Jonathan Calvert > Quotes

“The fear of a no-deal Brexit began ‘sucking all the blood out of pandemic planning’, the adviser said. ‘All the blood was flooding to the Brexit planning and we never picked it up.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Inexplicably, the final sentence of Johnson’s 2 March video message would later be lopped off the version posted on the prime ministerial Twitter page. It was: ‘I wish to stress that, at the moment, it’s very important that people consider that they should, as far as possible, go about business as usual.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“the comment piece was full of Hancockisms – a word that if it ever made a dictionary would be defined as: noun – Bold, positive claims with a large dollop of wishful thinking, which turn out to be mostly untrue.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March and were allowed to travel across Britain at will. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus – guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“It meant Britain would now have to navigate policy on the virus while being unsighted as to where it was spreading. ‘I was absolutely astonished,’ said Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at Edinburgh University, when she heard that contact tracing had been stopped. ‘I didn’t fully understand the ramifications of what was being said. And then it hit me that, actually, they’re letting the virus go. And so at the time I just felt like we were sleepwalking into disaster.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Without knowing they were infected, he and Johnson attended the last session of the Commons. As they were leaving the chamber, they were seen in a huddle of people who had gathered around the Speaker’s chair with just inches between them. It was the perfect example of why social distancing was important because they could easily have spread the virus to their colleagues. By failing to follow the very rules they had so stridently instructed others to adhere to, they were setting a bad example. And they were also endangering lives.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Even Hancock, who had been health secretary for almost two years, admitted that he had been forced to instruct his officials to find out what happened in Cygnus as a result of reading about it in the media.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“A source who was advising Downing Street at the time has confirmed that herd immunity was central to the government’s plans in late February and early March.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Boris Johnson spoke to the nation,’ Horton writes. ‘He said of Covid-19, “We didn’t fully understand its effects.” His plaintive excuse will likely become the core defence of his government in the subsequent public inquiry into why the UK failed so spectacularly to protect its citizens. It is a defence that can and must be refuted.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Neil Ferguson, the government’s chief modeller during that period, told a parliamentary select committee on 10 June: ‘The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced. So had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Professor Sir John Bell, the chair of medicine at Oxford University and the president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, would later tell the parliamentary health and social care select committee that there may have been a deliberate policy to avoid testing NHS workers due to staff shortage fears.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“The government’s own advisers were incredulous that senior politicians had not taken greater precautions to avoid being infected. ‘Whilst the PM was telling people to stay at home and keep at least two metres apart from each other, the House of Commons was open for business and face-to-face parliamentary activities were carrying on,’ said Professor Michie, a behavioural psychologist who sits on one of the government’s key advisory committees. ‘Given the transmission routes of touching contaminated surfaces and breathing in virus-laden droplets, it should not come as a surprise to hear that the PM and Health Secretary have tested positive for coronavirus. If leaders do not adhere to their own recommendations, this undermines trust in them which in turn can undermine the population’s adherence to their advice.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“She and fellow doctors were angered by the government’s positive messages about how well the NHS was coping. ‘I understand there’s a balance between not wanting to panic people, and I also understand about reputation management. But every evening at the [government’s televised media] briefing you just couldn’t recognise anything that they were saying. It was so discordant with what we were seeing. They’d made it all up.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“You have got tens and tens of thousands of people who have died who did not need to die, and massive economic destruction. That did not need to happen if we had sorted things out earlier. Everyone in this country needs to face the reality of this.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“From the beginning of March to the end of August, there were 25,200 more deaths in people’s homes than in normal years, yet only 2,400 of those were classified as being caused by Covid-19.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“The source said care home residents were being treated as ‘collateral damage’ and described the strategy as ‘mass murder’. Many of those who died had lived through the Second World War, which was being commemorated in the summer as it was the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Every day of delay will kill.’ It would still be almost two weeks before lockdown would happen.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Curiously, with the whole of Whitehall waiting for a decision, Johnson slipped away for a ‘personal engagement’ that Thursday evening. It is not known why he considered it necessary to meet the Russian newspaper baron, Evgeny Lebedev, at that moment and disregard his own advice to avoid all ‘non-essential contact with others’. The owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent had in the past been a very generous host to the prime minister, inviting him to a lavish party at his Italian villa. But the purpose of the meeting remains a mystery. Later in the year it would emerge that Johnson had nominated Lebedev, the son of a KGB agent, for a seat in the House of Lords. Johnson’s press officers have refused to say who was present at this meeting or why it was so important.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Hancock’s ‘enhanced monitoring’ had been ineffectual. Far from saving the world, his failure to take decisive action had actually helped accelerate the virus’s spread in the country he was supposed to be protecting.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“As the hours of inaction ticked away, the crisis was becoming worse. It is an extraordinary fact that each day that passed that week before lockdown, the health service’s burden was increasing by a third.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“The parliamentary public accounts committee, however, would later be less complimentary. The committee chastised the Treasury for waiting until mid-March before deciding on economic support schemes – despite the warnings from medical chiefs from January onwards. The MPs on the committee found that the government’s economic reaction to Covid-19 had been rushed and, in the process, neglected many sectors that needed help. This would have a long-term negative impact on the economy, it concluded. The sheer scale of the government failings were ‘astonishing’, the committee said.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Usually at a Cobra they’ve got options and you go through them. There was none of that. It was more like a discursive discussion. It was like a bunch of people having a discussion about this thing. It wasn’t a normal Cobra meeting. Johnson was just not on top of his game.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“The government’s own advisers were incredulous that senior politicians had not taken greater precautions to avoid being infected. ‘Whilst the PM was telling people to stay at home and keep at least two metres apart from each other, the House of Commons was open for business and face-to-face parliamentary activities were carrying on,’ said Professor Michie, a behavioural psychologist who sits on one of the government’s key advisory committees.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“We did not explain to the public that this was the delicate balancing act – we’ve reduced the likelihood of getting an ambulance but we’ve increased the response teams to pick up bodies in people’s homes.’ The adviser added: ‘The cremations were carried out in these very fast slots, running at weekends, running late into the night. A lot of concessions were struck with both Islam and the Church of England to just rush the bodies through, get them out, get them buried.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“In the afternoon there was a meeting of Cobra – and the prime minister was nowhere to be seen. ‘I turn up and Michael Gove is chairing it. Not Johnson. It was odd,’ one of those present recalls. ‘To miss such a critical Cobra meeting, I just don’t understand why. It’s inexplicable because this is the Cobra where we decided to bring in nationwide measures and he delegates to Michael Gove. It’s just odd. It’s literally a five-minute walk from Cabinet Office through the corridor to No. 10 to the press conference.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“If you were a Martian that landed at that meeting in his office,’ the source said, ‘you’d have thought Cummings was the prime minister, not Johnson. Cummings was far more aware and more lucid than Johnson.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years,”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“But, in reality, Raab would run the country by committee as part of a so-called quad of senior ministers that also included Hancock, Sunak and Gove. Each day they would hold daily meetings at 9.15 a.m., either on Zoom or in person. They had competing agendas and egos, and none had the true authority of a prime minister. At one point Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, is understood to have read them the riot act, insisting that they pull together for the good of the country.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“The cases had been doubling every three days and the contact tracing system had only managed to identify 1 in every 200 infections before it had to be jettisoned.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus

“Yet an investigation by the BBC programme Panorama discovered the move was at least partly a way to get around the shortage of protective equipment in the NHS. The problem was that the Health and Safety Executive had earlier ruled that the very top level of PPE should be worn when dealing with a disease ranked as an HCID. The change in classification therefore meant health workers could be kitted out with less protective equipment – making the most of the threadbare stocks available. The government had requested that the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens remove Covid-19 from the HCID list.”
― Jonathan Calvert, Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus