting yourself orange, as some politicians do, to try to appear good.”

The media and Project Fear

The media have much for which to answer from the fear that they reinforced day after day, with no contrarian voices. (GB News did not exist at the time.)

On March 4, The Telegraph’s Janet Daley wrote, ‘The BBC conspired in the campaign of fear that kept Britain locked up’:

It wasn’t about science, it was about politics. That was obvious as soon as the government began talking about following The Science as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth. Nobody who knows anything about science could say such a thing unless they were engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion …

The mass public acceptance of these extraordinary diktats was, initially, not all that surprising. At its outset, this was classed as a temporary emergency. What’s a few weeks (of what was exceptionally pleasant sunny weather) out of a lifetime if it serves to protect yourself and others – and, of course, the National Health Service? But it went on and on – and the longer it went on, the more the population appeared to accept it as a new normal. Even when the damage – especially to the young in both educational and psychological terms – was becoming clear, it went on. It is important to try to understand this …

What was most alarming was the alacrity with which the broadcast news media fell into line – with boundless enthusiasm – as they were given a key role in the day to day dissemination of government authority. As the medium through which the official information was conveyed – with, as we now know, often misleading modelling projections and outdated death figures – they went from being public service news media to what the BBC notably has always insisted it is not: state broadcasters. From disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound …

If this crisis was as severe as we were being told, wasn’t it vitally important that every source of expertise was given a fair hearing? Or was the appearance of unity considered so vital that it overrode everything – even sometimes the facts? Perhaps the worst effect of all this uncritical coverage was that government ministers, having manipulated public opinion into a frenzy of anxiety and potential guilt, then found themselves trapped in the national mood they had created.

How could we not have seen the consequences coming? How could anyone who has raised children not have foreseen the damage that would likely result when developing infants, growing toddlers, and sensitive adolescents were deprived of all that essential contact with the unfamiliar world beyond their own homes? Let alone the hideous fate of those elderly patients who had to die alone and the interminable grief of their loved ones who were forced to miss the final moments and were even denied the comfort of a full funeral.

What on earth was everybody thinking?

Interestingly, that same day, The Times had testimony from educators at all levels about the deleterious changes that lockdown produced in primary school pupils to university students in ‘Eerily quiet and sad: how lockdown affected students — by their teachers’:

A primary school teacher reported that children had lost the most basic skills:

With so much time spent on screens, handwriting was a challenge: we gave them each a pot of Play-Doh and had “dough disco” sessions, where they squished the dough to music, in order to improve their motor skills sufficiently that they could start writing again. We still hold additional handwriting sessions weekly. Handwriting has become an issue nationally in schools since the pandemic …

In reception class we have placed a huge dressing-up box. If they want to be a princess, they have to do up the buttons on the dress. Ofsted has said that in many schools, children forgot how to eat with a knife or fork or struggled to dress themselves after the pandemic.

We had to re-teach our school expectations such as rules and manners. I wrote a set of behaviour scripts, right down to how to speak to a teacher at the school gate. We taught even the youngest to say “Good morning, how are you?” as a conversation opener.

The secondary school principal said that self-harm was on the rise and that literacy skills had declined:

We quickly noticed telltale signs that both boys and girls had been self-harming — we recorded a 300 per cent increase compared to before the pandemic. Many cut themselves still; my staff have been trained to spot the markers. We try to get help for them.

After two years, much of it spent alone at home on screens, their literacy levels were at rock bottom. We assessed our 1,200 pupils in 2022 and found that 11-year-olds had a reading age of nine. These kids did not have books in their houses during the pandemic. They may have been reading on screens — but that will have been with Instagram and Snapchat notifications pinging and disrupting their focus.

So, teaching the children to read has become our number-one task. I hired a reading tutor who still does nothing but teach reading over six weeks using the phonics system of sounding out letters, which is really the job of a primary school. If kids cannot read properly, every subject — science, maths, history — is beyond them. We soon saw a correlation between this illiteracy and dropping out of school, not turning up to lessons and behaving badly. If you are in a history class and you cannot read, you will kick off to avoid looking like an idiot …

One of the biggest concerns is the slump in the number of children turning up to school, even now. Instead of our pre-pandemic figure of 97 per cent of pupils attending school, the figure has dropped to the low 90s. There are children we struggle to get in even once a fortnight …

I am anxious myself — I am on Sertraline to cope with it. It was sparked by having the responsibility of trying to make the right decisions to keep my kids learning, to give them a future, while also keeping my staff and families safe. Last week as Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages were revealed I felt sick at the thought that the politicians may not have been giving us accurate information to make the right choices. It makes me feel angry for the children and all they have lost.

The university professor says that his students are withdrawn and quiet:

By the time the Covid generation reached me in my university lectures and seminars, they were a shell of their former selves …

By the time they found their way into my first-year university lectures they were, compared to the students of old, unrecognisable.

Having spent their coming-of-age years online, sitting on Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams, they were now withdrawn and hunkered down. They were nothing like the passionate, vocal and highly engaged students I had become used to teaching for 20 years …

The net result of all this was a Covid generation who were eerily quiet, silent almost, and who often appeared to shun socialising and interacting with others. What used to be a thriving campus felt like a ghost town, while in my lectures and seminars students only rarely raised their hand to ask a question.

… to be honest, I think we’ve yet to see the full effects of the pandemic in higher education. Increasingly, across the country, there is growing chatter about much larger number of students simply dropping out from their studies, perhaps because they are struggling with the cost of living but also because they are struggling with the transition back to the post-Covid reality.

So, while the pandemic had a very visible impact on my world, it’s also clear this impact still has a long way to run.

I will wrap up on The Lockdown Files tomorrow.

I bet the official inquiry won’t come remotely close to what the series uncovered.