- Rishi Sunak, a candidates to be the next UK prime minister, attacked the extent of COVID lockdowns.
- The decisions to lock down were made while he was in government, and he appeared to support them.
- Sunak claimed he argued for a lighter-touch approach but was ignored.
One of the UK's leadership hopefuls launched an attack on government scientists, saying it was wrong to "empower" them to shape the country's COVID-19 lockdowns.
Rishi Sunak, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson and one of the so-called "quad" of four key decision-makers during the period, claimed he was banned from discussing the "trade-offs" of lockdowns.
Sunak is one of two Conservative candidates who could be chosen to success Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister. The other is Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary.
Speaking ahead of a hustings on Thursday night, Sunak told The Spectator magazine: "Those meetings were literally me around that table, just fighting. It was incredibly uncomfortable every single time."
He said: "We shouldn't have empowered the scientists in the way we did. And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we'd done all of that, we could be in a very different place. We'd probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example."
While the lockdowns were taking place, Sunak appeared to support them and repeatedly delivered government advice during press conferences.
In the Spectator interview he said nobody else would acknowledge that there were downsides to locking down.
He said: "The script was: oh, there's no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy."
Sunak said the closest he came to defying the Government's messaging was a speech he gave in September 2020 in which he said it was time to learn to "live without fear".
He said that officials in the UK Cabinet Office "were very upset about that."
Sunak's stance was challenged as "morally irresponsible" by Lee Cain, Johnson's former director of communications.
Cain tweeted: "Huge admirer of Rishi Sunak but his position on lockdown is simply wrong. It would have been morally irresponsible of the govt not to implement lockdown in spring 2020 - the failure to do so would have killed tens-of-thousands of people who survived covid.
"In addition, without lockdown the NHS simply could not have survived & would have been overwhelmed. This would have seen an even greater backlog of excess deaths for missed cancer appointments etc."
The UK recorded the highest COVID-19 death toll in western Europe, exceeding 180,000 according to Statista.
