Lord Sumption on lockdown

Lord Sumption is the intellectual champion of anti-lockdowners – one of the few public figures prepared to stick his neck out and continue to articulate a case against the Government’s measures.

Sumption, who began his working life as an academic, believes the response has been massively disproportionate and betrays a distinct lack of historical perspective.

The various lockdowns the Government has enforced over the past year have been brutal in prohibiting the most basic of human interactions. ‘It is historically extreme and unusual,’ he adds. ‘We have never, ever done such a thing.’

This conviction that has taken Lord Sumption into areas of the media he would usually have avoided like the plague. 

Sumption has received no threats of any kind – ‘just a small amount of virulent disagreement, a rather larger amount of polite disagreement and a surprisingly large amount of support. I have observed that lockdown scepticism goes with high levels of education.’

He feels so strongly on the subject that he appears ready to take on all-comers in any forum. ‘These lockdown rules are an attack on our humanity. They are an assault on everything that makes humanity spiritually valuable,’ he says with feeling. ‘The interaction with other human beings is completely fundamental to our existence.’ Then, he adds, there was the ‘attack on the entire spiritual dimension of our existence – the closure of schools, the closure of museums, theatres, churches, sports grounds. These are things without which we cannot function as human beings. And I do not think that the saving of lives is worth such a price.’

But 128,000 people have now died in the UK from or with Covid and more than three million worldwide. At the time of writing, people are dying in their thousands in India and neighbouring Nepal. Does he take an absolutist libertarian view that no mitigation measures were needed? ‘No, I don’t. If we were confronted with an Ebola outbreak that could possibly kill 50 per cent of those who catch it or smallpox with 30 per cent fatality then they would be warranted.’ Covid, he insists, is at the more bearable end of what mankind has previously had to endure. The bubonic plague, for example, wiped out 40 per cent of the population. The Covid death rate is less than one per cent.

So why did we lock down? ‘Essentially because other countries had done it and people started saying the solution to any problem like this is government action. If they are doing it on the other side of the Channel why aren’t we doing it?’ That, adds Sumption, is ‘not a very impressive argument’.

Neither is he moved by the suggestion that it was difficult for the UK Government to resist the pressure for a lockdown and therefore unfair to pillory them for it. He points out that they had a plan for dealing with a pandemic but failed to stick to it. What they did not have was any strategy for a lockdown.

‘If you are going to do something as drastic as this, you need to know what the consequences are likely to be – that requires serious thought, serious research and serious planning. None of these things happened,’ he says. ‘The dominant factor in Government policy – the entire attack on our humanity – has been guided not by “The Science” but by the desire of politicians to avoid being criticised.’

He is particularly scathing about the Prime Minister in this regard, whom he cites as ‘a classic example of someone whose prime desire is not to be criticised’, and also someone suffering from a reluctance – or inability – to study any dossier profoundly.

‘He is very vulnerable to people who are utterly confident about their position,’ Sumption observes. ‘He’s never prepared to put in the work that would make him utterly confident of his own position. In that respect he is completely different from Margaret Thatcher who always attempted to ensure she was on top of every issue she was called upon to deal with. Boris Johnson has got some of the rhetorical flair and a not dissimilar ideological position, but he simply does not have the intellectual capacity to follow it through. It’s not because he’s stupid. He clearly isn’t. It’s because he’s intellectually idle.’

He is equally scathing about Dominic Cummings, whom he describes as a ‘Putin-esque natural autocrat, incredibly dogmatic’, whose idea of good government is ‘minimal deliberation or consultation, which gives a much greater likelihood of really bad decisions. It’s extraordinary that two so different individuals, so obviously designed to rub each other up the wrong way, found themselves in a clinch. Either one on their own is disastrous, but the two together – my goodness.’

Evidently, he is not about to give anyone involved in the lockdown decision the benefit of the doubt. 

It matters not a jot to Sumption that he is a minority voice and he is entirely unfazed by the personal brickbats thrown at him over the stand he has taken. ‘It’s frustrating when people disagree as a matter of emotional instinct rather than because they think I’ve got anything in particular wrong,’ he says. ‘I don’t as a habit read the comments under articles I have written but of those I have, the hostile comments have unreal reasoning; they basically consist of abuse. I tend to think that if one’s opponents have nothing better to do than hurl abuse at you, that’s rather an encouraging sign.’

Sumption is unsure what to do next. Perhaps write his memoirs? ‘No. I don’t think lawyers should do so. It’s too dull,’ he says. 

Maybe a history of plagues might be in order.