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Across the country money is tight. These are icy days for pensioners deprived of winter fuel allowances. Farmers face ruinous death taxes.
Shop workers could lose their livelihoods owing to National Insurance rises and small businesses are imperilled by the Starmer Government’s socialist employment rules. A miasma of worries has descended since July’s election.
Yet in one privileged glade of the common weal all remains tickety-boo. Here lambs still gambol, sparrows chirrup and all is well with the world. Welcome to the sunny kingdom of public inquiries.
Tuesday’s Mail reported that the Covid Inquiry may eventually cost £208 million.
That could make it the priciest investigation ever conducted in Britain. Not that it is going to conclude any time soon. The inquiry costs taxpayers £150,000 every day and it is not expected to wrap up its hearings until June 2026. We’re probably looking at mid 2027 for the actual report.
‘Surely we could be hit by another pandemic by then, so any lessons from the inquiry will be redundant,’ you may say. ‘How can be it that hard to work out what went well and what went badly in our national response to Covid?’
To this there is a trusting response and there is a cynical response. The trusting one is that these are complex matters and that thoroughness is the least we owe the 227,000 unfortunates who died of or with Covid.
The cynical response? The Establishment and its lawyers are loving every minute of this and other inquiries. The longer these things last, the more dosh the professionals make and the more they can assert a cultural grip on our public institutions that entrenches caution at ruinous cost.
If this Covid inquiry was really trying to ascertain the truth, it should be questioning the Chinese government, writes Quentin Letts
Bereaved family members who lost loved ones during the Covid pandemic gathered outside of the inquiry ahead of its first day last summer
Yesterday’s Mail reported that the Covid Inquiry may eventually cost £208 million. That could make it the priciest investigation ever conducted in Britain. Not that it is going to conclude any time soon
By way of comparison, furthermore, Sweden’s Covid inquiry was completed within months. Illuminati at our Covid Inquiry often boast of ‘drilling down into the details’; let us, then, ‘drill down into the details’ of a report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the pressure group which came up with that amazing figure of £208 million.
The sum is enough, the Mail noted yesterday, to pay the salaries of 6,000 junior doctors. It should be said that the inquiry disputes the £208 million sum. The TaxPayers’ Alliance retorts that if anything ‘it’s likely to be an underestimate’.
With the inquiry providing employment for 150 lawyers, some £70 million has already been paid to solicitors and legal firms. Baroness Hallett, chairing the inquiry, has pocketed £524,000, and counting.
The inquiry has its own barristers led by Hugo Keith KC. Ladies and gentlemen, he is magnificent, he is sleek, he is leonine; but he is not cheap. All this while the rest of us feel under financial siege.
Alongside Mr Keith in the spacious inquiry building near London’s Paddington railway station are ranks of fellow briefs. It’s like the Nasa control room in the Moon landings: tables full of clever people sitting at computer screens.
These lawyers represent the ministers, civil servants and other individuals who were in charge during the pandemic. They are examined as witnesses in a tone and intensity similar to that of a criminal trial, so it is understandable they want legal advice.
Mr Keith’s silken asperity has at times been such that it is almost as if he thinks Boris Johnson’s government actively plotted to murder those people who died once the virus spread from China in late 2019.
Numerous government departments have legal representatives at the hearing, as do pressure groups representing ‘the victims’.
Ah, the victims. Great weight has been placed by Lady Hallett on the testimonies and concerns of those affected by Covid. Certain outfits have been declared ‘core participants’ at the inquiry. These include Save The Children, Just For Kids Law, Southall Black Sisters, the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations and Solace Women’s Aid. Is there a political tang to some of those groups? Or do they merely reflect the cruel way Covid hit some parts of our society harder than others?
A person looks on at the National Covid Memorial Wall located opposite the House of Commons along the River Thames
According to Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance, there were repeated problems in trying to get Boris Johnson to understand the science around Covid
England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has already given evidence before the Covid inquiry
Sir Patrick Vallance has also spoken before the inquiry, detailing his role and the issues encountered during the Covid pandemic
Visiting the hearings, one is struck by the zeal of those who occupy the public gallery. Day after day they hold up photographs of their dead loved ones. The inquiry has so far spent £11.6 million on collecting stories from victims’ families and on engaging with these bereaved campaigners. An admirable act of kindness? Or politicised waste of money?
As the months pass, is it not becoming evident that we were and are all victims of that miserable plague?
My brother died of cancer during lockdown. Covid regulations meant his NHS treatment was bad and his last months were even more miserable than they needed to be. No one asked my family to be a core participant at the Covid Inquiry.
Perhaps I should have held a photograph of my beloved bro’ on my visits to the inquiry.
The early hearings made plenty of headlines, chiefly because they were so political. The former No 10 supremo Dominic Cummings, giving evidence, came across as a crazy liability.
Former health secretary Matt Hancock, former chancellor Rishi Sunak and ex-PM Johnson were interrogated as if they were old Nazis at the Nuremberg war trials. They gave a decent account of themselves but it was a political feeding frenzy.
We still had a Conservative government at that time and pre-election tempers were running high. Did Left-wing broadcasters give their coverage extra welly for electoral reasons? It sometimes felt that way, just as it felt that Judge Hallett and her KC were revelling in the publicity.
Maybe this is inevitable with public inquiries. It was like that with the Hutton Inquiry in 2003 after the death of David Kelly and claims about biological warfare in Iraq.
Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock is one of the names set to be called before the inquiry
The probe’s chairwoman Baroness Hallett has been paid a staggering £524,000 for her efforts with a pro rata rate equivalent to a salary of £256,000
Currently, the inquiry is nearing the end of its 10-week investigation into section 3 – healthcare systems – out of a possible 10 different ‘modules’
The Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking was a bubbling vindaloo of agendas. Hutton cost £2.5 million; Leveson £7.3 million. Bargains. The Bloody Sunday Inquiry cost over £200 million in today’s prices but that lasted 12 years.
The daily costs of the Covid Inquiry are more than twice those of the next most expensive, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse.
Meanwhile, if Judge Hallett is so interested in political blame, why has she not quizzed anyone from the Chinese government? And why so little interest in the economic and psychological damage caused by social-distancing? Why does it feel such one-way traffic, as if defensive of the bureaucracy that encouraged lockdown?
The Covid Inquiry has yet to produce a ‘eureka’ moment. Once the show-trials of Cummings and Co had finished, the Inquiry dropped down the news agenda. It just plods on, costing the country a fortune.
If we really want to energise and inform the public, would a TV drama not be more powerful and cheaper? That certainly happened with the Post Office Horizon scandal. ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office turned a slightly dry story into major box-office.
It so happens that the Post Office Horizon Inquiry has just completed its hearings. It, too, had its share of windbag lawyers. They did not unearth anything astonishingly new.
Yes, the Government jumped to attention and announced some compensation for victims but that was thanks to the TV drama. All those fancy-pant lawyers, faffing over their modules, sucking their monthly moolah from the public teat, were beaten to it. Scooped by a TV show that didn’t cost taxpayers a penny!
