Category Archives: Eat out to help out

‘Eat out to help out’ launched without telling official in charge, Covid inquiry hears

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Simon Case, who was responsible for Covid policy at time, calls Boris Johnson’s Downing Street the ‘worst governing ever seen’

The UK’s most senior civil servant has set out the chaos at the heart of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street, saying good officials were “just being smashed to pieces” while he was not warned in advance about the “eat out to help out” scheme.

In a day of often damning testimony to the inquiry into the pandemic, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, said Johnson’s No 10 had been involved in the “worst governing ever seen” in the UK.

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Key Covid inquiry report creates election date headache for PM

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Heather Hallett’s first findings are to be published before the summer and will show how austerity and Brexit hit pandemic planning

An explosive report spelling out how the Conservative government failed to prepare the country for the Covid-19 pandemic as it obsessed about Brexit is to be released before the likely date of the next general election, the Observer has been told.

In a move that will cause alarm in Downing Street, Heather Hallett’s independent Covid-19 inquiry will issue a detailed interim report “before the summer” on the first batch of public hearings held last June and July, which revealed a catalogue of errors, including the lack of PPE and failures to act on recommendations of previous pandemic planning exercises.

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One Nation Tory MPs vow to drop support for Rwanda bill if there are amendments as ERG calls for it to be rewritten – as it happened

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Damian Green says government must ‘stick to guns’ but chair of European Research Group calls for bill to be pulled and rewritten

Sunak says the PM had to balance competing interests during Covid.

Only he could do that, because only he saw all the competing arguments made by different cabinet ministers.

Your phone, you said, doesn’t retain, and nor do you have access to, text messages at all relating to the period of the crisis.

In addition, you said although on occasion you use WhatsApp to communicate around meetings and logistics and so on, you generally were only party to WhatsApp groups that were set up to deal with individual circumstances such as arrangements for calls, meetings and so on and so forth. You don’t now have access to any of the WhatsApps that you did send during the time of the crisis, do you?

I’ve changed my phone multiple times over the past few years and, as that has happened, the messages have not come across.

As you said, I’m not a prolific user of WhatsApp in the first instance – primarily communication with my private office and obviously anything that was of significance through those conversations or exchanges would have been recorded officially by my civil servants as one would expect.

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‘The optics are terrible’: how Rishi Sunak’s 2020 ‘eat out to help out’ scheme backfired

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The then chancellor’s plan proved to be of no economic benefit and was decried by scientists – but it clearly set out the political aims of ‘Dishy Rishi’

There is no blue heritage plaque above the stainless-steel open kitchen at the branch of Wagamama at London’s Festival Hall – but the restaurant might have claims to one. It was here, in delivering a couple of plates of katsu curry – one chicken, one vegan – on 8 July 2020, that our current prime minister in effect launched his campaign for the country’s leadership.

During that lockdown spring as pandemic chancellor, Rishi Sunak had one of the few enviable public roles: he was cast as the man who saved the economy by giving money away. By the time he pitched up at Wagamama that lunchtime, his various Covid-help schemes had dished out £176bn in furlough payments and loans and deferred taxes. In those efforts Sunak, little known before the crisis, had sometimes looked like the only sober and responsible member of her majesty’s government. The headline act of his summer budget statement, “eat out to help out”, changed that narrative.

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Covid inquiry: Johnson surprised ‘eat out to help out’ not cleared by scientists

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Former PM also angrily denies comments he made about letting Covid ‘rip’ meant he had been uncaring

Boris Johnson assumed that Rishi Sunak’s flagship “eat out to help out” hospitality scheme had been cleared by government scientists and was surprised to learn later it was not, the former prime minister has told the inquiry into Covid.

In evidence that could pose notable difficulties for the prime minister when he appears before the inquiry on Monday, Johnson said it would have been “normal” for advisers such as Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance to have been briefed, and that he assumed this had been the case.

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Sunak under fire as ‘stupid’ Eat Out to Help Out scheme to be focus of Covid inquiry

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Leading scientist attacks prime minister as criticism mounts of government approach to science during the crisis

Rishi Sunak is facing a barrage of criticism in the run-up to the official Covid-19 inquiry as a leading scientist attacks his “spectacularly stupid” Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which is believed to have caused a sudden rise in cases of the virus.

The prime minister’s role as chancellor during the pandemic is under increasing scrutiny – as is that of his predecessor at No 10, Boris Johnson – in an escalating Covid blame game at Westminster as Lady Hallett prepares to open her investigation into the government’s pandemic response later this month.

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Here are five ways the government could have avoided 100,000 Covid deaths | Devi Sridhar

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The UK needs to learn from the lessons of the past year and come up with a concrete plan to avert a disastrous third wave

Yesterday Britain passed a grim milestone. A further 1,631 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded, taking the official tally above 100,000, though data from the Office for National Statistics suggests the total number will now be nearer 120,000. In a briefing, Boris Johnson has said his government did everything it could to minimise the loss of life, but these deaths were far from inevitable. While the number of UK deaths has entered the hundreds of thousands, New Zealand has recorded only 25 deaths from Covid-19 so far. Taiwan has recorded seven, Australia 909, Finland 655, Norway 550 and Singapore 29. These countries have largely returned to normal daily life.

In the first year of the pandemic, the UK faced three big challenges. Our national government had no long-term strategy for suppressing the virus beyond a continual cycle of lockdowns. Even now we still don’t know what the government’s plans for the next six months are. In the early days of the pandemic, the UK treated Covid-19 like a bad flu. The government halted testing, and the initial plan seemed to be allow the virus to run unchecked through the population (the “herd immunity” approach). Finally, ministers have pitted the economy against public health, instead of realising that the health of the economy depends upon a healthy population.

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Understanding how this catastrophe occurred is of critical importance

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The catastrophe facing the UK is a direct result of our government’s obsession with libertarian issues. Now we must avoid repeating the same mistakes

Six weeks ago, the government was given a stark warning that the nation faced a “very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences”. Only by imposing an immediate two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown could it hope to reduce the spread of coronavirus, the Sage group of scientific advisers told ministers.

“As over 90% of the population remain susceptible, not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences in terms of direct Covid-related deaths and the ability of the health service to meet needs,” the group warned.

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