The head of the Civil Service has admitted to the Covid Inquiry that the Government failed to be open with the public about alternatives to lockdown.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said there was a “failure of transparency” over what other options ministers looked at before locking down the nation for a second time.
Giving evidence, which had been delayed owing to illness, Mr Case compared officials making decisions in No 10 to “boiling frogs” who were “trapped into a way of thinking” that stopped them taking “decisive action”.
It also emerged that he privately told Boris Johnson to stop “agreeing all the time” with Rishi Sunak, the then-chancellor, urging him to assess factors other than the economy.
Mr Case replaced Sir Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary in September 2020, becoming the youngest person ever to take the job at the age of 41, having been brought into Downing Street at the height of the pandemic as the prime minister’s permanent secretary.
During nearly five hours of questioning, Mr Case was asked by Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, if the Government had failed to show it had considered alternatives to lockdown in late 2020.
“I think it’s a very fair criticism,” he said. “There were a number of occasions where this desire to have simple, clear unambiguous messages coming out of government about the strategy meant that there wasn’t enough engagement on the alternatives.
“I think this is a case where there could have been an explanation, there could have been more explanation of what we’d done to explore alternatives and why they wouldn’t work, it was a sort of failure of transparency.”
Mr Case claimed that Boris Johnson had found the decisions to introduce lockdowns difficult, and said he had not initially understood that the prime minister struggled on a “deep ideological level” with the idea of “the mass locking up of the population”.
He said that Mr Johnson was worried about the “damage, as he saw it, that was being done to society through those big decisions on lockdowns”.
Mr Case said that he and others in Downing Street became “prisoners of our own thinking” during the pandemic.
When it came to deciding what needed to be done to tackle surging Covid cases in autumn 2020, Mr Keith asked him if, put “bluntly”, “you just couldn’t see your way out of the sack that you were in”.
Mr Case compared the situation to an “expression that gets used about boiling frogs”.
“This idea that we’d sort of got trapped into a way of thinking and wrestling that meant we couldn’t actually see and take decisive action,” he said. “We were prisoners of our own mentality, which was that we were desperate to avoid another lockdown. There were all these attempts to try and come up with solutions and we were just prisoners of our own thinking.”
Baroness Hallett, the inquiry chair, earlier heard how Mr Case privately told Boris Johnson to stop backing Mr Sunak’s decisions during the pandemic, sending a WhatsApp that Mr Keith said told him to stop “agreeing all the time with his own chancellor”.
The inquiry heard that Mr Case told his boss, “It can’t always be you agreeing with Rishi”. Mr Keith said that Mr Case was “driven to WhatsApp your own prime minister to tell him that the relationship between him and his chancellor was being operated in such a way that you had to advise him, to stop agreeing all the time with his own chancellor”.
Mr Case said this was reasonable because the chancellor’s job was “to put forward the economic case, the economic argument” and “the prime minister’s job is to balance other considerations.”
The Cabinet Secretary said that it was no “secret they were very different personalities” and took decisions in different ways but that they had a good relationship as he was asked if bilateral meetings became places where the prime minister was bounced into a “U-turn”.
WhatsApps revealed that early in the pandemic Mr Case said Nicola Sturgeon was showing the UK Government “how to do it” in a discussion with Helen MacNamara, then the deputy cabinet secretary.
She had said she was “horrified” by secrecy in decision-making and said that there were suggestions of introducing different restrictions in different places which she likened to an “experiment with people’s lives”.
Mr Case replied: “Nicola Sturgeon showing them how to do it. Honestly need to start being transparent about the issues and choices.”
Other WhatsApps showed Mr Case complained that “crisis + pygmies = toxic behaviours” after Ms MacNamara said there was “far too much ego and bitching going on”.
He said it was a “fair conclusion” to draw that the WhatsApp was an observation on the abilities of individuals in the Cabinet Office and No 10.
“Good people were working incredibly hard in impossible circ*mstances with choices where it seems there was never a right answer,” he said.
“But that lack of sort of a team spirit, the difficult atmosphere, we were trying to run everything from the centre of government, trying to run the response to a global pandemic.”
There was a duplication of effort, overlapping of meetings and “good people were just being smashed to pieces”, he said.
In another WhatsApp Mr Case sent to Ms MacNamara in August 2020 he described the U-turn on exam results as “the most awful governing I think I’ve ever seen”.
He added that “lots of people should lose their head” over the controversy, which saw the Government announce that A-level and GCSE results would no longer be determined by an algorithm and that pupils would instead receive grades their teachers predicted for them.
Asked what the “root cause of the dysfunctionality” was during the pandemic, Mr Case said they “couldn’t get the right balance of personalities and people” and “it took us too long to get those things right”.
Mr Keith then asked why he had agreed that the Government “failed at a number of fundamental levels”.
Becoming emotional, Mr Case said: “The language in those WhatsApps that we’ve discussed, they come out of a raw human in the moment, it’s not a roundly considered view in those moments. There were some dark days when it felt we just couldn’t get it right.”
Mr Case’s testimony concludes the oral evidence of the Covid Inquiry’s second module, scrutinising government decision-making during the pandemic.
The inquiry will not hear evidence again until September when it examines healthcare systems, but will report back on its first investigation into pandemic preparedness over the summer.
Lady Hallett said she wanted to “assure the public” that the inquiry teams for each module had begun work on “producing our analysis of the evidence”.
She added that the inquiry was close to publishing its report for module one, which examined pandemic preparedness.
