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DAN HODGES

DAN HODGES

DESCRIBING the mood among civil servants in her department, one Minister channelled an inner Joyce Grenfell. Adopting the tone of the much-missed St Trinian’s actress, she said: ‘I’m suddenly getting some pretty heavy Head Girl energy from my private office. I’ll ask them to do something and there’ll be a lot of, “No, Minister, I really think you’d be better off doing it this way instead.” They’re getting very cocky.’

Civil servants sense change is in the air. They can read the polls and the body-language of the Tory politicians they serve. And they are relishing their discomfort.

‘Initially, my departmental officials were fine, until they thought a ministerial reshuffle was coming and I might be leaving. Then they started briefing against me to everyone,’ a former Minister told me. ‘Now they believe there’s going to be a change of government, which would be the biggest reshuffle of all. So they’re really stirring things up.’

From Downing Street to the individual government departments, the picture is the same.

Like Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey, civil servants have calculated Rishi Sunak’s administration is doomed, and next year will see it replaced by Sir Keir Starmer and Labour. And, as a result, the Whitehall machine has begun flexing its collective muscle.

A fortnight ago, the successful bids for the latest tranche of Levelling Up funding were announced. Dozens of Tory MPs in vulnerable Red Wall seats were praying that an injection of cash into their areas could boost their political fortunes and turn the electoral tide. But to their horror, many found their local projects had been rejected.

‘The PM was told he and other Ministers couldn’t get involved in selecting the winning bids,’ one furious Red Waller told me. ‘The civil servants warned him that if he did, he’d be subjected to judicial review. It was all done by the officials. So the Government has spent £2billion but everyone’s still unhappy.’

MINISTERS also report a new truculence in the way internal government appointments are being managed.

‘We were interviewing for a new senior policy position,’ a Government adviser told me, ‘and I said, “The Minister is very impressed by one candidate.” But the official replied, “Yes, sorry, but we’re selecting someone else.”’

Despite the adviser repeating how impressed they were with one of the candidates, the civil servant just shrugged and said: ‘I’m afraid we’re going in a different direction.’

Some insiders believe the prospect of a change of regime is encouraging some elements of what they call ‘the Blob’ to move beyond obstructionism to outright sabotage. ‘Just look at some of the stuff that’s happening at the Treasury,’ one Tory adviser said. ‘It’s leaking like a sieve. Officials are openly briefing anything they think will damage the Government. They can’t wait for [Labour’s] Rachel Reeves to come sweeping in.’

Part of this is payback. It’s now almost three years since Dom Cummings – Boris Johnson’s most influential aide – reportedly pledged ‘a hard rain’ would fall on those mandarins who tried to oppose his Civil Service reforms.

Allies of Cummings insist he never used the phrase, but it was seen within Whitehall as a declaration of war. A war many Ministers are now resigned to losing.

‘I understand what Dom was trying to achieve,’ one told me, ‘but that just wasn’t the right way. He thought he could use our big majority to steamroller his reforms through the Civil Service, but he never stood a chance. They’ve been doing this for over 200 years – there was only ever going to be one winner.’

Another issue is the institutional conservatism of the Civil Service machine. As Ministers have come to recognise the scale of the electoral challenge facing them, they’ve been looking for increasingly radical solutions to try to shift the political weather. Only to find their own officials standing in their way.

It was such intransigence – real or perceived – that lay at the heart of Liz Truss’s ill-fated decision to axe Treasury Permanent Secretary Sir Tom Scholar. ‘Scholar was the perfect symbol of what Liz was fighting against,’ one ally claimed. ‘She wanted to be bold in prioritising economic growth. He was just interested in managed decline. That’s why she got rid of him.’

When Sir Tom was ousted, there was an immediate backlash from the Civil Service establishment. And when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) launched an unprecedented attack on Truss’s tax-cuttings plans, some Ministers believed it was directly organised by his allies in Whitehall.

‘They were behind it,’ one told me. ‘We’re pretty sure some were even using their contacts in the White House to wind up the IMF to attack the emergency budget. It was all co-ordinated.’ These suspicions about the loyalty of their own officials were only heightened by rumours last week that Sir Tom is in the running to be appointed as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff in a future Labour government.

Other reports raised the prospect of a senior role for Theresa May’s Brexit negotiator, Olly Robbins.

‘These guys are jumping ship to Starmer, or having cosy chats with him, and they’re taking all this intelligence with them. They know where all the bodies are buried,’ one Minister lamented.

Labour sources say that so-called ‘black box discussions’, in which Starmer and his team engage in formal talks with the Civil Service over their plans for government, have not yet commenced. But they are perfectly open about the fact they are already cultivating relationships with senior officials. ‘You need to remember that a lot of the senior guys were around when we were last in power,’ one Shadow Minister explained.

‘Tom Scholar and Olly Robbins worked for Gordon Brown and Tony Blair when they were Prime Minister. Also, when we were in government, we didn’t go round telling them we were going to smash them and the institution they’d spent their life working for to pieces.’

CIVIL servants have their faults, and they have their qualities, but one characteristic stands above all others – a great capacity for selfpreservation. The Whitehall apparatchiks believe the writing is on the wall for Sunak and his Government. And they intend to conduct themselves accordingly.

One Cabinet Minister compared the situation to the dressing room culture of Chelsea Football Club: ‘The players know the team’s results are rubbish, they’re out of contention for the title, but they know that ultimately it’s the manager, not the players, who will carry the can.’ Another was more blunt: ‘Civil servants can see there’s blood in the water. They know we’re basically done for. So their attitude is, “We might as well help finish them off.”’

A ‘hard rain’ was supposed to fall on Sir Humphrey and his colleagues. But, as ever, they have endured. Now they have the opportunity to wreak their revenge. And they fully intend to seize it.

THE Chinese government has reversed its rigid stance on Covid-19 lockdowns, implicitly conceding its earlier policy was causing more harm than good after an outbreak of protests. Now, public health officials in Beijing have tentatively increased their official death toll from this ghastly pandemic after the gap between their claimed figures and reality risked public ridicule. These ‘adjustments’ are also a reminder of how China’s position on the origin of this virus that emerged within its borders should not be accepted at face value. Many Chinese scientists, doctors and health officials feel unable to freely disclose data or share stories.

And in any nation with restricted free speech, those who seek to analyse or probe events are handicapped if so many facts are disputed or even dismissed as imaginary by the authorities.

Sadly, the crucial debate over Covid’s origins has been shackled – but not only in China. And this refusal to discuss openly what everyone suspects to be true – or at the very least strongly possible – has the disastrous consequence of eroding public trust in science.

We live in Orwellian times – as we have seen for ourselves investigating these issues. In early 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) commissioned two extensive reports into the causes, consequences and implications of the pandemic.

UNEP’s primary focus is environmental, not health. But it considered Covid worthy of exploration since there were strong suggestions from the start that the pandemic arose as a consequence of humanity’s abuse of nature.

One possible pathway to Covid-19 was suggested to involve the illegal importation into China of pangolins, which are in demand there as meat, for use in traditional medicine and the fashion industry. Another was the sale of legallydubious animals in food markets and consumption of caught or farmed wild animals.

The 2002 SARS epidemic was sparked by a bat virus passing to humans who ate meat from civet cats in Guangdong province.

UNEP asked each of us to lead these reports. We have both worked for decades at the intersection of human and animal epidemiology with environmental change, while we also had extensive previous experience with the UN system.

Now, however, we are so concerned by a cover-up that we are writing this joint statement calling for a re-evaluation of the likely pathways that caused this pandemic. We accept ‘natural origin’ is possible with ‘zoonotic’ transmission from nature to humans – yet strangely, there remains no sign of any evidence to support this theory.

Meanwhile, the risk of a laboratory-associated pathway leading to the pandemic – the lab leak theory – has been significantly under-played despite growing circumstantial evidence.

WORSE, we fear some prominent British and American scientists, funding bodies and decision-makers have played a key and self-serving role in suppressing greater consideration of this possibility – assisted by leading medical and scientific journals.

Most journalists, politicians and many other scientists followed the lead set by these influential conductors of public opinion.

The reticence to consider fairly a laboratory pathway extended to UNEP. In the first report (led by Professor Randolph, who has extensive experience working in high and low biosecurity laboratories, with several co-authors), the possibility of a non-natural origin is not discussed at all, despite being actively considered in the drafting. But even in early 2020, it appeared that UNEP was averse to including anything so controversial as the lab-leak theory in the report. Maybe its concerns were understandable, given the political and public health climate as the pandemic spread around the planet.

Additionally, there was very limited solid, circumstantial evidence to support a laboratory pathway at that point beyond the curious coincidence that China’s most secure laboratory for virological experiments was in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic emerged.

For the second report, the sole author (Professor Butler) was sceptical initially about a lab link. But

Our fears grew that publication of the report was stalled deliberately

as circumstantial evidence in support of a laboratory pathway grew, thanks to the work of a few brave scientists, internet detectives and journalists, he concluded that it would be highly misleading to gloss over this controversial possibility.

His determination was strengthened by criticism of initial drafts by some reviewers who argued that discussion of a lab pathway was still too rudimentary. Some internal UNEP reviewers seemed reluctant to permit such discussion at all.

Nevertheless, by late 2021, the second report was almost finalised and contained serious discussion of both main causal routes. However, his fears grew that publication was being deliberately stalled.

The first report was published within weeks of completion, but the second one took ten months – and only appeared after an increasingly alarmed author contacted influential figures, including the report’s Norwegian chief funder. It was eventually released with little publicity three months ago.

These two reports are substantial with a combined length of 152 pages, citing 387 scientific publica

tions and with 94 reviewers. They cannot be dismissed as scientifically lightweight, nor the product of biased or naive authors. Unlike some key players in the Covid origin debate, neither of us has been involved in ‘gain of function’ work that includes manipulation of virological structures to increase virulence. Nor do we have any history of collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Neither of us has received funds from the US National Institutes of Health, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency or EcoHealth Alliance – all of which have been involved with funding work at WIV that falls within the definition of ‘gain of function’.

Nor have either of us been financially rewarded for work with the

Wellcome Trust – one of the world’s largest science funding bodies whose director Sir Jeremy Farrar was, we believe, a key figure alongside US funding chiefs in the scandalous suppression of debate on this issue.

In early 2020, Professor Farrar admitted to being torn between the two leading hypotheses on the pandemic’s cause. An email that February, released through Freedom of Information, also revealed he described research conditions in Wuhan as ‘Wild West’.

Yet, in the same month, Farrar, with 26 others, co-signed an influential statement in The Lancet that said: ‘We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.’ The central role in this letter of his fellow signatory, Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, was intentionally disguised. Incredibly, Farrar has been appointed chief scientist for the World Health Organization.

We should make clear that each of us has links with EcoHealth, the official journal of EcoHealth Alliance as a co-editor for three years (Prof Butler) and as a current review editor (Prof Randolph).

Yet neither of us had any idea of EcoHealth Alliance’s vigorous involvement in such controversial ‘gain of function’ research, nor that it was collaborating so closely with WIV. The conflicts of interest of Daszak and some of his coauthors were undeclared. Some of them still are, sadly.

The toll of Covid fatalities is approaching that of the cumulative death toll from influenza over the past half a century, officially standing at almost seven million but probably substantially higher. It is by far the most lethal recent emerging disease after HIV/AIDS. And the end is not in sight.

This is why it is so important to understand the causes to prevent similar pandemics. Most recently discovered pathogens ‘burn out’ in human populations. Some are then held in laboratories, including in Wuhan – which also holds the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses. Are some of these being experimented upon? Almost certainly, yes.

Yet a pall of suspicious secrecy, deceit and conflicts of interest shroud this work, enforced not

only by China but by some Western funding bodies and influential Western scientists.

We can see incompetence, too. A new report by the US Office of Inspector General found fault with both the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest public funder of biomedical research, and EcoHealth Alliance, which it was supposed to help monitor.

This report damningly noted that each organisation failed to ‘understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas and take corrective action’. It is of critical importance that these risks are better understood, that scientists accept the

It is critical scientists accept dangers and the field is better regulated

dangers and that this field is better regulated. Our view is that, on current balance of evidence, a laboratory pathway seems the most likely cause of the pandemic – although, like any good scientists, we are happy for our theories to be challenged by fresh or firm evidence. Irrespective of the origin of the pandemic, however, this debate has exposed that self-regulation of ‘gain of function’ research has been a dismal failure.

We have good role models on risk reduction in nuclear technologies. These are urgently needed in biotech. Supporters of the ‘natural origin’ hypothesis like to claim nature is the most imaginative and lethal creator of pathogens. But if Covid emerged through human-assisted evolution in a laboratory, we would have to blame human hubris for this deadly wave of disease.

Happy Valley: The Finale

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