Abstract
The publication of the UK New Year’s Honours list was a watershed of sorts in the public narrative about the COVID pandemic and its handling by government, its advisers and institutions.
For many, the bestowing of gongs commemorating a long-lost Empire has become increasingly anachronistic. In recent years this has been further devalued by the plethora of awards allocated to the ephemeral worlds of light entertainment and celebrity culture, together with increasing evidence of a culture of reward for political donations.
These trends have occurred against a background of multiple honours to those for whom the financial compensation and status accompanying successful careers might be regarded as sufficient recognition. The stretching ever upwards of the hierarchy of caste and class certainly run counter to the declared objective of ‘levelling up’.
During the first COVID round of awards there was an implicit holding back from identifying those believed to have played important roles in the response to the pandemic, albeit with a nod or two to grass roots contributors; such restraint has not continued in the recent honours list for while some 20% of those recognised have been COVID-related, true to form, the higher forms of recognition have been dominated by those in national leadership roles irrespective of how well they have acquitted themselves in the greatest public health emergency in 100 years.
If the ritual of the award of national honours is to have any meaning it should surely reflect the contributions and abilities of those both picked out and passed over. Given the prominent place given to evidence-placed policy and practice over the past three decades is it asking too much to join up the dots, to learn the lessons of the handling of the pandemic and to reward those who have stepped up to the mark and delivered at all levels of society? The list of issues against which to make such judgements is quite long but should be quite clear to all of us who have lived through the past two years. 3
Faced with a government that was clearly out of its depth the situation called for assertive contributions from those best placed to challenge, to educate and to fulfil the much vaunted responsibility to ‘speak truth to power’. In the light of the nation’s abysmal performance, with a tally of COVID deaths that places us not only in the company of the worst-performing developed countries but also chasing that of countries less well placed to look after the health of their populations, hard questions must be asked. In a BMJ editorial, Kamran Abbasi, writing in his capacity of executive editor at the BMJ, questioned whether ‘when politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands a off premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not a premeditated and reckless indifference to human life? … who is responsible for the resulting non-Covid excess deaths? 4
We might well ask whether the awarding of state honours to those so closely involved in the pandemic fiasco constitutes bad faith in rewarding failure. It potentially compromises the ability of those so recognised to give full, unvarnished, accounts of the underlying errors of omission and commission when they know where the bodies are buried and have a vested interest in keeping them there. It is noticeable that the much criticised over-centralisation of the public health response is reflected in the absence from the list of any local public health leader despite their widely acclaimed efforts in mobilising the local response to testing, tracing and containment of the virus in the face of national incompetence by staying true to long tried and tested public health measures.
Raising questions such as this may seem harsh for some, such as Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, for whom a higher award in the form of a knighthood has long since gone with the job. It can be argued that he was dropped in cold to the crisis having only recently assumed the mantle of Chief Medical Officer, that he was slow off the mark to assert himself with the politicians, and that by the time he found his authentic voice they had stopped listening. However, few fair-minded people might begrudge the Chief Medical Officer the customary recognition.
For others such as Chief Scientist, Patrick Vallance, who breathed disastrous life into an appalling flawed concept of ‘herd immunity’, based on letting the pandemic run its course, the escalation of his knighthood to ‘Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath’ might be seen as offensive to all those families who lost loved ones to the virus in the early stages of the emergency.
A sign of the public mood might be found in an article in The Spectator, ‘Five Howlers from Jennie Harries’, which reminds us that the person now heading the UK Health Security Agency played a disastrous hand as Deputy Chief Medical Officer, backing the go-ahead of large-scale events, ridiculing the use of face masks as a defence against spreading the virus, arguing against the value of testing and tracing when the degraded public health system was shown to have inadequate capacity to deliver one of the mainstays of epidemic control, dismissing shortages of personal protective equipment that would lead to thousands of avoidable deaths and causing confusion about the potential impact of the Omicron variant of the virus while simultaneously presiding over the new organisation that was encouraging Lateral Flow Testing in the absence of an adequate supply of the kits. 5 On New Year’s Day, The Daily Telegraph devoted a whole page indictment of Dr Harries under the heading ‘She gets a damehood … the rest of us get Covid’, describing the new Dame as having ‘failed upwards’ into her new role. 6
For many of the millions of NHS and social care staff who have lived and breathed COVID to the point of exhaustion, as well as those families and friends who have lost loved ones, these and other examples are likely to add insult to injury. An exception to this might be that of the knighthood awarded to Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam, who through his transparent humanity, clear communication and sense of humour, gave the public something to hold onto amid the formulaic bureaucracy of denial, falsehood and bad faith.
It remains to be seen whether this distasteful episode is a last nail in the coffin of the remnants of the ‘Glory of Empire’ or whether from its ashes might arise a phoenix more suited to a democracy of equal opportunity. Every generation produces its heroes and heroines, whatever size canvas they live out their lives. Among the lessons of the pandemic surely this is one to take its place among the many others.