The British government has been holding a “Covid Inquiry” for several weeks, they are apparently on “Module 5” now. Hours of footage livestreamed to the handful of people who can be bothered to listen, picking apart Boris Johnson’s Whatsapp messages.
We haven’t mentioned it before now because…well, there’s no point.
We know what it’s going to find, the same thing this kind of navel-gazing show trial always finds:
- The government under-estimated and/or overreacted.
- There was a failure of imagination based on bad intelligence.
- A lack of accountability and oversight led to some minor abuses of power by people who will be censured, may be forced to resign, but will definitely never face any criminal trial.
Whatever they eventually find “officially” happened, you can be sure that corruption and malfeasance and personal profit played no part. Nobody ever acted in bad faith. Everything is always a well-intentioned accident. A minor display of over-zealous incompetence.
Oh. And here’s a scapegoat. What an idiot, right? Let’s make fun of him on Have I Got News for You this weekend, and then next year we’ll make him a lord.
That’s what inquiries are for. They tell stories and sell narratives. They tie up the loose ends and weave a pretense of accountability.
They rewrite history amid a theatrically contrived display of faux-cathartic self-examination which, in the end, only supports the mainstream narrative.
“Oh no! The intelligence was flawed!”
“Oh no! We never wargamed hijacked planes!”
“Oh no! We accidentally revitalized the heroin trade!”
“Oh no! We didn’t take the virus seriously enough at first and then we over-reacted!”
It’s always the same, and rarely worth talking about.
The reason I’m breaking that habit today is that I happened to see this headline…
The real Covid scandal is emerging right in front of the inquiry’s nose
And it irritated me. Firstly, with the pettiness of the subject, the narrowness of the focus. It’s picking gnat shit out of pepper, as the saying goes.
But, mostly, because it’s just such a lie. The story it’s selling is that Dominic Cummings wanted a lockdown, and he went against the experts who fought tooth and nail against it.
This is clearly about salvaging the tarnished reputation of “the science”, government experts and corrupt modelers so they can be redeployed in the future without any embarrassing baggage. It’s about piling all the blame on one disposable non-entity.
As I said, here’s a scapegoat…
The author, Fraser Nelson, tweeted it in these words:
The Covid inquiry has unwittingly revealed how close Britain came to avoiding lockdown – and how, in the end, panic beat science.
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) November 2, 2023
My column on the real scandal (now online) https://t.co/NRtjYdCiUn
As I said on Twitter: Government inquiries never “unwittingly” reveal anything. Like “leaked reports” and “anonymous insider sources”, they seed story beats that support the establishment narrative under a wafer thin veneer of “the story behind the story”.
This inquiry is just another strain of propaganda in the information war. A rear-guard action covering the Covid retreat.
The “real Covid scandal” has little and less to do with Dominic Cummings. The “real Covid scandal” is that the fake pandemic was orchestrated from the highest level in order to seize political power to an unprecedented extent.
Dominic Cummings is the smallest fraction of one percent of that story. He’s not the reason the UK had a lockdown. Just as he isn’t the reason France had a lockdown, or Germany, or Canada, or Russia, or China, or Brazil, or Australia, or New Zealand, or Italy, or Mexico, or Japan or…
…you get the idea.
“Lockdown” was not a mistake. It was a deliberate act of societal sabotage carried out on a global scale.
What the “Covid Inquiry” would have you believe is that an international wave of lockdowns was some kind of happenstance. An avalanche of coincidences. Dozens of ethnically diverse little Dominic Cummings clones, all making the exact same mistakes for the exact same reasons at the exact same time in almost every nation of the world.
What Covid really revealed – what the inquiry will never so much as hint at and what nobody in the mainstream wants us to talk about – is that some greater authority exists above almost all national governments, with both the desire and ability to dictate the domestic policies of almost every nation on Earth.
And spoiler alert: It’s not Dominic Cummings.
By Kit Knightly