Everyone's writing about this, so feel free to ignore...

 I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the headline – 'Lockdown could have been avoided entirely'! Had the farcical Covid 'inquiry' at last, having expended just shy of £200 million of our money, managed to produce a glimmer of sense? No, of course not, as I soon discovered. The gist was that lockdown could have been avoided if we'd, er, locked down a week earlier: it was the predetermined narrative of 'too little, too late' yet again. Earlier and more drastic action, it was said, would have saved 23,000 lives, according to 'computer modelling' – the same deeply flawed computer modelling that came up with such preposterous projections throughout the epidemic. There's an interesting graph on the Spectator website, showing a mighty Himalaya of projected deaths – projected by computer modelling – looming over something more like an alluvial plain, the near-flatline of actual Covid deaths. This 'inquiry' was set up with its conclusions ready made – that Boris Johnson's government fouled up and must be blamed, and that the only thing wrong with the harsh and oppressive measures taken was that they weren't harsh and oppressive enough, or go on for long enough. In the teeth of all the evidence, lockdown is unquestioningly presented as a life-saver on a grand scale, with no acknowledgment that, overall, the countries with the lightest (or non-existent) lockdown regimes had the best outcomes in terms of mortality, and those with the tightest regimes had among the worst. So, nothing has been learnt, and the next time will be even worse – especially if it happens under Starmer, who, when the final lockdown was belatedly lifted, predicted that this 'reckless' act would lead to 50,000 extra deaths in what would forever after be known as the 'Johnson variant'. This, oddly, did not come to pass.