If they "followed the science" and "got all the big calls right"

[verdantverdure]

And protected the people of Britain, and our economy...

Then Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and all the Cabinet Ministers of the Conservative government since 2019 have nothing to hide

And can hand over any and all communications to the Covid Inquiry.

Yet there's still no shortage of applicants.

"Straining every sinew"

How could I forget that one?!

Sorry, slight misdirect. One of the authors of this is associated with John Hopkins. Here is the link: iea.org.uk/media/lockdowns-were-a-costly-failure-finds-new-iea-book/

I think the conduct of those in government and whether lockdown was ultimately the best option are two different, albeit overlapping questions, and would benefit from separate enquiries.

Because the first lockdown at least was politically inevitable. And while we knew full well what a lot of the downsides would be in March 2020, despite lots of claims otherwise whenever this topic comes up, what we didn't know was whether they'd outweigh the benefits. Additionally, we actually aren't in a position to answer that question yet, and won't be for a long time. A lot of the longer term consequences, of restrictions in particular, haven't happened yet.

Whereas ministerial conduct is something we do need to be discussing now, while they're still in power. Things like corruption in procurement and the impact of Partygate should be hashed out asap, so people have as much of the information as possible before the next general election. And those things aren't actually affected by whether one thinks lockdown was the right policy or not.

Yes.

But I suspect if you asked people what they thought the current crop of politicians, be they Labour, Tories or Liberals not many people would think those candidates were up to much.

So there's the rub. Make being a politician a crap job with a crap quality of life.

Get crap people. Or at the very minimum get people with significant ulterior motives.

You can't possibly think reducing the level of scrutiny would do anything to prevent people with ulterior motives from wanting the job, though? And we'd have shitter mechanisms to identify when they acted on those motives.