TRIGGERnometry - Live with Isabel Oakeshott - Sex, Lies and Lockdowns

00:00:00.160 Hey Francis, do you like protecting yourself online?

00:00:03.200 No, what's some little nerd going to do to me online? 1.00

00:00:07.280 No one can mess with the alpha dog 601.

00:00:10.720 That's what I called myself after winning a particularly intense game of Call of Duty back in 2017.

00:00:17.680 Why is there a 601 on the end?

00:00:19.680 There are already 600 other alpha dogs.

00:00:22.640 It's quite popular amongst the alpha male community.

00:00:25.440 I'm sure.

00:00:26.880 Well, going online without a VPN is like leaving your laptop open whilst you go to the toilet in a coffee shop.

00:00:32.800 Coffee always does that to me. 0.75

00:00:34.000 For once in your life, can you just do the bloody advert like a real alpha, like me? 0.81

00:00:38.000 Come on mate, chill out.

00:00:39.520 I always make sure to use ExpressVPN because hackers can sell your data online for as much as $1,000 a pop.

00:00:48.720 Even a 12 year old can do it, which is one of the many reasons I don't trust kids.

00:00:53.120 That's why we use ExpressVPN at Trigonometry.

00:00:56.240 ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:01:01.200 Hackers can't steal your sensitive data.

00:01:03.520 You'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.

00:01:09.600 I have ExpressVPN on my phone because it's dead easy to use.

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00:01:51.120 Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry.

00:02:00.240 I'm Francis Foster.

00:02:01.440 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:02:02.720 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:02:08.160 It doesn't get any more fascinating than the guests we have for you today.

00:02:11.600 Without much further ado, she's the journalist behind the lockdown files.

00:02:14.960 Isabel Oakeshaw, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:16.720 Thank you for having me.

00:02:17.600 And you've had a very busy week, so we appreciate you coming and sitting down for 45 minutes to chat

00:02:23.040 and then answering some questions from our audience.

00:02:25.600 Really appreciate it.

00:02:26.800 You know, it's funny because I was talking to a friend of mine last night.

00:02:29.360 We were WhatsAppping back and forth.

00:02:30.800 And dangerous thing to do, especially when I'm around.

00:02:34.320 Well, that's that's and that was basically how the conversation ended up.

00:02:38.160 After a while, we kind of read back our slightly spicy messages and we were like,

00:02:42.960 well, let's make sure whoever writes ghost writes her next book. 0.70

00:02:45.520 It's not Isabel Oakeshaw.

00:02:47.040 And the point I'm making is you have put, you know, something on the line there in order

00:02:52.800 to get this story out.

00:02:55.040 So what was it about the messages that you saw with Matt Hancock, the former health secretary,

00:03:01.440 that made you think, you know what, this is worth it?

00:03:03.840 Well, you're absolutely right.

00:03:04.880 I mean, of course, I've put something on the line.

00:03:06.800 I've put a lot on the line, actually.

00:03:08.960 I mean, there's been a lot of flack flying.

00:03:11.760 The reality is, if you detonate a nuclear bomb, there's going to be some radiation.

00:03:16.720 And most likely quite a bit of it is going to blow in your direction if we're talking

00:03:20.480 about the world of politics.

00:03:21.920 So that I knew that this would be pretty explosive.

00:03:27.520 I knew that there would be a price to pay for me.

00:03:30.480 There are different bits of that price to pay.

00:03:32.960 There's a legal risk that I've taken.

00:03:35.520 After all, I did breach a confidentiality undertaking.

00:03:38.640 That's not something I take lightly or do flippantly.

00:03:42.400 There's also the risk associated with people, you know, feeling that I probably am not going

00:03:47.840 to be the most trustworthy person to write their books.

00:03:50.880 That's obviously something that I have to take into account.

00:03:54.960 But above all of that is what I felt was the overwhelming public interest in the content

00:04:01.920 of this material.

00:04:04.000 And, you know, in the end, I was willing and am willing to take a knock to my reputation,

00:04:11.760 to have people disparaging me, to have people say that I, to impugn my motives, which there's

00:04:17.120 been plenty of, in order to get this material out there.

00:04:21.440 Because what we see here is the real-time detail of who was saying what and when around the most

00:04:30.880 momentous decisions, decisions that affected the lives of every single person in this country.

00:04:37.280 And similar decisions were being taken all over the world as countries locked down.

00:04:42.640 So really, the UK, as a result of these WhatsApp files, as Fraser Nelson has said, is the first

00:04:49.440 country to have kind of drawn back the curtain on what was really going on.

00:04:53.760 And what have we seen, Isabel?

00:04:54.880 Because, look, Francis and I, both, not happy about lockdowns.

00:04:58.880 We supported the first one because we were told it's going to be a couple of weeks and blah,

00:05:02.480 blah, blah.

00:05:03.120 OK, let's go along with it.

00:05:04.320 And before we know it, we're like two years into a lockdown and blah, blah, blah.

00:05:07.840 Right.

00:05:08.480 However, there's a lot of people who might look at the things that have come out as a

00:05:12.720 result of your revelations and kind of go, well, OK, look, the fact that kids were forced to wear

00:05:18.320 masks because Boris couldn't be bothered to have an argument with Nicola.

00:05:21.520 Yeah, that's a bit bad. 1.00

00:05:24.880 And most of the rest of it, isn't it just government incompetence, politicians making stupid jokes, 0.99

00:05:29.920 the kinds of you that you and I would make in a WhatsApp group. 0.96

00:05:32.480 So what have you revealed exactly that people should care about if they currently don't?

00:05:37.120 Yeah, that's funny.

00:05:38.080 You know, I find this this question has come up quite a lot and I'm kind of left wondering,

00:05:42.080 what more do you want, guys?

00:05:43.440 Blood, you know, what is it that you might have been expecting to find there?

00:05:48.160 I feel that people maybe hope that there might be some kind of gigantic conspiracy,

00:05:53.600 you know, that we might reveal that, you know, there was a secret plan to kind of kill off

00:06:00.880 the elderly or there was some kind of Bill Gates thing to inject everybody with microchips.

00:06:06.320 Hancock did actually joke about that, but it was very definitely a joke, obviously.

00:06:10.800 And, you know, I feel that there were a lot of people hoping that what was going on during this

00:06:17.040 time was something totally extraordinary and unexpected. And in reality, what was going on

00:06:23.520 was the very exaggerated everyday business of government, which is full of cock up and far 0.63

00:06:30.160 more cock up than conspiracy, really. But what have we learned? Well, we can point to any number of

00:06:37.760 a kind of specific revelations, which I actually think are very important. You know, the over the

00:06:42.560 weekend, the Telegraph published details of messages from Matt Hancock between him and his political

00:06:48.160 Glade in which they discussed, and I quote, deploying the variant to, and I quote, frighten the pants

00:06:54.800 off people. Now, this is an insight, provides us with an extraordinary insight into the mindset of

00:07:01.120 a very, very tiny group of people who had seized an unprecedented level of power. So what you see here,

00:07:09.040 in a sense, is a kind of insight into the psychology of what happens when a small group of people

00:07:18.720 take power, which they did, they seized effectively an unprecedented level of control over our everyday

00:07:25.280 lives. And they essentially did so in a pseudo democratic fashion that we can discuss quite how

00:07:30.800 democratic it really was, but they used emergency legislation to do that. And what do they then do

00:07:37.600 with that power? And we've had since politicians coming out, Jacob Rees-Mogg yesterday, one of our,

00:07:42.960 who was a cabinet minister at the time, saying, actually, you know, I was in the cabinet at the

00:07:47.200 time, I didn't know about a lot of this stuff that was going on, evidence that influenced critical

00:07:53.920 decisions, because it was all concentrated in the hands of four people, effectively the prime minister,

00:08:00.480 the chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove, who's kept very much in the shadows,

00:08:05.920 and I always thought he was up to all forms of no good. You know, when a politician of that level

00:08:11.360 of influence is very quiet, it's a bit like when kids disappear and, you know, they're somewhere

00:08:16.400 upstairs and you kind of know that they've definitely got your makeup back, you know,

00:08:19.920 they're busy smearing it all over everywhere. So Michael Gove played a pivotal part in all of this,

00:08:26.240 this, and Matt Hancock himself. And those four people just were in an extraordinary position

00:08:34.320 of power and responsibility, by the way. And I think we can have a lot of sympathy for the people

00:08:40.720 on whose shoulders all of this rested. You know, you said, we were talking earlier about whether it

00:08:47.440 was the right thing to lock down first time round. I mean, absolutely. You know, I never felt that that

00:08:53.120 was unreasonable, you know, in the face of an unprecedented threat. For me, I think there are

00:08:59.200 very, very serious question marks over whether we needed to do so repeatedly for the best part of

00:09:04.240 off and on two years in a way that had, we now know, devastating collateral damage

00:09:10.400 on our economy, but much more importantly, on people's health in other respects and on our children.

00:09:17.040 Isabel, now I'm someone who was, I was in favour of the first lockdown like Constantine,

00:09:23.200 but the more I saw this pattern repeat itself, the more I realised where we were going to end up,

00:09:28.720 particularly financially. However, I have come to accept, begrudgingly, that I'm in the minority.

00:09:35.840 And there's a lot of government ministers who would say, well, look, you may think this way,

00:09:39.760 I think this way, but the reality is 65% of the public, according to recent polls,

00:09:45.200 don't think that way.

00:09:46.800 Yeah, I find that really interesting. It's just really weird. I've kind of

00:09:52.640 come to the conclusion that people like being told what to do. You know, it's why a lot of

00:09:57.360 people just keep going back to prison, because presumably in prison, you don't have to

00:10:01.440 actually decide anything. You know, you've got your regime, you've got your routine,

00:10:05.440 you're told when to get up, you're told when to exercise, you're told when to go to bed,

00:10:09.840 you're fed something, you know, you've got all your basic facilities there and that's it.

00:10:14.080 That's the end of your responsibility. I think some people perhaps quite like that abrogation

00:10:18.480 of responsibility for their own existence. I find it pretty warped, personally, I think,

00:10:23.760 but maybe some people's lives are not quite as richly rewarding as our own. And so,

00:10:31.760 I don't know, maybe they felt less of a loss at being bossed around in that way.

00:10:35.840 I mean, part of it was also, let's be fair, that the government made them absolutely terrified with

00:10:43.040 their propaganda. And then gave them money.

00:10:45.040 Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, you know, focus groups and polling will show

00:10:50.560 that terrified people are grateful if you protect them. So, if you've then put vast resources into

00:10:56.720 terrifying a population, it should be no surprise that that terrified population

00:11:00.560 thanks you for looking after them as you present it to them at the time. And that fear factor has

00:11:06.800 had a long hangover, hasn't it? I mean, I still see people walking outside with masks on and

00:11:14.880 maybe it's a bad reflection on me. There's something inside me that just really kind of rails against

00:11:19.920 that. I feel sorry for them, but I also can't understand why they think that that's going to make

00:11:25.600 any difference to their existence. And, you know, one of the things that spurred me on on this project

00:11:34.080 is because there's, of course, been a lot of criticism and there always is. I work, you know,

00:11:38.400 in the intersection of politics and media. I'm not a neutral reporter or a neutral commentator. I'm a

00:11:45.520 right of centre broadcaster and commentator. And that in itself attracts quite a lot of flack.

00:11:51.760 But one of the things that's really kept me going, as it were, is the absolute flood of letters and

00:11:59.600 emails and approaches on Twitter from ordinary people who say, thank you for exposing all of

00:12:05.200 this stuff. We knew, we thought this was what was going on. And now we know that our suspicions were

00:12:11.840 justified. And, you know, some of the letters I'm getting are so moving, profoundly moving,

00:12:18.400 you know, particularly the mother of a 16-year-old boy who took his own life during lockdown. I wrote

00:12:24.720 about her and him in the Telegraph last weekend. And, you know, these were very disempowered

00:12:33.040 individuals. It was all very well for our leaders in their lovely big houses in leafy parts of London,

00:12:40.160 with all the luxuries that made lockdown at the very worst bearable, and for many better off people,

00:12:46.880 really quite pleasurable. It was all very well for those people. But what about the single mum 1.00

00:12:52.720 living on a rough council estate in Bootle with a five-year-old, as this lady had, who has ADHD?

00:13:00.400 I'm picturing that she was in some kind of high-rise block or something like that. Anyway, they have no

00:13:06.000 garden. The only place was a local play park. And that was then cordoned off by overzealous council

00:13:13.200 officials, as we now know, entirely unnecessarily, in my view. It was soon quite obvious that the

00:13:19.760 virus wasn't going to be transmitted in play parks, really. Certainly not children, you know,

00:13:25.360 they weren't particularly vulnerable to it. So in desperation, this mother, fearing that there would

00:13:30.640 be more lockdowns, quite rightly, as it turned out, she moved house and took her family up to the

00:13:35.360 northeast, where she was unable to get her teenage son into a school. By then, of course, homeschooling

00:13:44.480 had become a lazy default for local authorities. They couldn't be bothered to find a place for her 0.81

00:13:50.160 son. This lady was not empowered. She had no agency. You know, if somebody didn't find a school 1.00

00:13:55.200 place for my children, I'd be creating merry hell. But she didn't have the means to create merry hell. 0.96

00:14:00.080 And so her son was isolated and became increasingly depressed. He put on weight,

00:14:05.200 because he was no longer playing football at school. And the long and the short,

00:14:09.280 and it is a very long and sorry tale, is that he hung himself. One day, he took himself off,

00:14:14.480 saying that he was going to go shopping, pick up a few things for tea, and he never came home.

00:14:19.760 And, you know, she said that he had become so paranoid because of the fear campaign,

00:14:26.560 that he would not even open his bedroom window for fear of the virus creeping in and getting him.

00:14:32.640 Well, look, something's gone profoundly wrong if children are reacting to a government propaganda

00:14:39.760 campaign in that way. And, you know, I am not a crier. I rarely shed tears, but I genuinely was

00:14:47.680 deeply upset by her story, because I know, not least in itself, it is a terrible story.

00:14:54.000 But because it's replicated in so many different ways across Britain, and I'm having so many of

00:14:59.280 these messages, people died.

00:15:00.800 And of course, and there are many people who suffered in many ways. And this is one of the

00:15:05.200 things we talked on the show about extensively. But Isabel, and this isn't to take anything away

00:15:11.120 from what you've just said, because I think it's really important. But I guess France's point is,

00:15:15.040 what is there in these lockdown files that will convince those people who don't agree with the

00:15:21.520 three of us, that they should?

00:15:23.600 Perhaps nothing, because I think there's something wrong with them.

00:15:26.480 Well, good to know you came here in the spirit of persuasion, Isabel.

00:15:32.000 Yeah, I mean, look, if you can't be persuaded by the content of these lockdown files that this was

00:15:38.240 just so profoundly wrong, what is going to persuade you? What more does it take? You know, we've got

00:15:44.160 tens of thousands of children who never went back to school. We've got a broken NHS. We've got

00:15:49.920 an economy in smithereens. What more evidence do you need? Do you really still think it was a good idea

00:15:55.200 to shut society down for that long, when we had a vaccine, and when the mortality rates for this

00:16:01.200 condition were not particularly high for anybody who wasn't already above the age of life expectancy?

00:16:07.360 And one of the things that came to light in the lockdown files, one of the things I actually I

00:16:11.440 found profoundly shocking was the quality of evidence that was being used to the government,

00:16:15.920 by the government to justify their decisions.

00:16:18.640 So I think another point is as much what is not discussed as what is. And it's important to point

00:16:27.360 out, and many critics quite reasonably have done, that what we have here is only Matt Hancock's

00:16:34.800 text WhatsApp messages were the people he chose to share with me. So there may have been conversations

00:16:40.640 with other individuals who he didn't want to share with me. And, you know, he was the health secretary,

00:16:46.240 so his focus was on health. He wasn't Rishi Sunak, whose WhatsApp, with lots of other people,

00:16:52.080 might have revealed a very different story. But at no point in this 2.3 million word dump of information,

00:17:01.120 which the Telegraph's team of eight people have brilliantly spent the last two months picking

00:17:07.360 through, is there any sense of Matt Hancock, and remember, he was one of the only the four that were

00:17:13.840 taking all these critical decisions, worrying about the collateral damage of the policies he was

00:17:20.560 pursuing, or really troubling over the cost benefit analysis. You know, he was not continually saying,

00:17:30.880 well, hang on a minute, if we do this, yes, it may ostensibly and in the short term be deemed to be

00:17:39.280 saving lives. But what about the lives further down the line? And in fact, there was a minister,

00:17:45.680 a junior health minister, James Bethel, who did actually flag these things up on a number of

00:17:51.280 occasions, quite interestingly, he talked a lot about what was happening, for example, with clinical trials,

00:17:56.480 you know, that they basically juddered to a halt for anything other than COVID vaccines. Well,

00:18:01.920 that really matters. You know, if we've stopped investigating and trying to find new cancer

00:18:07.600 treatments, new treatments for Alzheimer's, new treatments for all the other desperately awful

00:18:13.360 diseases that ruin lives, for the best part of two years, that research stops, that's a serious matter.

00:18:21.200 And to give James Bethel his due, he pushed on that quite repeatedly. But Matt Hancock didn't seem to have

00:18:26.960 much interest. I think he paid lip service to that. But to be fair, probably didn't have the

00:18:32.000 bandwidth for anything more than his immediate objective.

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00:19:00.720 Princess of Wales Theatre. Get tickets at Mervish.com. Well, that was one of my principal concerns

00:19:07.760 throughout the pandemic, really, is I don't remember a single time anyone standing up at a prime

00:19:12.640 minister's press conference and saying, how many people are these policies going to kill? Because if you

00:19:18.400 don't know the answer to that question, how can you possibly make the decision to lock down?

00:19:23.120 So, I think it's a really bad look. And although they've done it to me, I don't particularly want

00:19:28.160 to do it to them for journalists to criticise other journalists. But anyway, I'm going to do it.

00:19:35.360 I think that there were a few of us on the sceptical side who watched those press conferences

00:19:43.360 in some despair at the lack of scepticism, the lack of critical approach towards the policies that were

00:19:54.080 being unveiled. You know, I think that very few journalists did anything other than in a sense,

00:20:00.560 practically goad the government on to go ever harder. Now, I worked in the lobby for many years as a

00:20:08.080 Sunday Times political editor. I know the psychology of the political press pack. And I've been part of

00:20:15.040 it. And it's always to get the kind of more extreme and the worst story. It's not actually your agenda

00:20:21.440 as a political journalist in the lobby, it's not actually producing good, it's producing the best

00:20:28.560 possible story, which is usually the worst thing happening, or trying to get resignations or

00:20:34.160 something. And I'm, I've been part of that. So I understand how it works, you know, the desire to

00:20:39.680 get a scalp or the desire to say more bad things are coming. And I think it warps the approach, you

00:20:46.240 know, it's not a, it's not a trigonometry style discussion, you know, looking at the ups and downs,

00:20:53.200 on the one hand and on the other, it's boom, boom, boom, and off we go to file our copy. And I'm not

00:20:58.640 abrogating my responsibility for having been part of that in the past. But those journalists did not

00:21:05.280 ask the questions that, for example, Julia Hartley Brewer was asking on talk radio day in, day out,

00:21:12.320 you know, and she was quite a lone voice. And Isabel, Douglas Murray made the point when we were talking,

00:21:18.640 when we did an interview with him during the pandemic. And he said part of the problem is the

00:21:23.440 fact that a lot of journalists don't have a scientific background. So they're not able to

00:21:28.560 interrogate the data properly. Well, and I certainly don't have a scientific background,

00:21:33.040 as people repeatedly remind me. And there was a lot of that, wasn't there? Anyone who criticised

00:21:39.520 anything to do with the response, you would get a pile on saying, well, you're not a doctor,

00:21:44.560 you're not an epidemiologist, I'm not taking any lessons from you. You don't necessarily have to be

00:21:50.960 an epidemiologist to work out that shutting up a lot of people, locking them down, only allowing them

00:21:59.280 out for an hour of exercise and threatening to criminalise them for sitting in a public park,

00:22:05.200 or sunbathing has happened, or going for a walk on their own in the hills, is going to have a pretty

00:22:12.240 awful effect on everybody's psychology and on the businesses that are shut. You know, that isn't,

00:22:18.400 it doesn't take an expert to work that out. And if you turn the whole of the NHS,

00:22:22.480 if you've pivoted it to being a COVID emergency service, then probably other conditions are going

00:22:29.520 to suffer. And Isabel, we're looking at and analysing the decisions and the behaviour of government,

00:22:35.360 essentially, with these lockdown files. What percentage of this do you think are just mistakes,

00:22:40.240 which any government can make, particularly in that time, ranking competence, and also as well,

00:22:46.240 something a little bit more sinister, which I got a little bit of with those messages,

00:22:51.840 which is a sneering contempt, if I'm honest. I love the way you said ranking competence. It

00:22:56.720 just kind of rolled off your tongue there. He's been practising that for a long time. I know,

00:23:00.400 I know. It's just a phrase we use quite a lot. Yeah, I'm learning how to drive. It's something that

00:23:04.720 I've heard many times by my instructor. There's a mixture of all of that,

00:23:09.680 isn't there? You know, I've always wanted to believe and I've generally believed that politicians

00:23:14.400 start out genuinely wanting to do good. Maybe that's a bit naive of me. But, you know, having

00:23:20.000 worked around politicians for nearly two decades, most of them do want to change things for the

00:23:25.920 better. They're coming from a position of wanting to try and make people's lives better. And I have no

00:23:32.560 doubt that the then House Secretary, Matt Hancock, was desperately trying to contain the crisis in the

00:23:41.760 way he saw best fit with the evidence that he had available at the time to begin with. Now, after that,

00:23:50.560 I think that there was some loss of perspective, frankly, a near complete loss of any sense of

00:23:58.480 proportionality. And you can imagine why that happened. You know, if you've created the conditions

00:24:05.200 in which you are basically in a bunker, and normal life has all but disappeared, then of course,

00:24:12.080 judgments are going to be warped. I'm not saying I would have done brilliantly in those circumstances,

00:24:17.520 which one of us would have. It's always easier to cut from the sidelines. I'm certain I wouldn't

00:24:22.400 have done many of the things they did. I mean, there are certain things that still really rankle

00:24:27.840 with me, in particular, the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, actively encouraging people in this

00:24:36.160 country to snoop and spy on their neighbours and to report them for breaches of COVID restrictions.

00:24:42.800 I thought that that coming from a Home Secretary of a Conservative government was utterly unforgivable.

00:24:51.040 I thought that it encouraged a grotesque culture in this country, which had real consequences. You

00:24:58.560 know, I had two police officers come to my door on Easter Day 2021. You know, what a woeful use of

00:25:06.080 police resources sending two cops to check that I was self-isolating. You know, my partner had the

00:25:12.480 police turn up twice at his property. These stories are everywhere, aren't they? Rachel Johnson,

00:25:18.000 the Prime Minister's own sister, wrote for The Telegraph a few days ago about how the cops turned

00:25:22.640 up at her property. You know, I just think this is awful. And generally, they were acting on tip-offs.

00:25:28.480 What kind of country is this? Is that what kind of country any government should be promoting?

00:25:34.080 Well, I mean, you're making a lot of good points. Your colleague at The Telegraph,

00:25:42.000 or temporary colleague, I should say, Shirelle Jacobs, she wrote a very interesting article recently,

00:25:48.480 in which she essentially talked about how rather than looking at this as a sort of

00:25:53.520 the government getting more power and getting power drunk, actually, what they were responding to,

00:25:59.040 and that's why I made the point about the journalist, is imagine you are Boris Johnson and Matt

00:26:03.520 Hancock. And you're like looking out at a journalist lobby who are all demanding harder,

00:26:07.840 deeper, faster lockdowns. And the polling all shows, I mean, if you still believe polling,

00:26:13.200 that's what the public want. What are you supposed to do?

00:26:18.240 Well, let me provide a really simple answer, and it is to provide leadership. That's what you're

00:26:25.200 supposed to do. You know, you're not supposed to just respond to obeying mob, are you? You're there

00:26:32.080 because you're a leader. You're there to do better than that.

00:26:34.480 You're right. And the most stunning absence of leadership for me was watching their capitulation

00:26:42.800 to Nicola Sturgeon. And that, I think, is such a, I mean, it's a bit of a pointy head,

00:26:48.080 sort of political obsession, but it is really interesting. And tell people who are not familiar,

00:26:54.480 Isabel, what actually happened. Yeah, let me explain that throughout these messages,

00:26:59.040 these WhatsApp messages, there is a continual long-running anxiety about the devolved

00:27:06.800 administrations, in particular what was going on in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon, who is a

00:27:12.720 formidable politician, whatever you think of what she wants to do, which is namely break up the union, 0.99

00:27:20.000 she is a very, very good political operator. And she was very often one step ahead of Downing Street,

00:27:28.640 and, you know, very keen to be one step ahead. And that actually distorted the way they responded,

00:27:34.400 because they were continually worrying, what's Nicola going to do next? How's Nicola going to

00:27:38.880 exploit this? Is Nicola going to leak the details of this conversation or that conversation? It has a

00:27:44.560 really kind of detrimental, I think, really negative effect on the overall pandemic response. But

00:27:51.280 I think also, actually, the government was quite right to be worried about what Nicola Sturgeon might

00:27:56.640 do. And I think they, in their defence, they tried very hard to work together with the devolved

00:28:02.000 administrations. But in the end, you know, Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP had an agenda of their own.

00:28:08.160 And what was that agenda?

00:28:09.120 Well, her agenda is to promote the cause of independence. She was also, I'm not saying

00:28:14.480 she wasn't trying to save lives, first and foremost, but she also allied with that is what

00:28:20.560 she's there to do, her core offer, which is break up the United Kingdom. She's not suddenly going to

00:28:25.680 forget that.

00:28:26.560 And Isabel, but I really want to talk about the masking situations in schools.

00:28:31.680 Oh, yeah.

00:28:32.160 Because they did back down to her. And the only reason they backed down to her

00:28:35.920 is because they were scared of getting into an argument or a fight with her, really.

00:28:39.040 Yes. I mean, they didn't want, you know, I'm going to be paraphrasing here because I can't

00:28:42.720 remember exactly what was said. But effectively, Nicola Sturgeon had announced one policy which

00:28:47.760 involved a lot of mask wearing in schools. The UK government didn't really think that there was

00:28:52.880 much of a case for that. But they also thought that maybe it wouldn't do much harm either.

00:28:57.360 They didn't really want a row or a split with Nicola Sturgeon, because if they'd gone a different

00:29:01.680 way, they would have been forced to say either she's got it wrong, or, you know, we're going to

00:29:08.080 have to accept that we're doing it anyway, just to avoid that kind of political spat. And they just,

00:29:15.360 the path of least resistance, that's what they took, the path of least resistance.

00:29:19.840 I hate masks. I think that they are insidious. I think the idea that they

00:29:24.240 do no harm is a false one, actually. I think they do all sorts of harm. I want to be able to see

00:29:30.320 people's faces, please. I think that's the society that we live in. And, you know, if people really

00:29:36.240 want to go around with a piece of grubby cloth over their face, which does very, very little,

00:29:40.720 if it's a kind of medical grade thing, then perhaps in a free and liberal society,

00:29:46.480 we should let them do so, just as we let people go around with very flimsy clothes

00:29:51.200 on or whatever else they may want to wear, you know, spikes.

00:29:54.000 She looked at me there.

00:29:57.440 That could be your next episode.

00:29:59.840 Well, we lose all of our subscribers.

00:30:01.520 So, look, if people want to wear a mask, well, I don't like it, but, you know, maybe that's

00:30:07.840 up to them. But to say that there's no harm in forcing children to do so, I think it's just

00:30:14.000 untrue. You know, my son was made to wear masks, you know, like every other child is a teenager at

00:30:20.560 the time. And there's pictures of him, school photograph, they've all got masks on. It's grotesque.

00:30:25.520 And it made no practical sense because, you know, a former guest of ours, Catherine Burble-Singh,

00:30:29.920 who runs a school.

00:30:30.800 We love Catherine.

00:30:32.640 We all do, of course. She's brilliant. But she was like, have you met kids?

00:30:36.800 You think you're going to force teenagers to wear masks all day in the classroom? That is not how

00:30:41.040 this is going to go down. And she's a strict headmistress as well, you know. So it just, it

00:30:46.960 seemed impractical. Isabel, I want to move on slightly somewhat to the COVID inquiry.

00:30:53.280 Yes, that's really important. Well, it is really important. And I have to say,

00:30:56.880 Or rather it should be. Well, quite. Because until the revelations that you've been

00:31:03.840 at the head of with this, I have to say, I think the consensus among people who think

00:31:09.120 like us has been, they're not, it's going to take bloody ages. It's not going to find anything.

00:31:14.080 It's going to be, I mean, it's going to be like, no one knows who killed JFK. No one knows

00:31:19.440 what happened with Iraq. We're not, we're not going to find anything out. Was that also your

00:31:24.160 view? And is that part of the rationale for releasing these? This is one of the, if not

00:31:29.040 the key driving force for doing this, because of course, if the COVID inquiry was about to wrap up,

00:31:35.040 or if it could realistically be expected to conclude, for example, by the end of this year, or even,

00:31:42.160 let's say, by the end of next year, if we could have confidence and faith that that is going to

00:31:47.120 happen, then there would have been a much greater ethical dilemma over whether or not to release

00:31:54.080 these messages, because it could arguably have been much more difficult to defend the public

00:32:01.760 interest in doing so, if they were all going to be examined along with all the other messages and

00:32:07.760 evidence that needs to be taken into account by a judge in an objective, you know, proper fashion,

00:32:14.240 then that would perhaps be best left to that process. The problem is that the COVID inquiry has

00:32:22.880 an insanely expansive remit. I've read it. I'm amazed that very few journalists have actually

00:32:29.680 bothered to do this, but if you actually sit and read the remit, you know, I could say that it would

00:32:34.800 take at least a year to cover each area. There's about 30 areas. I mean, this poor judge is being

00:32:41.920 asked to cover every single aspect of the inquiry, and some should also be in there. If you're going

00:32:48.640 to go for everything, then also, there should be more areas covered. I think the only way to manage

00:32:54.960 this is to pare it right back in the way that the Swedes did. They produced, they got their inquiry

00:33:00.800 underway quickly. They've already produced a report. They did it efficiently. They didn't

00:33:06.000 try to do everything. They paired it back to the key lessons to be learned. And that's what we should

00:33:11.040 do. And, you know, if that were to happen, then I probably wouldn't have done what I've done here

00:33:18.080 and put these messages in the public domain. But I have no confidence in the timeframe for that process.

00:33:23.680 There's no deadline, by the way. Nobody should be deceived about this. There is no deadline.

00:33:29.440 Well, it sounds then pretty much like unless more stuff comes out of the nails, unless more people...

00:33:35.040 I hope it does.

00:33:36.080 Well, quite, because I just don't think we're going to get to the bottom of it, the way that

00:33:41.280 things are currently set up.

00:33:42.880 No, but then ordinary people are not really, they don't really have the capability, the resources to

00:33:50.080 kind of sift through the information. So... Neither do I. I mean, who does? You know,

00:33:54.560 we couldn't, in the process of writing Matt's book, you know, Matt and I didn't have the resources to

00:34:00.640 go through 2.3 million messages. You know, that is not any kinds of small undertaking. You took

00:34:06.160 Telegraph eight people full-time two months to go through it all, cross-reffing it with graphs and

00:34:12.960 what's in the public domain and so on. Huge operation. Well, you think that's a tiny fraction of the overall

00:34:18.960 COVID evidence. You know, how are we supposed to approach this? And yet, and yet it is so

00:34:26.640 important that some attempt is made. So pair it back, give it a realistic time frame and get on

00:34:33.600 with it and stop hiring masses of lawyers to protect vested interests. These lawyers are on contracts that

00:34:40.640 last five years or more. That gives you some indication of how long we're going to be here.

00:34:45.120 Yeah. We do the podcast again when it's recorded. I'm booking in now.

00:34:51.760 And what was he like, Matt Hancock? Because there's a lot of people who are very upset and very angry

00:34:57.120 of him, quite rightly so, in my opinion. But he's still a human being. I think that, you know, there's

00:35:02.720 a lot of people who dress him up as a villain of the piece, unthinking, uncaring, narcissistic, etc.

00:35:08.240 I don't think he's a monster any more than I'm a monster. I think he's highly capable, highly intelligent.

00:35:15.920 I found him really good to work with, by and large. Very, very good manager. Phenomenally

00:35:23.920 hardworking. And I love working with clever people. You know, he's a very, very able person.

00:35:29.120 And so that's that those are the good things that I want to say. I don't know.

00:35:36.560 You're the politician now. That's it. It's not. Yeah. Fair enough.

00:35:42.320 That sounds like damning with fame, praise. I don't I've never wanted this to be about

00:35:47.120 Matt Hancock as a bad guy. It is so much bigger than that, isn't it? And it's not about me being

00:35:53.120 the good guy or the bad guy either. Although there's been a lot of that. But really, guys,

00:35:57.600 it isn't about me and it isn't about him. Look at the material and make your mind up as to whether

00:36:04.880 on balance we are better off knowing it. I believe overwhelmingly that we are. And it's as simple as

00:36:10.560 that. You've made me feel somewhat sorry for him, actually, because I'm sitting here thinking, well,

00:36:14.320 what if they release Boris Johnson's messages? I imagine there's some some good stuff in there.

00:36:19.200 To be honest, you better, mate. Yeah. So so it's you. We've got like a little tiny window into this

00:36:26.080 bigger picture and Matt Hancock. Yeah. You know, he was at the center, of course,

00:36:29.680 to a large extent. But still. And you mentioned your own role in this and the way that you've been

00:36:36.000 in the spotlight, which I have to say, maybe I'm probably naive and stupid, but has surprised me 0.72

00:36:42.160 the way people have come after you, because I mean, whatever people may think about you or Matt 0.78

00:36:47.520 Hancock. I mean, this is clearly in the public interest, is it not? I mean, where's the argument?

00:36:51.840 I mean, I think it's absolutely laughable to suggest that it isn't. It's just laughable.

00:36:56.560 How can you possibly suggest that we should not know how these profoundly important decisions were

00:37:04.240 being taken? Of course we should know that. So why, why, why is, I mean, I mean, Cathy Newman,

00:37:09.120 I've got a lot of things to say on, but I won't. Please do.

00:37:15.360 I said it on Twitter. It's true. Her only discernible talent is to ask irrelevant questions with a straight 0.99

00:37:20.320 face and pretend like she's doing something meaningful. She didn't have a straight face. 0.96

00:37:23.920 She had a face that was all about showboating and trying to look clever versus me, you know, 0.98

00:37:29.440 trying to make me look bad. But anyway, what a lot of journalists try to do with you is to say,

00:37:34.480 you know, you work for Talk TV. Why did you publish with the Telegraph? It's for money. It's for this.

00:37:39.120 It's for attention. And look, Francis and I were having this discussion earlier today

00:37:43.600 when we were sort of discussing how to handle the interview. And I was sort of saying,

00:37:47.520 I don't really care what your motivation is for releasing this information because the

00:37:52.000 information is important. If you did it for money or for attention, I don't care.

00:37:56.640 And also people's motivations are complex. People can be interested in the thing

00:38:01.920 and themselves at the same time. And that's how life works usually.

00:38:04.960 Sure. I mean, I think my motivations are pretty obvious. I mean, I was a vocal critic of lockdown policy,

00:38:12.240 not from day one, because, you know, we were talking earlier about the fact that I think most of us went

00:38:18.160 along with the first initial lockdown, whatever it was, three weeks to flatten the sombrero,

00:38:22.960 whatever it was we were told. But beyond that, I was a very vocal critic of it all.

00:38:28.640 And so what could be more important if you're a journalist than getting to the truth of matters

00:38:37.440 that matter to you and to huge numbers of people? It's not some niche thing worrying about how we

00:38:43.040 responded to the pandemic. It's something that affects every single person to this day in different

00:38:48.720 ways. So my motivation working with Matt Hancock in the first place was to get as close to the truth

00:38:56.240 as I could. What better way than to work with him on his project? As it happened, I got rather more

00:39:03.120 information than I expected. And in fairness to him, he, and I've said this many a time,

00:39:09.440 he did lean towards disclosure, not everything. I mean, you know, it was his book after all. It was

00:39:14.800 his truth. But I didn't find him trying to deliberately, you know, to trying to cover up a

00:39:21.360 load of stuff that he didn't want me to say. I get the sense you feel sorry for him.

00:39:27.600 Oh, wow. That's an interesting question. No, I don't feel sorry for him. And I'm

00:39:31.120 certain he won't feel sorry for me. No, I don't imagine he will.

00:39:34.080 But yeah, no, but I want to be really fair here and acknowledge the pressure that he was under,

00:39:39.600 acknowledge the enormous sacrifices that he made. And, you know, he or his allies listening to this

00:39:45.680 will probably say how nauseating she's sitting there saying that, having blown him up.

00:39:50.160 But you're asking me if I feel sorry for him. No, but I want to acknowledge that he is a person.

00:39:55.040 And he's worked really, really, really bloody hard. And he paid a very high price, personal price.

00:40:01.120 Francis, before you jump in, I should just say, we'll do another 5-10 minutes of chat. And then

00:40:05.440 send in your questions, Superchats, PayPal's, and we'll pick a bunch and ask Isabel a few of them

00:40:11.360 after the break in about 5-10 minutes. Go for a minute.

00:40:14.560 Do you think we have learned our lessons from COVID? Or, as there will be another pandemic,

00:40:20.800 are we doomed to make the same mistakes all over again?

00:40:23.360 I do really worry about what you pointed out earlier, which is the number of people who

00:40:31.840 still want to be locked down. Yeah. I mean, and there are real worries too, on the flip side,

00:40:40.640 that if another pandemic comes, and it really is an absolute horror disease, not that COVID wasn't

00:40:48.400 for some people. I really have to emphasise, I've never said, this isn't a hideous virus,

00:40:55.200 and I was quite scared of it at the beginning. But the worry is, let's say we get something which

00:41:00.560 is as deadly to people of all ages as, for example, Ebola. The worry now is that people will feel that

00:41:08.160 they were duped by this government, and they were about a number of things. They will feel that they

00:41:14.160 were laughed at and mocked, and that those making those decisions were not following themselves,

00:41:20.400 which we know from the so-called Partygate affair. And they will not go along with it next time.

00:41:27.680 So that's the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is something, hopefully we don't get

00:41:32.480 any more of these, but that's probably not realistic. If there is another, in a dreadful

00:41:38.080 event, there is another pandemic. People this time, and I don't mean those who aren't in a position to do

00:41:44.640 anything about it, but those of us that have positions in which we can hold a government to account,

00:41:50.800 will ask more searching questions. And the politicians around them, our elected representatives,

00:41:58.320 will not allow power to be seized by a small group of people who continually awarded themselves

00:42:06.320 more extensions of power. And that our elected representatives put up more of a fight or a

00:42:13.520 challenge to things that they feel aren't quite substantiated.

00:42:18.880 So one of the frustrations for me was the way protesters were treated in completely different

00:42:25.120 ways. So you had the BLM protests, which happened during lockdown, and that happened,

00:42:31.040 and everyone seemed to be fine with it. And then you had anti-lockdown protesters.

00:42:35.360 Yeah, and that was obviously completely abhorrent, wasn't it? And not to be accepted,

00:42:40.000 and the police should be dispatched forthwith. Yeah, look, it was ever thus, double standard.

00:42:45.920 Isabel, on the BLM, I mean, people know... There's quite a lot about that in the messages,

00:42:52.000 by the way. Has that already been released? Because I haven't seen those.

00:42:56.400 Because there's been a lot of coverage. I think that there may still be some stuff to come on that

00:43:01.280 area. Well, I was going to ask you about this, because I have to say, look, whatever you think

00:43:04.960 of BLM, and people know what I think about that organization, that's fine, right? People can be pro,

00:43:09.360 anti-whatever. That, for many people that I know, was the moment when they went,

00:43:14.160 hold on a minute. We've just been locked in our houses for three months, and now, because there

00:43:19.280 is a good cause, and you can believe it's a good cause, that's fine. People are allowed to protest

00:43:24.800 in their thousands, no masks, no social distancing in the streets of London, despite the lockdown that

00:43:31.360 we still have in place. What did we learn from your revelations about that moment? What were they

00:43:38.320 saying? What was the conversation like? Well, you're now testing me, because I can't actually

00:43:42.960 remember. Okay, fair enough. There's so much stuff. You know, in this volume of material,

00:43:49.760 which is sort of several times the size of the Bible, it wasn't an area that Matt and I focused on

00:43:57.360 in his book. But what I do remember very clearly was the Health Secretary pushing the Cabinet Office to go

00:44:05.120 further in terms of not allowing public protest. And I think it ended up that, you know, maybe six

00:44:11.680 people could kind of go along at very socially distance intervals and make their feelings known.

00:44:17.840 I mean, I thought this was one of the most shocking aspects of the whole response to the pandemic. If we

00:44:23.040 lose our fundamental right to protest, sorry, how are we any better than the worst of the dictatorships?

00:44:30.160 I mean, that seems to me, if ordinary people cannot gather on a street or outside a politician's

00:44:38.720 place of work and actually make their feelings known in the most direct and peaceful manner that

00:44:45.760 we've always been allowed to do throughout modern history, we've lost pretty much everything, haven't we?

00:44:51.920 Well, there were a number of cabinet ministers and government advisers who quite approved of the

00:44:57.520 way China did things. Let's be brutally honest about it. So, yes, there were. I mean, here's looking 1.00

00:45:03.040 at you, Jeremy Hunt. You know, the chancellor now was one of the main people behind the scenes who was

00:45:09.520 kind of pushing for aspects of the very sinister Chinese response. I mean, I personally felt mandatory hotel 1.00

00:45:18.320 quarantine for which people were charged an absolutely disgraceful amount was an abhorrent thing.

00:45:26.640 And, you know, the government had to

00:45:30.240 create very special laws in order to be able to do that, you know, to force people into that type

00:45:35.520 of accommodation, into, you know, single rooms in which they were kept for a week or two weeks or

00:45:40.560 whatever it was and charged an absolute fortune for the benefit. I don't understand why anyone

00:45:45.440 ever got themselves into a situation where they actually went into that mandatory hotel quarantine

00:45:51.680 at places like Heathrow and Gatwick, but you can only imagine that they must have been in dreadful

00:45:57.120 circumstances for that to be upon them. And also, as well, the glee with some of the jokes that were

00:46:03.440 shared on the WhatsApp at the fact that these people had to pay such massive sums of money.

00:46:08.000 And remember, it wasn't just that that people were fleeced on, because I think they were fleeced,

00:46:13.600 they were fleeced on all these absurd, repetitive COVID tests. You know, you have to have a package,

00:46:20.880 that hideous word, you know, making it sound as if you're getting something good.

00:46:25.280 And for your huge amount of, you know, massive profit margin for the companies involved, you know,

00:46:32.640 the profit margins on those mandatory COVID tests were grotesque. They were, you know, you go to other

00:46:38.960 countries and they give it to you for virtually nothing, have it processed in no time whatsoever,

00:46:44.480 and off you are, off you go on your way. Here you had to pay £90 for the benefit of something

00:46:50.160 telling you you were perfectly well as you likely knew you were to begin with. Time and again,

00:46:55.360 a COVID test before you left, a COVID test after you left, another one three days in, you know,

00:47:01.120 honestly, absolute racket. Isabel, let me ask you a party political question, because you described

00:47:07.760 yourself earlier as a right of centre journalist. This was done by a conservative party. Conservatives

00:47:14.320 are supposed to not want the government to interfere in people's lives too much and just let them crack

00:47:18.640 on with it. Pretty disillusioning, right? Well, so where does that leave people like you? Well,

00:47:23.920 I've never been a member of any political party. I think I'm a small c conservative. I'm not far

00:47:30.320 right, as some people like to claim you laugh, but honestly, I had an article this morning that was

00:47:36.800 absolutely outrageously defamatory. I had to get that taken down, describing me as a fascist.

00:47:43.040 I don't even believe in capital punishment. I'm completely liberal on some of these issues.

00:47:48.960 Where does it leave us? I think it leaves us pretty despairing, actually. I don't really want to get

00:47:54.560 into party politics, but since you asked, I'd have to say the reform party run by my partner,

00:47:59.600 Richard Tyson, is the only party that consistently opposed lockdown.

00:48:07.280 Well, on that happy note, why don't we have a quick break, get some questions from our audience,

00:48:12.080 and we'll put them to you. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you for submitting your

00:48:16.160 questions. We're going to put them to Isabel, and then, of course, we'll record a couple of

00:48:19.760 bonus questions for those of you who are on Locals. You've already submitted your questions there.

00:48:23.840 We'll do those afterwards. But for now, Francis, take it away.

00:48:26.320 Absolutely. So, the first question is from DC. Thank you very much, DC. And they ask,

00:48:31.840 and they ask, how do we ensure the fourth estate flourishes in the future? It is in decline with

00:48:37.200 social media. Print journalism is declining. Big tech supports governments to avoid regulation and run

00:48:45.680 social media. It's a really good question. And for me, you know, I've been in print media for a

00:48:51.360 really long time since the late 90s. And I've watched investigative journalism, in particular,

00:48:58.080 really decline. And the reason for that is because it's highly resource intensive. And often,

00:49:03.200 you know, if you are doing a kind of covert operation, it's very, very expensive, you know,

00:49:10.720 and it saps up resources for an uncertain outcome. There was a possibility, for example,

00:49:16.480 with the Telegraph investigation, that the company could have put eight weeks of eight of its best

00:49:23.440 reporters working full time on this project only for something completely out of the company's

00:49:29.840 control, the news organisation's control, to derail the investigation so that it didn't get published,

00:49:36.080 whether it was a successful injunction by the government. Now, that's not totally out of the

00:49:41.520 control of a newspaper, because you can make damn sure that you've got grounds for that not to happen.

00:49:47.600 But you know, who knows what could have happened, there could have been war breaking out somewhere,

00:49:51.440 all sorts of things, in which case, the investment that a paper makes has been completely obliterated.

00:49:57.520 So very diminishing number of organisations have these resources. Where the traditional papers have

00:50:06.320 lost those resources, we see other organisations springing up doing their own kinds of

00:50:10.880 investigations. Often those may have some kind of political agenda. And, you know, you can argue

00:50:17.440 about whether it is a good or a good, a good or a bad thing, that those investigations come out,

00:50:22.480 because they may be biased. But what has been heartening about this operation that I ve been

00:50:28.880 involved in is that there are still traditional papers, like the Telegraph, the Sunday Times too,

00:50:34.240 have to say, that will put big resources into investigations in the overwhelming public interest.

00:50:42.080 So all hope isn't gone. But people need to continue buying newspapers or newspaper subscriptions.

00:50:49.120 Otherwise, it does just narrow down to smaller organisations, which are not kind of

00:50:55.760 of so easily scrutinised in terms of who funds them and what their agenda may be.

00:51:02.320 And to be fair to The Guardian, they did some great work exposing Michelle Moan.

00:51:06.720 I've no interest in being fair to The Guardian.

00:51:10.080 They've never, ever been fair to me.

00:51:13.840 There you go. Nudge Wink Wink, however, with the Fiverr, is very interested in being fair to you.

00:51:19.520 And he says, please tell Isabel she has done a vital service for the country

00:51:23.040 in releasing these messages. And thank you.

00:51:25.200 Thank you.

00:51:25.840 Now, yes, this is a good question from someone whose name I will not read out. It says,

00:51:33.040 does Isabel have more messages that haven't been released yet? And we were talking in the break

00:51:37.440 that there are going to be further.

00:51:38.720 Yeah, so we've got some days left of this investigation. I ve also faced quite a few

00:51:43.600 questions that have come through my Twitter and on my website as to why we don't just release them all.

00:51:51.280 And there's a really good reason for that. And that is because they're full of private information

00:51:56.880 that isn't in the public interest. I mean, most of it, by the way, is pretty trivial, really trivial,

00:52:02.880 actually. But it wouldn't be right to chuck out there a load of civil servants' names and addresses

00:52:09.280 and telephone numbers and, you know, who they're going on a date with and what they thought of so-and-so.

00:52:14.880 You know, the Telegraph has been meticulous at all times in their public interest threshold

00:52:21.760 for inclusion of material. And that feels like the right thing to do.

00:52:26.640 Shoving it all out there on the internet like some kind of, you know, I don't know, irresponsible

00:52:32.160 whistleblower doesn't feel right to me. Marky Mark asks a question. Scientists are bad at politics.

00:52:39.120 Politicians are mostly terrible at scientists at science. Sorry. Journalists are mostly awful at

00:52:44.000 science. We're very bad at maths as well. I've just noticed that over the years. 0.66

00:52:49.040 So how do we provide any credible form of narrative with that being the case?

00:52:55.760 Good question. And how are journalists not taken advantage of by clever scientists and other clever

00:53:00.720 people? Because in some ways, I think that is part of, is and was part of the problem, you know,

00:53:06.080 in those lobby briefings during the pandemic where we had Chris Whitty, very eminent,

00:53:11.920 hugely knowledgeable, talking to a bunch of journalists like myself that don't have the

00:53:18.480 knowledge, you know, specialised knowledge to come back. That is, that is, there's a sort of inbuilt

00:53:24.560 floor to that structural floor, I suppose. I mean, what you could say in the context of a pandemic,

00:53:31.120 I think that there needs to be a much, sort of, more carefully constructed group of advisors. It's

00:53:39.360 not for journalists. They're never going to make us all scientific experts. But I think what went

00:53:44.400 wrong, one of the key things that went wrong during the pandemic, and this is on Matt Hancock and the

00:53:49.760 people around him, was the suppression of information and the smearing of dissenters.

00:53:56.720 Including scientists, by the way, Sinatra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya, etc.

00:54:01.520 I'm sorry, I really think that was grotesque. You know, these people that came up with an

00:54:07.360 alternative way of dealing with the virus should have been respected, they should have been listened

00:54:12.320 to. They were very, very distinguished figures that led that so-called Barrington Declaration,

00:54:19.440 the kind of prospectors for how things could be done differently. And they were utterly vilified,

00:54:25.120 and the government used every tool it had to vilify and discredit and undermine those people. And those

00:54:32.640 people paid a really high price in career terms, in personal terms. I think that that was appalling,

00:54:39.280 disgraceful, shameful, and it should never happen again.

00:54:43.040 I agree. This is a bit of a weird question from Nick, so feel free to ignore it. He says,

00:54:48.000 Matt Hancock just recently did an interview with Good Morning Britain, where he repeatedly

00:54:53.040 posited that there would be another pandemic. Do you know why he's sort of persuaded about that?

00:54:58.960 I think what the person who's asked that question is getting at is, does he have some secret

00:55:04.320 knowledge that another pandemic is coming? And I don't know if he has any secret knowledge, but I'm

00:55:11.440 going to say almost certainly not. I think that what he is saying is that the way our world is now,

00:55:19.840 so very interconnected with so much global movement at all times, that it's highly likely that there will

00:55:27.520 be some other virus, something else that is like COVID, hopefully not a lot worse. But you'd be a fool 1.00

00:55:36.560 to sit here and say, well, I don't think that's going to happen again, which is why it's so urgent. 0.99

00:55:40.240 That's what I said the first time. I said, it's just a bit of flu. Everyone needs to calm down.

00:55:44.080 It didn't work out that way. Well, I think a lot of people said that.

00:55:50.000 So, and this is a really interesting question from Mr. Steve. He says, Isabel,

00:55:53.680 thank you very much. For how long roughly will the paper, the Telegraph, be published in the

00:55:58.640 lockdown files? In brackets, I need to budget. I love that. We all need to budget. Budget time,

00:56:06.480 apart from anything else. I think it's really important with any newspaper kind of expose like this,

00:56:12.240 that you don't flog it forever. You know, you've got to quit while you're ahead. You've got to know

00:56:17.360 when's the time that you've, you know, you've made the case. And the Telegraph was not trying

00:56:22.640 to make the case. Probably I was a bit, but the Telegraph is just about putting the information out

00:56:28.240 there. But you don't want to kind of squeeze it for every pip, I don't think. You've got to maintain

00:56:35.120 in any journalistic endeavour, you know, your quality. So, I think the paper will keep running

00:56:41.760 it for as long as the paper thinks that there is material there that is in very strong public

00:56:47.760 interest. And after that, you know, sometimes stories, as we've already seen, they have a life

00:56:52.240 of their own. You know, it depends where the politics of this goes. It depends whether,

00:56:57.200 could there, for example, be any kind of prosecutions? I'm not saying that there should be,

00:57:02.320 but there are certainly plenty of people who still want accountability for what happened.

00:57:07.280 I don't personally feel the need for, you know, for blood. I don't feel, I don't feel that gets us

00:57:14.320 anywhere. But I do understand the visceral kind of anger amongst people who suffered so profoundly,

00:57:20.720 perhaps people who were forced to say goodbye to loved ones over iPads. I mean, this is just

00:57:27.440 beyond comprehension. And we have many people write in to make that very point. You know,

00:57:31.440 when you have an audience of people who can write directly in, you hear a lot of stories.

00:57:36.400 Yeah. And those are the stories that have come to me. Yeah. And these policies had a real impact

00:57:41.280 on people. So, you can understand why they're angry. And I do agree with you, going out for blood is not

00:57:46.080 what we want. But what I think people do want is, as we talked about earlier, making sure this never

00:57:50.880 happens again in the same way. And that's what I want. You know, people ask, do I have an agenda? Yes.

00:57:56.320 My agenda is that never again does our country, and I hope no other country does it either,

00:58:03.120 go down this route in such an ill-informed, cack-handed, and at times, deeply sinister fashion.

00:58:11.600 Well, we'll ask a couple more, and then we will wrap up. June Hope says, is there anything that

00:58:17.760 you'll be releasing, and again, this may be testing your memory after a long couple of weeks,

00:58:22.320 anything about the sacking of carers who refuse to get vaccinated? There's some 40,000.

00:58:30.000 Yeah, really good question. I mean, I know that there is material in the WhatsApps about that,

00:58:37.200 about whether or not that policy would be sustainable. In fact, very early on in the messages,

00:58:43.360 and this is actually in Matt's book, so I can talk about it quite freely. You know, he puts on

00:58:48.240 records that he actually believes it should be mandatory to have the flu jab if you work in the

00:58:52.800 NHS. And he was saying that, you know, he had hoped to make, to implement that policy had it not been for the

00:59:00.480 coronavirus coming in and, you know, obviously distracting him with a much bigger problem. So, you know,

00:59:06.480 that's what he wanted to do. It might still happen under another leader who felt, another leader of the

00:59:12.960 health service who felt the same way. I remember that there are conversations about whether or not

00:59:19.920 it was a good idea, and whether or not essentially they could get away with doing it. And certainly

00:59:24.720 the words get away with it are not used. That's me paraphrasing it. That was a big call, you know,

00:59:30.640 to attempt to mandate vaccination. Matt Hancock had no qualms about that. He vociferously defended that

00:59:40.560 as a policy. He always argued that if you are putting yourself into a setting where people are

00:59:46.800 vulnerable, then the very least you can do is make sure that you're not unwittingly making them

00:59:52.720 sicker and more unhealthy. I happen to profoundly disagree with that. I think it crosses a line for me.

00:59:59.680 And the policy was a disaster, and they had to abandon it. It was. Do you want to do a couple

01:00:04.640 more? I thought we would. There's a couple more? Yeah, there's a couple more. Dynamite Rabbit,

01:00:09.120 great name. Says, courageous guest, great interview, best channel on earth. Couldn't agree more.

01:00:14.320 Do you think... It's just a friendly comment to say thank you. But Lady Sarcastro did ask a question,

01:00:22.160 which is, so far we've heard about Go, Hancock and Case. Does Isabel think there will be more people being

01:00:28.800 exposed as complicit in she says lying, but let's say deceiving the public just to not get sued?

01:00:35.840 Yeah, really good question. I mean, you know, we... There was a sort of question mark at the

01:00:43.840 beginning of this operation about whether you could cover the stories on a kind of person-by-person

01:00:50.000 basis, because that's how the WhatsApps came to me, you know, under names of individuals. But actually,

01:00:55.200 I think doing it thematically has worked really, really well. And I don't quite know how to answer

01:01:01.680 that question. But if the questioner is asking, are there more people who we're about to expose have

01:01:08.160 done truly dreadful things, then I think broadly the answer to that is probably no.

01:01:12.400 Okay. Isabel, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want

01:01:17.280 to find out more about you and your work, where is the best place to do that?

01:01:20.960 Well, there is a website. And also, I did check my Wikipedia and was wanting to update it and found

01:01:27.840 that it's now so many people have tried to do good and bad things to my Wikipedia page. It's now

01:01:33.040 protected, which means that only moderators can change it. So go to my website, isabeloakshot.co.uk.

01:01:41.200 Fantastic stuff. Thanks for coming on. We're gonna ask you a couple of questions that go

01:01:45.680 behind a paywall. But for now, thank you. And thank you guys for watching and listening. Join

01:01:49.280 our locals if you want to hear that bonus content. Thanks for being here live with us. Take care and

01:01:54.080 have yourselves a great morning, evening or afternoon, wherever you are. And remember,

01:01:57.520 if you want your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:02:02.640 We'll see you soon, guys.

01:02:32.640 We'll see you soon, guys.

01:02:34.640 Bye.

01:02:35.640 Bye.

01:02:36.640 Bye.

01:02:37.640 Bye.

01:02:38.640 Bye.

01:02:39.640 Bye.

01:02:41.640 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - March 08, 2023

Live with Isabel Oakeshott - Sex, Lies and Lockdowns

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