Live with Isabel Oakeshott - Sex, Lies and Lockdowns
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per minute
172.44275
Harmful content
Misogyny
9
sentences flagged
Toxicity
11
sentences flagged
Hate speech
3
sentences flagged
Summary
Isabel Oakeshawkeshaw is the journalist behind the lockdown files, a series of secret documents found in the phone of the former Health Secretary of State, Matt Hancock. She talks to us about how she got access to them, why she decided to publish them, and what it took to get them out there.
Transcript
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
00:00:10.720
That's what I called myself after winning a particularly intense game of Call of Duty back in 2017.
00:00:22.640
It's quite popular amongst the alpha male community.
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.
00:00:34.000
For once in your life, can you just do the bloody advert like a real alpha, like me?
0.81
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.
00:00:56.240
ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.
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.
00:01:14.480
All you need to do is fire up the app and with one tap of the button,
00:01:19.200
AlphaDog601 sleeps easy knowing his data is safe.
00:01:23.760
We use ExpressVPN on all our devices, phone, laptops, tablets, and computers.
00:01:30.880
Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash trigger.
00:01:37.120
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash trigger and you get an extra three months free.
00:01:51.120
Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry.
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.
00:02:17.600
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.
00:02:26.800
You know, it's funny because I was talking to a friend of mine last night.
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
00:02:47.040
And the point I'm making is you have put, you know, something on the line there in order
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?
00:03:04.880
I mean, of course, I've put something on the line.
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
00:03:21.920
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.
00:03:35.520
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
00:04:04.000
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.
00:04:54.880
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,
00:05:04.320
And before we know it, we're like two years into a lockdown and blah, blah, blah.
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.
00:05:24.880
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?
00:05:38.080
You know, I find this this question has come up quite a lot and I'm kind of left wondering,
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,
00:09:46.800
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
00:10:45.040
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
00:15:00.800
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
00:15:23.600
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,
00:16:18.640
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.
00:18:34.640
Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto. The true
00:18:41.840
story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including
00:18:47.120
America, Forever in Blue Jeans and Sweet Caroline. Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega
00:18:53.840
hit is here. The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, April 28th through June 7th, 2026. The
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.
00:28:09.120
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
00:28:26.560
And Isabel, but I really want to talk about the masking situations in schools.
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.
00:30:01.520
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,
00:30:32.640
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...
00:33:36.080
Well, quite, because I just don't think we're going to get to the bottom of it, the way that
00:33:42.880
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.
00:45:30.240
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.
00:51:13.840
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
00:51:25.840
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
00:51:38.720
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.