Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out To Help Out scheme will come under scrutiny from the Government’s top scientists this week at the official inquiry into the Covid pandemic.
Professor Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance are appearing before the inquiry and are expected to reveal whether they were adequately consulted about the scheme, which offered the public a 50 per cent discount on restaurant bills after the easing of the UK’s first lockdown.
The Treasury policy was designed to kickstart the economy in August 2020 when Mr Sunak was chancellor, but research has shown the coronavirus spread more rapidly in areas with a lot of participating restaurants, and infections in those areas slowed after the scheme ended.
Sir Patrick, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, will give evidence at an all-day session on Monday. Extracts from his private diaries, some of which have already been heard during the inquiry, have already exposed the disagreements at the heart of Downing Street as the virus swept through the country. New damaging details of then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic are likely to follow.
The inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett, previously heard how Sir Patrick described “No 10 chaos as usual”, and on another occasion that Mr Johnson’s government was “all over the place and so completely inconsistent”.
The diaries have also revealed that Sir Patrick and Sir Chris, England’s chief medical officer, were not informed of Mr Sunak’s Eat Out To Help Out scheme before it went live in August 2020. The pair of government advisers said in their original witness statements that “had they been consulted” on the scheme at the time, they would have advised against it because they suspected that it would increase transmission of Covid at a crucial time in the fight to control the virus in the UK.
Sir Chris and Sir Patrick often flanked Mr Johnson at the daily Downing Street coronavirus briefings, becoming household names during the pandemic. Sir Chris will make an all-day appearance before the inquiry on Tuesday. The pair will likely face scrutiny over the evidence that has already emerged which suggests that they seemed to have been stronger in their warnings about the Covid pandemic in private than they were in public.
For example, Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former chief adviser, told a No 10 aides’ WhatsApp group on 6 February, 2020 that Sir Patrick had just said to him that the virus was “probably out of control now and will sweep the world”. However, on 25 February, 2020, Sir Chris and Sir Patrick had briefed journalists saying that data from China suggested it was still possible to contain the virus.
On Wednesday, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the former deputy chief medical officer, and the current chief scientific adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean – who described Rishi Sunak as “Dr Death” in the weeks following the launch of the eat out scheme – will appear before the inquiry.
Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak are expected to be called before the inquiry in early December, when they will mount their own defences of their time in office and handling of the pandemic.
