The Telegraph's "Lockdown Files"
The truth is between a rock and a hard place
The Telegraph's Lockdown Files are headline news across UK media, the files consist of a cache of what's app messages that former health secretary Matt Hancock handed to the writer Isabel Oakshott to speed up the completion of his Pandemic Diaries book. The Telegraph and a team of writers are now publishing some of these messages while claims are being made from Hancock’s camp that the release of these files is a breech of a non disclosure agreement.
The first story of what will be an ongoing series is in regards to the failure to test people before they were put into care homes. The Telegraph says Hancock ignored advice to test everyone while Hancock and government ministers are accusing the Telegraph of ommiting key messages that at the time there simply wasn't enough testing capacity to do this.
The problem with getting to the bottom of this is that both the government and the Telegraph have a track record of misleading the British public. There is already plenty of documented evidence that the government failed to protect care homes resulting in over 20,000 deaths just in the first wave.
However, the Telegraph and a number of the writers involved in the Lockdown Files have demonstrated they aren't reliable commentators either, having used their positions to pursue political agendas.
Oakshott's partner is Richard Tice, Nigel Farage's closest political ally and leader of the Reform Party. Reform used to be the Brexit Party until Farage and Tice rebranded it in 2020 as an anti-lockdown, pro “freedom” Party.
Accusations that key messages that don't fit the narrative the Telegraph want to develop are well founded considering Oakshott's track record regarding the book she wrote on the Brexit campaign. Somehow Oakshott did not realise the documents she had collected for the book contained evidence that suggested collusion with Russia, only when the story began to break in other outlets did she suddenly discover the information she'd had in her possession for several years.
Will it be discovered in years time after the Lockdown Files have run their course that important information that might alter the political narrative somehow went unnoticed by Oakshott?
While the Lockdown Files make headlines there is a previous massive leak of internal chats of incredible public interest that was given to the Counter Disinformation Project and a number of trusted sources, the #HARTleaks.
The internal chats of the disinformation group HART whose members include conspiracy theorist Michael Yeadon and former lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica Patrick Fagan provides the evidence that politicians and journalists were directly working with the group and others like UsForThem to undermine public health policy due to political ideology and the embrace of the flawed pseudoscience of the Great Barrington Declaration.
The leaks show how the Telegraph, along with other outlets was used to platform disinformation with writers even organising meetings between disinformation groups and MPs to change government policy.
The Telegraph's Allison Pearson was also responsible for helping to create UsForThem, whose founder Molly Kingsley had started writing for the Telegraph just before the pandemic began. In many respects UsForThem are essentially a product of the Telegraph.
UsForThem have had considerable support from MPs over the pandemic which seems increasingly questionable considering her likening of the vaccine programme to the holocaust.
Recently she has written in defence of Andrew Bridgen MP who has had the whip withdrawn due to likening the vaccine to the holocaust, she's argued that he hasn't minimised the holocaust because the vaccine might be a crime of similar scale.
That the Telegraph platformed someone who heaps praise on GB News presenter Neil Oliver who was recently criticised for a protocols of zion-esque rant on live TV means any reporting by the Telegraph must be read with caution.
Allison Pearson even praised the Safer to Wait campaign against child vax, citing Ros Jones of HART as running the campaign on behalf of UsForThem.
Alongside other misleading information Safer to Wait suggested children could be given ivermectin as an alternative to vaccination. It also suggested the vaccines will cause cancer, this is the version of the leaflet that was designed to be handed out directly to children.
It was Camilla Turner of the Telegraph who created headlines not just in the UK after reporting on a junk VAER dumpster dive by Tracy Hoeg that massively exaggerated the risk of myocarditis. The paper and the headlines it created considerably undermined confidence in the vaccine.
It's hard to believe the Telegraph's reporting hasn't in part contributed to the growth of the antivax movement which recently gathered at the exclusive Carlton Club.
Fraser Nelson editor of the Spectator is also involved in the Lockdown Files. The Spectator has consistently supported the strategy of mass infection advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, infact the GBD was launched in the UK via the Spectator, and it was the publication the GBD authors chose to write their response to their critics.
The Spectator's track record of reporting during the pandemic is so dubious that it has a personal interest in shaping the narrative of the pandemic.
The Lockdown Files are reminiscent of the Expose interview with Rishi Sunak published by the Spectator last year which did not provide an accurate picture of the pandemic response claiming there had been no economic modelling and that alternative experts had not been listened to.
This isn't true, Rishi Sunak commissioned Philip Thomas of Bristol University to do modelling for the Treasury, and Nelson should be aware of this considering the Spectator reported on this modelling and then employed Thomas as their data expert.
Due to this the Telegraph, Oakshott and Nelson's reporting on the Lockdown Files must be looked at through the lens of the agenda they have pursued throughout the pandemic.
Nelson should consider applying the same psychology he does for politicians to himself, he has always argued against measures and alongside the Telegraph was part of the media circus in 2020 that claimed a second wave wasn't possible, putting considerable media pressure onto Johnson to not take action as cases escalated in the winter.
Without such pressure from the media Johnson might well have taken action earlier, the second wave was the UKs deadliest wave and the worst chapter of the pandemic response because the knowledge and tools were available to prevent a large proportion of the deaths and suffering they occurred.
Just like Hancock, the “no second wavers” have never shown contrition or remorse for their deadly errors, instead they have chosen to spend the past two years trying to rewrite history to claim that none of the measures that should have been taken would have had any effect.
While the Lockdown Files have started with care homes, expect those working on them to pivot to picking out messages from the WhatsApp's in order to vindicate their own actions. At the end of his article Nelson is already laying the ground work to do this, in particular in regards to schools.
It’s true the government failed to follow the scientific advice and evidence in regards to schools, like care homes the evidence is already available in official documents, however in contradiction to SAGE the Telegraph will use the Lockdown Files to argue that even less should have been done to prevent letting the virus run rampant through schools. Considering it's track record it's not going to implicate itself in promoting policies that caused death and disability in children, its failure to acknowledge thousands of children suffering from long covid has already proven this.
Nelson says that transparency matters, perhaps he would like to provide the full details of the private meetings the Spectator and Telegraph had with Johnson in September before the government decided to ignore SAGE'S advice on a circuit breaker?
The Telegraph and the writers involved can not be trusted as custodians of the Lockdown Files, if transparency really does matter then they should make the full files available to other journalists to verify they aren't ommiting important information, they should certainly be providing a full copy to the covid inquiry and its core participants. Until they do then we cannot know if they are working for the public interest or their own.