It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written a Jason Leitch-bashing blogpost, mainly because it’s seemed a bit unnecessary – Leitch has been signed up to the Scottish Government’s sensible strategy for over a year now, which means his salesman’s patter has been put to far better use than it was in the earliest stages of the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to rewrite the history of what happened in February and March 2020 or his own disgraceful role in that.
I was a bit stunned to see on Twitter this afternoon that people were saying they had no recollection of Leitch ever advocating herd immunity – the implication being that it couldn’t possibly have happened. In reality, of course, Leitch embarked on a Grand Complacency Tour of the TV and radio studios in the weeks leading up to lockdown and was considerably more explicit about his support for mass infection than most UK government officials. He wasn’t, in fairness, the main instigator of the herd immunity strategy – but when you’re faced with a calamitous error in government policy which is likely to cause tens of thousands of needless deaths, and you have a choice between pushing back against that, or embracing it and selling it wholeheartedly to the public, I think it’s appropriate that you take your share of responsibility if you follow the latter course. At the moment, Leitch’s antics at the start of last year are like the embarrassing family secret that he and others think will just go away if it’s never spoken of.
I’ve been accused in the last few months of being “on the wrong side of history” because of my support for Alba and my dislike of the SNP’s turn towards identity politics. The jury is still out on those points, but one thing I’m entitled to say that I was undoubtedly on the right side of history about was my vocal opposition to herd immunity in those crucial weeks in early-to-mid-March 2020. Unthinking SNP loyalists were trying to shout me down, telling people to ignore “irresponsible bloggers” like me and to listen to “experts” like Leitch instead. I’m quite proud of the fact that I was one of the people pointing out that the emperor had no clothes when it was not at all comfortable to do so.
Remember the plaudits Leitch received for smugly telling Piers Morgan that it was absolutely right to go to a crowded concert just before lockdown when the virus was spreading like wildfire, and indeed that he would have done so himself? In retrospect it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry. At a time when we now know Boris Johnson wanted Chris Whitty to inject him with coronavirus on live TV to demonstrate how ‘mild’ the illness he later almost died of was, the Scottish Government was still in complete lockstep with London. That was a catastrophic error that can’t just be swept under the carpet, no matter how well Nicola Sturgeon has done since she belatedly broke with the UK-wide approach last spring.
