TRIGGERnometry - Live with Isabel Oakeshott - Sex, Lies and Lockdowns

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

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I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It doesn't get any more fascinating than the guests we have for you today. Without much further ado, she's the journalist behind the lockdown files. Isabel Oakshow, welcome to you. through Thank you for having me.

And you've had a very busy week, so we appreciate you coming and sitting down for 45 minutes. It's an honor. Thank you. And then answering some questions from our audience. Really appreciate it. You know, it's funny, because I was talking to a friend of mine last night. We were WhatsApping back and forth. Dangerous thing to do, especially when I'm around.

Well, that's, and that was basically how the conversation ended up. After a while, we kind of read back our slightly spicy messages. And we were like, well, let's make sure whoever writes, ghosts writes her next book, It's not Isabel Oaksop. And the point I'm making is you have put, you know, something on the line there in order to get this story out. So what was it about the messages that you saw with Matt Hancock, the former health secretary,

that made you think, you know what, this is worth it? Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, of course I've put something on the line. I've put a lot on the line, actually. I mean, there's been a lot of flak flying. The reality is if you detonate a nuclear bomb, there's going to be some radiation, and most likely quite a bit of it is going to blow in your direction if we're talking about the world of politics. So that I knew that this would be pretty explosive.

I knew that there would be a price to pay for me. There are different bits of that price to pay. There's a legal risk that I've taken. After all, I did breach a confidentiality undertaking. That's not something I take lightly or do flippantly. There's also the risk associated, with people, you know, feeling that I'm not going to be the most trustworthy person to write their books. That's obviously something that I have to take into account. But above all of that is what I felt was the overwhelming public interest in the content of this material. And, you know, in the end, I was willing and am willing to take a knock to my reputation, to have people disparaging me, to have people say that I, to impugn my motives, which has been plenty of,

in order to get this material out there. Because what we see here is the real time detail of who was saying what and when around the most momentous decisions, decisions that affected the lives of every single person in this country. And similar decisions were being taken all over the world as countries locked down. So really, The UK, as a result of these WhatsApp files, as Fraser Nelson has said, is the first country to have kind of drawn back the curtain on what was really going on. And what have we seen as well? Because, look, Francis and I both not happy about lockdowns. We supported the first one because we were told it's going to be a couple of weeks and blah, blah, blah.

Okay, let's go along with it. And before we know it, we're like two years into a lockdown and blah, blah, blah. right however there's a lot of people who might look at the things that have come out as a result of your revelations and kind of go well okay look the fact that kids were forced to wear masks because boris couldn't be bothered to have an argument with nicola yeah that's a bit that's wrong bad and most of the rest of it isn't it just government incompetence politicians making stupid jokes the kinds of you that you and i would make in a WhatsApp group so what what have you revealed exactly that people should care about if they currently don't yeah that That's funny. You know, I find this question has come up quite a lot. And I'm kind of left wondering, what more do you want, guys? Blood? You know, what is it that you might have been expecting to find there? I feel that people may be hope that there might be some kind of gigantic conspiracy. You know, that we might. There's a lot of people who heard that. Yeah, right. You know, that we might reveal that, you know, there was a secret plan to kind of kill off the elderly. Or there was some kind of Bill Gates thing to inject everybody with microchips. Hancock did actually joke about it. that but it was very definitely a joke. Obviously. And I feel that there were a lot of people hoping that what was going on during this time

was something totally extraordinary and unexpected. And in reality, what was going on was the very exaggerated everyday business of government, which is full of cock-up and far more cock-up than conspiracy, really. But what have we learned? Well, we can point to any number of a kind of specific revelations, which I actually think are very important.

You know, over the weekend, the Telegraph published details of messages from Matt Hancock between him and his political aid in which they discussed, and I quote, deploying the variant to, and I quote, frighten the pants off people. Now, this is an insight, provides us with an extraordinary insight into the mindset of a very, very tiny group of people who had seized an unprecedented level of power. So what you see here in a sense is a kind of insight into the psychology of what happens when a small group of people take power, which they did. They seized effectively an unprecedented level of control over our everyday lives. And they essentially did so in a pseudo-democratic fashion that we can discuss quite how democratic it really was.

But they used emergency legislation to do that. and what do they then do with that power? And we've had since politicians coming out, Jacob Rees-Mogg yesterday, one of our, who was a cabinet minister at the time, saying, actually, you know, I was in the cabinet at the time, I didn't know about a lot of this stuff that was going on, evidence that influenced critical decisions, because it was all concentrated in the hands of four people, effectively the prime minister, the chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove, who's kept very much in the shadows, and I always thought he was up to all forms of no good.

You know, when a politician of that level of influence is very quiet, it's a bit like when kids disappear and, you know, they're somewhere upstairs, and you kind of know that they've definitely got your makeup bag, you know, and they're busy smearing it all over everywhere. So Michael Gove played a pivotal part in all of this, and Matt Hancock himself. And those four people just were in an extraordinary position of power and responsibility, by the way, and I think we can have a lot of sympathy

for the people on whose shoulders all of this rested. You know, you said we were talking earlier about whether it was the right thing to lock down first time round. I mean, absolutely. You know, I never felt that that was unreasonable, you know, in the face of an unprecedented threat. For me, I think there are very, very serious question marks over whether we needed to do so repeatedly for the best part of off and on two years in a way that had we now no devastating collateral damage on our economy, but much more importantly, on people's health in other respects and on our children. Now, I'm someone who was in favour of the first lockdown like Constantine, but the more

I saw this pattern repeat itself, the more I realised where we were going to end up, particularly financially. However, I have come to accept begrudgingly that I'm in the minority. And there's a lot of government ministers who would say, well, look, you may think this way, I think this way, but the reality is 65% of the public, according to recent polls, don't think that way. Yeah, and I find that really interesting, actually. Don't we all?

It's just really weird. I've kind of come to the conclusion that people like being told what to do. You know, it's why a lot of people just keep going back to prison, because presumably in prison. You don't have to actually decide anything. You know, you've got your regime, you've got your routine, you're told when to get up, you're told when to exercise, you're told when to go to bed, you're fed something, you know, you've got all your basic facilities there, and that's it. That's the end of your responsibility. I think some people perhaps quite like that abrogation of responsibility for their own existence. I find it pretty warped personally,

I think, but maybe, maybe some people's lives are not quite as richly rewarding, as our own. And so, I don't know, maybe they felt less of a loss at being bossed around in that way. I mean, part of it was also, let's be fair, that the government made them absolutely terrified with their propaganda. And then gave them money. Yeah. I agree with that. I mean, you know, focus groups in polling will show that terrified people are grateful if you protect them. So if you've then put vast resources into terrifying a population, it should be no surprise that that terrified population thanks you for looking after them as you present it to them at the time. And that fear factor has had a long hangover, hasn't it? I mean, I still see people walking outside with masks on. And

maybe it's a bad reflection on me. There's something inside me that just really kind of rails against that. I feel sorry for them, but I also can't understand why they think that that's going to make any difference to their existence. And you know, one of the things that spurred me on on this project is because there's, of course, has been a lot of criticism and there always is. I work, you know, in the intersection of politics and media. I'm not a neutral reporter or a neutral commentator. I'm a right of centre, broadcaster and commentator, and that in itself attracts quite a lot of flag. But one of the things that's really kept me going, as it were, is the absolute flood of letters and emails and approaches on Twitter from ordinary people who say, thank you for exposing all of

this stuff. We knew, we thought this was what was going on, and now we know that our suspicions were justified. And, you know, some of the letters I'm getting are so moving, profoundly moving, particularly the mother of a 16-year-old boy who took his own life during lockdown. I wrote about her and him in the telegraph last weekend. And these were very disempowered individuals. It was all very well for our leaders in their lovely big houses in leafy parts of London with all the luxuries that made lockdown at the very worst bearable and for many better off people really quite pleasurable.

It was all very well for those people. But what about the single mum living on a rough council estate in Butel with a five-year-old, as this lady had, who has ADHD? I'm picturing that she was in some kind of high-rise block or something like that. Anyway, they have no garden. The only place was a local play park. And that was then cordoned off by overzealous council officials, as we now know, entirely unnecessarily, in my view. it was soon quite obvious that the virus wasn't going to be transmitted in play parks, really.

Certainly not. Children, you know, they weren't particularly vulnerable to it. So in desperation, this mother fearing that there would be more lockdowns, quite rightly as it turned out, she moved house and took her family up to the northeast, where she was unable to get her teenage son into a school. By then, of course, homeschooling had become a lazy default for local. authorities. They couldn't be bothered to find a place for her son. This lady was not empowered. She had no agency. You know, if somebody didn't find a school place for my children, I'd be creating Mary Hell, but she didn't have the means to create Mary Hell. And so her son was isolated and became

increasingly depressed. He put on weight because he was no longer playing football at school. And the long and the short, and it is a very long and sorry tale, is that he hung himself. One day he took himself off saying that he was going to go shopping, getting pick up a few things, for tea and he never came home. And, you know, she said that he had become so paranoid because of the fear campaign that he would not even open his bedroom window for fear of the virus creeping in and getting him. Well, look, something's gone profoundly wrong if children are reacting to a government propaganda campaign in that way. And, you know, I am not a crier. I rarely shed tears, but I genuinely was deeply upset by her story,

because I know not least in itself it is a terrible story, but because it's replicated in so many different ways across Britain, and I'm having so many of these messages. People died. Of course, and there are many people who suffered in many ways, and this is one of the things we talked on the show about extensively, but this isn't to take anything away from what you've just said, because I think it's really important.

But I guess France's point is, what is there in these lockdown files that will convince those people who don't agree with the three of us that they should? Perhaps nothing, because I think there's something wrong with them. Well, good to know you came in the spirit of persuasion, isn't it. I mean, look, if you can't be persuaded by the content of these lockdown files that this was just so profoundly wrong, what is going to persuade you? What more does it take? You know, we've got tens of thousands of children who never went back to school. We've got a broken NHS. We've got an economy in smithereens.

What more evidence do you need? Do you really still think it was a good idea to shut society down for that long when we had a vaccine and when the mortality rates for this condition were not particularly high for anybody who wasn't already above the age of life expectancy? And one of the things that came to light in the lockdown folds, One of the things I found profoundly shocking was a quality of evidence that was being used to the government by the government to justify their decisions.

So I think another point is as much what is not discussed as what is. And it's important to point out, and many critics quite reasonably have done, that what we have here is only Matt Hancock's text WhatsApp messages with the people he chose to share with me. So there may have been conversations with other individuals who he didn't want to share with me. And, you know, he was the health secretary, so his focus was on health. He wasn't Rishi Sunak, whose WhatsApp with lots of other people might have revealed a very different story. But at no point in this 2.3 million word dump of information, which the telegraph's team of eight people have brilliantly spent the last two months picking through,

is there any sense of Matt Hancock, and remember he was one of the only the four that were taking all these critical decisions worrying about the collateral damage of the policies he was pursuing or really troubling over the cost benefit analysis. He was not continually saying,

well, hang on a minute, if we do this, yes, it may ostensibly, and in the short term, be deemed to be saving lives, but what about the lives further down the line? And in fact, there was a minister, a junior health minister, James Bethel, who did actually flag these things up on a number of occasions. Quite interesting, he talked a lot about what was happening, for example, with clinical trials, you know, that they basically juddered to a halt for anything other than COVID vaccines. Well, that really matters. You know, if we've stopped investigating

and trying to find new cancer treatments, new treatments for Alzheimer's, new treatments for all the other desperately awful diseases that ruin lives for the best part of two years. That research stops. That's a serious matter. And to give James Bethel his Jew, he pushed on that quite repeatedly. But Matt Hancock didn't seem to have much interest. I think he paid lip service to that. But to be fair, probably didn't have the bandwidth for anything more than his immediate

objective. Well, that was one of my principal concerns throughout the pandemic, really, is I don't remember a single time anyone standing up at a Prime Minister's press conference and saying, how many people are these policies going to kill? Because if you don't know the answer to that question, how can you possibly make the decision to lock down? So I think it's a really bad look, and although they've done it to me, I don't particularly want to do it to them for journalists to criticize other journalists. But anyway, I'm going to say. Look, I think that there were a few of us on the skeptical side who watched those press conferences in some despair at the lack of skepticism, the lack of critical approach towards the policies that were being unveiled.

You know, I think that very few journalists did anything other than, in a sense, practically goad the government on to go ever-hurst. harder. Now, I worked in the lobby for many years as Sunday Times political editor. I know the psychology of the political press pack, and I've been part of it. And it's always to get the kind of more extreme and the worst story. It's not actually your agenda as a political journalist in the lobby is not actually producing good. It's producing the best possible story, which is usually the worst thing happening or trying to get resignations or something. And I've been part of that, so I understand how it works, you know, the desire to get a scalp or the desire to say more bad

things are coming. And I think it warps the approach. You know, it's not a, it's not a trigonometry style discussion, you know, looking at the ups and downs on the one hand and on the other, it's boom, boom, boom, and off we go to file our copy. And I'm not abrogating in my responsibility, for having been part of that in the past. But those journalists did not ask the questions that, for example, Julia Hartley-Bruer was asking on talk radio day in, day out, you know, and she was quite a lone voice.

And Isabel, Douglas Murray made the point when we were talking, when we did an interview with him during the pandemic, and he said part of the problem is the fact that a lot of journalists don't have a scientific background, so they're not able to interrogate the data properly. Well, and I certainly don't have a scientific background as people repeatedly remind me. And there was a lot of that, wasn't there?

Anyone who criticised anything to do with the response, you would get a pile on saying, well, you're not a doctor, you're not an epidemiologist. I'm not taking any lessons from you. You don't necessarily have to be an epidemiologist to work out that shutting up a lot of people, locking them down, only allowing them out for an hour of. of exercise and threatening to criminalize them for sitting in a public park or sunbathing has happened or going for a walk on their own in the hills is going to have a pretty awful effect on everybody's psychology and on the businesses that are shut.

You know, that isn't, it doesn't take an expert to work that out. And if you've turned the whole of the NHS, if you've pivoted it to being a COVID emergency service, then probably other conditions are going to suffer. And Isabel, we're looking at and analyzing the decisions and the behaviour of government, essentially, with these lockdown files. What percentage of this do you think are just mistakes, which any government can make, particularly in that time, ranking competence, and also as well, something a little bit more sinister, which I got a little bit of with those messages, which is a sneering contempt, if I'm honest. I love the way you said, rank incompetence. It just kind of rolled off your tongue there. He's been practising that.

I know, it's just a phrase we use quite a lot. Yeah, I'm learning how to drive. It's something that I've been many times by my instructor. There's a mixture of all of that, isn't there? I've always wanted to believe, and I've generally believed that politicians start out genuinely wanting to do good. Maybe that's a bit naive of me. But, you know, having worked around politicians for nearly two decades,

most of them do want to change things for the better. They're coming from a position of wanting to try and make people's lives better. And I have no doubt that the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, was desperately trying to contain the crisis in the way he saw best fit with the evidence that he had available at the time to begin with. Now, after that, I think that there was some loss of perspective, so frankly a near complete loss of any sense of proportionality. And you can imagine why that happened. If you've created the conditions in which you are basically in a bunker

and normal life has all but disappeared, then of course judgments are going to be warped. I'm not saying I would have done brilliantly in those circumstances, which one of us would have. It's always easier to carp from the sidelines. I'm certain I wouldn't have done many of the things. things they did. I mean, there are certain things that still really rankle with me, in particular, the then-home secretary, Priti Patel, actively encouraging people in this country to snoop and spy

on their neighbours and to report them for breaches of COVID restrictions. I thought that that, coming from a home secretary of a conservative government, was utterly unforgivable. I thought that encouraged a grotesque culture in this country, which had real consequences. You know, I had two police officers come to my door on Easter Day, 2021. You know, what a woeful use of police resources sending two cops to check that I was self-isolating. My partner had a police turn up twice at his property. These stories are everywhere, aren't they? Rachel Johnson, the Prime Minister's own sister wrote for the Telegraph a few days ago about how the cops turned up at her property. You know, I just think this is awful. And generally they were acting on tip-offs.

What kind of country is this? Is that what kind of country any government should be promoting? Well, I mean, you're making a lot of good points. Your colleague at the telegraph, or temporary colleague, I should say, Cheryl Jacobs. She wrote a very interesting article recently, in which she essentially talked about how rather than looking at this as a sort of of the government getting more power and getting power drunk, actually what they were responding to, and that's why I made the point about the journalist, is imagine you are Boris Johnson and my Hancock,

and you're like looking out at a journalist lobby who are all demanding harder, deeper, faster lockdowns. And the polling all shows, I mean, if you still believe polling, that's what the public won. What are you supposed to do? Well, let me provide a really simple answer, and it is to provide leadership. That's what you're supposed to do. You know, you're not supposed to just respond to obeying mob, are you?

You're there because you're a leader. You're there to do better than that. You're right. You're right. And the most stunning absence of leadership for me was watching their capitulation to Nicola Sturgeon. And that, I think, is such a, I mean, it's a bit of a pointy head. sort of political obsession. But it is really interesting.

And tell people who are not familiar, as about what actually happen. Yeah, let me explain that throughout these messages, these WhatsApp messages, there is a continual long-running anxiety about the devolved administrations, in particular what was going on in Scotland, where Nicholas Sturgeon, who is a formidable politician, Whatever you think of what she wants to do, which is namely break up the union, she is a very, very good political operator. And she was very often one step ahead of Downing Street and, you know, very keen to be one step ahead. And that actually distorted the way they responded because they were continually worrying,

what's Nicola going to do next, how's Nicola going to exploit this, is Nicola going to leak the details of this conversation or that conversation? it had a really kind of detrimental, I think really negative effect on the overall pandemic response. But I think also actually the government was quite right to be worried about what Nicholas Sturgeon might do. And I think they, in their defence, they tried very hard to work together with the devolved administrations. But in the end, you know, Nicholas Sturgeon and the SNP had an agenda of their own. And what was that agenda? Well, her agenda is to promote the cause of independence.

She was also, I'm not saying she wasn't trying to save lives first and foremost, but she also allied with that is what she's there to do, her core offer, which is break up the United Kingdom. She's not suddenly going to forget that. And Isabel, but I really want to talk about the masking situations in schools. Oh, yeah. Because they did back down to her. And the only reason they backed down to her is because they were scared of getting into an argument or a fight with her, really.

Yes. I mean, they didn't want, you know, I'm going to be paraphrasing here because I can't remember exactly what was said. But effectively, Nicola Sturgeon had announced one policy, which involved a lot of mask wearing in schools. The UK government didn't really think that there was much of a case for that, but they also thought that maybe it wouldn't do much harm either. They didn't really want a row or a split with Nicola Sturgeon, because if they'd gone a different way, they would have been forced to say either she's got it wrong, or, you know, we're going to have to accept that we're doing it anyway, just to avoid that kind of political,

spat and they just, the path of least resistance. That's what they took, the path of least resistance. I hate masks. I think that they are insidious. I think the idea that they do no harm is a false one, actually. I think they do all sorts of harm. I want to be able to see people's faces, please. I think that's the society that we live in. And, you know, if people really want to go around with a piece of grubby cloth over their face, which does very, very little, if it's, unless it's a kind of medical grade thing, then perhaps in a free and liberal society, we should let them do so, just as we let people go around with very flimsy clothes on or whatever else they may want to wear, you know, spiking.

She looked at me then. That could be your next episode. Well, we lose all of our subscribers. So, look, if people want to wear a mask, well, I don't like it, but, you know, maybe that's up to them. but to say that there's no harm in forcing children to do so, I think it's just untrue. You know, my son was made to wear masks. You know, like every other child is a teenager at the time,

and there's pictures of him, school photograph, with all got a mask on. It's grotesque. And it made no practical sense because, you know, a former guest of us, Catherine Berville Singh, who runs a school. We love Catherine. We all do, of course.

She's brilliant. But she was like, have you met kids? You think you're going to force teenagers? to wear masks all day in the classroom. That is not how this is going to go down. And she is a strict headmistress as well. So it just seemed impractical. Isabel, I want to move on slightly somewhat to the COVID inquiry.

Yes, that's really important. Well, it is really important. And I have to say... Rather, it should be. Well, quite. Because until the revelations that you've been at the head of with this, I have to say, I think the consensus among people, who think like us has been,

it's going to take bloody ages. It's not going to find anything. It's going to be, I mean, it's going to be like, no one knows who killed JFK, no one knows what happened with Iraq. We're not going to find anything out. Was that also your view, and is that part of the rationale for releasing these WhatsApp?

If not the key driving force for doing this, because of course, if the COVID inquiry was about to wrap up, or if it could realistically be expected, to conclude, for example, by the end of this year, or even, let's say, by the end of next year, if we could have confidence in faith that that is going to happen, then there would have been a much greater ethical dilemma over whether or not to release these messages,

because it could arguably have been much more difficult to defend the public interest in doing so if they were all going to be examined, along with all the other messages and evidence that needs to be taken into account by a judge in an objective, you know, proper fashion, then that would perhaps be best left to that process. The problem is that the COVID inquiry has an insanely expansive remit. I've read it. I'm amazed that very few journalists have actually bothered to do this, but if you actually sit and read the remit, you know, I could say that it would take at least a year to cover each area.

There's about 30 areas. I mean, this poor judge is being asked to cover every single aspect of the inquiry. And some should also be in there. If you're going to go for everything, then also there should be more areas covered. I think the only way to manage this is to pair it right back in the way that the Swedes did. They've produced, they got their inquiry underway quickly.

They've already produced a report. They did it efficiently. they didn't try to do everything. They paired it back to the key lessons to be learned, and that's what we should do. And if that were to happen, then I probably wouldn't have done what I've done here and put these messages in the public domain. But I have no confidence in the time frame for that process. There's no deadline, by the way.

Nobody should be deceived about this. There is no deadline. Well, it sounds then pretty much, like unless more stuff comes out of the nails, Unless more people... I hope it does. Well, quite, because I just don't think we're going to get to the bottom of it, the way that things are currently set up. No, but then ordinary people are not really...

They don't really have the capability, the resources, to kind of sift through the information. Neither do I, to be honest now. I mean, no, who does? You know, look, we couldn't, in the process of writing Matt's book, you know, Matt and I didn't have the resources to go through 2.3 million messages. You know, that is not any kind of small undertaking. You took Telegraph eight people full-time two months to go through it all, cross-reffing it with graphs and what's in the public domain and so on. Huge operation.

Well, you think that's a tiny fraction of the overall COVID evidence. You know, how are we supposed to approach this? And yet, and yet it is so important that some attempt is made. So pare it back, give it a realistic time frame. and get on with it and stop hiring masses of lawyers to protect vested interests. These lawyers are on contracts that last five years or more. That gives you some indication of how long we're going to be here. We do the podcast again when it's reported.

I'm booking in now. And what was he like, Matt Hancock? Because there's a lot of people who are very upset and very angry of him, quite rightly so, in my opinion. But he's still a human being. I think that there's a lot of people who dress him up as a villain of the piece, unthinking, uncaring, narcissistic, etc. I don't think he's a monster any more than I'm a monster. I think he's highly capable, highly intelligent. I found him really good to work with by and large, very, very good manager, phenomenally hardworking. And I love working with clever people. You know, he's a very, very able person. So those are the good things that I want to say. I don't know.

You're the politician now. That's it. It's not, yeah. Fair enough. That sounds like damning with faint praise. I never wanted this to be about Matt Hancock as a bad guy. It is so much bigger than that, isn't it? And it's not about me being the good guy or the bad guy either, although there's been a lot of that.

But really, guys, it isn't about me. and it isn't about him, look at the material and make your mind up as to whether on balance we are better off knowing it. I believe overwhelmingly that we are. And it's as simple as that way. You've made me feel somewhat sorry for him, actually, because I'm sitting here thinking, well, what if they release Boris Johnson's messages? I imagine there's some good stuff in there. To be honest, you better, mate. So we've got like a little tiny window into this bigger picture and Matt Hancock.

You know, he was at the central. of course to a large extent, but still. And you mention your own role in this and the way that you've been in the spotlight, which I have to say, I'm probably naive and stupid, but it has surprised me the way people have come after you because, I mean, whatever people may think about you

or Matt Hancock, I mean, this is clearly in the public interest, is it not? I mean, where's the argument? I mean, I think it's absolutely laughable to suggest that it isn't. It's just laughable. How can you possibly suggest that, we should not know how these profoundly important decisions were being taken. Of course we should know that.

So why is, I mean, Cathy Newman, I've got a lot of things to say on, but I won't. Please do. I said it on Twitter. It's true. Her only discernible talent is to ask her relevant questions with a straight face and pretend like she's doing something meaningful. She didn't have a straight face. She had a face that was all about showboating and trying to look clever versus me, you

know, trying to make me look at. But anyway, what's what a lot of journalists trying to do with you is to say, you know, you work for talk TV, why did you publish with the telegraph, it's for money, it's for this, it's for attention. And look, Francis and I were having this discussion earlier today when we were sort of discussing how to handle the interview and up. And I was sort of saying, I don't really care what your motivation is for releasing this information because the information is important.

If you did it for money or for attention, I don't care. Yeah. And also people's motivations are complex. People can be interested in the thing and themselves at the same time. And that's how life works usually. Sure. I mean, I think my motivations are pretty obvious. I mean, I was a vocal critic of lockdown policy, not from day one,

because we were talking earlier about the fact that I think most of us went along with the first initial lockdown, whatever it was, three weeks to flatten the sombrero, whatever it was we were told. But beyond that, I was a very, very vocal critic of it all. So what could be more important if you're a journalist than getting to the truth of matters that matter to you and to huge numbers of people? It's not some niche thing worrying about how we responded to the pandemic. It's something that affects every single person to this day in different ways. So my motivation in working with Matt Hancock in the first place

was to get as close to the truth as I could. What better way than to work with him on his project? As it happened, I got rather more information than I expected. And in fairness to him, and I've said this many a time, he did lean towards disclosure. Not everything. I mean, you know, it was his book after all. It was his truth.

But I didn't find him trying to deliberately, you know, to trying to cover up a load of stuff that he did. didn't want me to say. I get the sense you feel sorry for him. Oh, wow. That's an interesting question. No, I don't feel sorry for him. And I'm certain he won't feel sorry for me.

No, I don't imagine he will. Yeah, no, but I want to be really fair here and acknowledge the pressure that he was under, acknowledge the enormous sacrifices that he made. And, you know, he or his allies listening to this will probably say how nauseating she's sitting there saying that, having blown him up. But you're asking me if I feel sorry for him. No, but I want to. acknowledge that he is a person and he's he worked really really really bloody hard and he paid a

very high price personal price francis before you jump in i should just say we'll do another five ten minutes of chat and then send in your questions superchats paypals and we'll pick a bunch and ask is about a few of them after the break in about five ten minutes go from it do you think we have learned our lessons from covid or as there will be another pandemic are we doomed to make the same mistakes all over again. I do really worry about what you pointed out earlier, which is a number of people who still want to be locked down. Yeah, I mean, and there are real worries too.

On the flip side, that if another pandemic comes and it really is an absolute horror disease, not that COVID wasn't for some people, I really have to emphasize, I've never said this isn't a hideous virus, and I was quite scared of it at the beginning. But the worry is, let's say we get something which is as deadly to people of all ages as, for example, Ebola. The worry now is that people will feel that they were duped by this government, and they were about a number of things. They will feel that they were laughed at and mocked and that those making those decisions were not following. themselves, which we know from so-called Partygate affair, and they will not go along with it

next time. So that's the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is something, hopefully we don't get any more of these, but that's probably not realistic. If there is another, in a dreadful event, there is another pandemic, people this time, and I don't mean those who aren't in a position to do anything about it, but those of us that have positions in which we can hold a government, to account, will ask more searching questions, and the politicians around them, our elected representatives, will not allow power to be seized by a small group of people who continually awarded themselves more extensions of power, and that our elected representatives put up more of a fight or a challenge to things that they feel aren't quite substantiated.

One of the frustrations for me was the way protesters were treated in completely different ways. So you had the BLM protests, which happened during lockdown. And that happened, and everyone seemed to be fine with it. And then you had anti-lockdown protesters. Yeah, and that was obviously, you know, completely abhorrent, wasn't it? And not to be accepted and the police should be dispatched forthwith. Yeah, look, it was ever thus, double standards. Isabel, on the BLM, I mean, people know.

There's quite a lot about that in the messages, by the way. Has that already been released? Because I haven't seen those. Now you're... Because there's been a lot of coverage. I think that there may still be some stuff to come on that area. Well, I was going to ask you about this because I have to say, look, whatever you think of BLM and people know what I think about, that organization, that's fine, right?

People can be pro, anti-whatever. That, for many people that I know was the moment when they went, hold on a minute. Yeah. We've just been locked in our houses for three months. And now because there is a good cause, and you can believe it's a good cause, that's fine. People are allowed to protest in their thousands, no masks, no social distancing in the streets of London, despite the lockdown that we still have in place. What did we learn from your revelations about that moment? What were they saying?

What was the conversation like? Well, you're now testing me because I can't actually remember. Okay, fair enough. There's so much stuff. You know, in this volume of material, which is sort of several sizes, times the size of the Bible, it wasn't an area that Matt and I focused on in his book. But what I do remember very clearly was the Health Secretary pushing the Cabinet office to go further in terms of not allowing public protests.

And I think it ended up that, you know, maybe six people could kind of go along at very socially distance intervals and make their feelings known. I mean, I thought this is one of the most shocking aspects of the whole response to the pandemic. If we lose our fundamental right to protest, sorry, how are we any better than the worst of the dictatorships? I mean, that seems to me, if ordinary people cannot gather on a street or outside a politician's place of work and actually make their feelings known in the most direct and peaceful manner that we've always been allowed to do throughout modern history. We've lost pretty much everything, haven't we?

Well, there were a number of cabinet ministers and government advisors who quite approved of the way China did things. Let's be brutally honest about it. Yes, there were. I mean, he is looking at you, Jeremy Hunt. You know, the Chancellor now was one of the main people behind the scenes who was kind of pushing for aspects of the very sinister Chinese response. I mean, I personally felt mandatory hotel quarantine,

for which people were charged an absolutely disgraceful amount, was an abhorrent thing. And, you know, the government had to create very special laws in order to be able to do that, you know, to force people into that type of accommodation, into, you know, single rooms in which they were kept for, a week or two weeks or whatever it was and charged an absolute fortune for the benefit. I don't understand why anyone ever got themselves into a situation where they actually went into that mandatory hotel quarantine at places like Heathrow and Gatwick.

But you can only imagine that they must have been in dreadful circumstances for that to be upon them. And also as well, the glee with some of the jokes that were shared on the WhatsApp at the fact that these people had to pay such massive sums of money. I remember it wasn't just that that people were fleeced on, because I think they were fleeced. They were fleeced on all these absurd, repetitive COVID tests. You have to have a package, that hideous word, you know, making it sounds if you're getting something good. For your huge amount of, you know, massive profit margin for the companies involved, you know, the profit margins on those mandatory COVID tests were grotesque.

They were. You know, you go to other countries and they would give it to you for virtually nothing, have it processed in no time whatsoever, and off you are, off you go on your way. Here you had to pay £90 for the benefit of something telling you that you were perfectly well as you likely knew you were to begin with. Time and again, a COVID test before you left, a COVID test after you left, another one three days in, you know, honestly, absolute racket. Isabel, let me ask you a party political question, because you described yourself earlier as a right-of-centre journalist. This was done by a conservative party. Conservatives are supposed to not want the government to interfere in people's lives too much and just let them crack on with it. Pretty disillusioning, right? So where does that leave people like you? Well, I've never been a member of any political party. I think I'm a small-sea conservative.

I'm not far right as some people like to claim you. laugh, but honestly, I know had an article this morning that was absolutely outrageously defamatory. I had to get that taken down, describing me as a fascist. I don't even believe in capital punishment. I'm completely liberal on some of these issues. Where does it leave us? I think it leaves us pretty despairing, actually. I don't really want to get into party politics, but since you asked, I'd have to say the Reform Party run by my partner Richard Tyson is the only party that consistently opposed lockdown. Well, on that happy note, why don't we have a quick break, get some questions from our audience

and we'll put them to you. Hello everybody, welcome back. Thank you for submitting your questions. We're going to put them to Isabel and then of course we'll record a couple of bonus questions for those of you who are on locals, you've already submitted your questions there. We'll do those afterwards. But for now, Francis, take it away. Absolutely. So the first question is from D.C. Thank you very much, D.C. And they are And they ask, how do we ensure the fourth estate flourishes in the future? It is in decline with social media, print journalism is declining.

Big Tech supports governments to avoid regulation and run social media. It's a really good question. And for me, I've been in print media for a really long time since the late 90s. And I've watched investigative journalism in particular really decline. And the reason for that is because it's highly resource intensive. And often, you know, if you are doing a kind of covert operation, it's very, very expensive. You know, it saps up resources for an uncertain outcome. There was a possibility, for example, with the Telegraph investigation, that the company could have put eight weeks of eight of its best reporters working full time on this project only for something completely out of.

of the company's control, the news organizations control, to derail the investigation so that it didn't get published, whether it was a successful injunction by the government. Now, that's not totally out of the control of a newspaper because you can make damn sure that you've got grounds for that not to happen. But, you know, who knows what could have happened? There could have been war breaking out somewhere or all sorts of things, in which case the investment that a paper makes has been completely obliterated. So very diminishing number of organisations have these resources. Where the traditional papers have lost those resources,

we see other organisations springing up, doing their own kinds of investigations. Often those may have some kind of political agenda. And you can argue about whether it is a good or a good or a bad thing, that those investigations come out because they may be biased. But what has been heartening about this operation that I've been involved in is that there are still traditional papers like the Telegraph, the Sunday Times too, have to say,

that will put big resources into investigations in the overwhelming public interest. So all hope isn't gone, but people need to continue buying newspapers or newspaper subscriptions. Otherwise, it does just narrow down to smaller, organisations which are not kind of so easily scrutinised in terms of who funds them and what their agenda may be. And to be fair to the Guardian, they did some great work exposing Michelle Mohn. I've no interest in being fair to the Guardian.

I've never ever been fair to me, so. There you go. Nudge and Winquick, however, with the Fiverr, is very interested in being fair to you and he says, please tell Elizabeth she's done a vital service for the country in releasing these messages and thank you. Thank you. Now, yes, this is a good question from someone whose name I will not read out. It says, does Isabel have more messages that haven't been released yet? And we were talking in the break that there are going to be further.

Yeah, so we've got some days left of this investigation. I've also faced quite a few questions that have come through my Twitter and on my website as to why we don't just release them all. And there's a really good reason for that. And that is because they're full of private information that isn't in the public interest. I mean, most of it, by the way, is pretty trivial, really trivial, actually. But it wouldn't be right to chuck out there a load of civil servants' names and addresses and telephone numbers and who they're going on a date with and what they thought of so-and-so.

The telegraph has been meticulous at all times in their public interest threshold for inclusion of material. and that feels like the right thing to do. Shubbing it all out there on the internet, like some kind of, you know, I don't know, irresponsible whistleblower doesn't feel right to me. Marky Mark asked the question. Scientists are bad at politics, politicians

are mostly terrible at scientists. At science, sorry. Journalists are mostly awful at science too. We're very bad at maths as well. I've just noticed that over the years. So how do we provide any credible form of narrative with that being the case? Good question.

And how are journalists not taken advantage of by clever scientists and other clever people? Because in some ways, I think that is part of the problem, you know, in those lobby briefings during the pandemic where we had, Chris Witty, very eminent, hugely knowledgeable, talking to a bunch of journalists like myself that don't have the knowledge, you know, specialised knowledge to come back. there's a sort of inbuilt floor to that structural floor, I suppose.

I mean, what you could say in the context of a pandemic, I think that there needs to be a much sort of more carefully constructed group of advisors. It's not for journalists. We're never going to make us all scientific experts. But I think what went wrong, one of the key things that went wrong during the pandemic, and this is on Matt Hancock and the people around him, was the suppression of information and the smearing of dissenters. Including scientists, by the way.

Sennedra Gupta, J. Batacharya, etc. I'm sorry, I really think that was grotesque. You know, these people that came up with an alternative way of dealing with the virus should have been respected, they should have been listened to. They were very, very distinguished figures that led that so-called Barrington Declaration, the kind of prospectors for how things could be done differently. And they were utterly vilified. And the government used every tool it had to vilify and discredit and undermine those people.

And those people paid a really high price in career terms, in personal terms. I think that that was appalling, disgraceful, shameful. And it should never happen again. I agree. This is a bit weird question from Nick. So feel free to ignore it. He says, Matt Hancock just didn't. recently did an interview with Good Morning Britain, where he repeatedly

posited that there would be another pandemic. Yeah. Do you know why he's sort of persuaded about that? I think what you're the person who's asked that question is getting at is does he have some secret knowledge? Yeah, that another pandemic is coming. Right. And I I don't know if he has any secret knowledge, but I'm going to say almost certainly not. I think that what he is saying is that the way our world is now, so very interconnected with so much global movement at all times, that it's highly likely that there will be some other virus, something else that is like COVID, hopefully not a lot worse. But you'd be a fool to sit here and say, well, I don't think that's

going to happen again, which is why it's so urgent. I said it's just a bit of flu. Everyone needs to calm down. Well, I think a lot of people said that. So, and this is a really interesting question from Mr. Steve, and he says, Isabel, thank you very much. For how long roughly will the paper, the Telegraph, be publishing the lockdown files, in brackets, I need to budget. I love that. We all need to budget time apart from anything else. I think it's really important with any newspaper kind of expose like this, that you don't flog it forever. You know, you've got to quit while you're ahead. you've got to know when's the time that you've made the case

and the telegraph was not trying to make the case, probably I was a bit, but the telegraph is just about putting the information out there. But you don't want to kind of squeeze it for every pip, I don't think. You've got to maintain in any journalistic endeavour, you know, your quality. So I think the paper will keep running it for as long as the paper thinks that there is material there that is in very strong public interest. And after that, you know, sometimes stories, as we've already seen, they have a life of their own. You know, it depends where the politics of this goes. It depends whether could there, for example, be any kind of prosecutions. I'm not saying

that there should be, but there are certainly plenty of people who still want accountability for what happened. I don't personally feel the need for, you know, for blood. I don't feel, I don't feel that gets us anywhere. But I do understand the visceral kind of anger amongst people who suffered so profoundly, perhaps people who were forced to say goodbye to loved ones over iPads. I mean, this is just beyond comprehension. And we have many people write in to make that very point. You know, when you have an audience of people who can write directly in, you hear a lot of stories. Yeah, and those are the stories that have come to me. Yeah. Yeah. And these policies had a real impact on people. So you can understand why they're angry. And I do agree with you, going out for blood is not what we want.

But what I think people do want is, as we talked about earlier, making sure this never happens again in the same way. And that's what I want. You know, people ask, do I have an agenda? Yes. My agenda is that never again does our country, and I don't hope no other country does it either, go down this route in such an ill-informed, cack-handed and at times deeply sinister fashion. Well, we'll ask a couple more and then we will wrap up. June Hope says, is there anything that you'll be releasing? And again, this may be testing your memory after a long couple weeks. Anything about the sacking of carers who refuse to get vaccinated?

Some 40,000. Yeah, really good question. I mean, I know there is material in the WhatsApp about that, about whether or not that policy would be sustainable. In fact, very early on in the messages, and this is actually in Matt's books, so I can talk about it quite freely, you know, he puts on record that he actually believes it should be mandatory to have the flu jab if you work in the NHS. And he was saying that, you know, he had hoped to make, to implement that policy had it not been for the coronavirus coming in and, you know, obviously distracting him with a much bigger problem.

So, you know, that's what he wanted to do. It might still happen under another leader who felt another leader of the health service who felt the same way. I remember that there are conversations about whether or not it was a good idea and whether or not essentially they could get away with doing it. And certainly the words get away with it are not used. That's me paraphrasing it. That was a big call, you know, to attempt to mandate vaccination. Matt Hancock had no qualms about that. He vociferously defended that as a policy.

He always argued that if you are putting yourself into a setting where people are vulnerable, then the very least you can do is make sure that you're not unwittingly making them sicker and more unhealthy. I happen to profoundly disagree with that. I think it crosses a line for me. And the policy was a disaster and they had to abandon it. It was. Do you want to do a couple more? I thought we've...

No, no, there's a couple more. Dynamite Rabbit, great name, says. Courageous guest, great interview, best channel on Earth, couldn't agree more. Do you think... It's just a friendly comment to say, thank you. But Lady Sarcastro did ask a question, which is, so far we've heard about

Go, Hancock, and Case. Does Isabel think there will be more people being exposed as complicit in she says lying, but let's say deceiving the public just to not get sued? Yeah, really good question. I mean, you know, there was a sort of question mark at the beginning of this operation about whether you could cover the stories on a kind of person by person basis, because that's how the WhatsApps came to me, you know, under names of individuals. But actually, I think doing it thematically has worked

really, really well. And I don't quite know how to answer that question, but if the questioner is asking, are there more people who we're about to expose have done truly dreadful things, then I think broadly the answer to that is probably no. Okay. Isabel, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about you and your work, where is the best place to do that? Well, there is a website. And also, I did check my Wikipedia and was wanting to update. it and found that it's now, so many people have tried to do good and bad things to my Wikipedia pages. It's now protected, which means that only moderators can change it. So go to my website,

isabelleoakshot.co.uk.com. Fantastic stuff. Thank you. We're coming on. We're going to ask you a couple of questions that go behind a paywall. But for now, thank you. And thank you guys for watching and listening. Join our locals if you want to hear that bonus content. Thanks for being here live with us. Take care and have yourselves a great morning, evening or afternoon wherever you are. And remember, if you want your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.