Playing the fear card

Matt Hancock and daniel Andrews both embody the kind of politician that Robert Menzies called out decades earlier during the height of World War Two – those who cultivate a fear-based narrative out of fear of losing their grip on power. BY NIck Cater.

First published on skynews.com.au

The COVID pandemic demanded leaders of unimpeachable quality. 

Instead, we got leaders like UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Daniel Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, whose high-handed, manipulative and unprincipled response to the crisis was exposed in documents made public this week.

The unsavoury inner-workings of Hancock’s mind were laid bare in the release of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages to a British journalist.

Make no mistake, Churchill’s wartime diaries they are not.

But as documentary evidence goes these days, it is as good a contemporaneous account of a politician in a crisis as we can expect.

We learn that Hancock was advised as early as late February 2020 that the mortality rate of the virus was too low to justify taking short cuts in vaccine safety trials.

“For a disease with a low (one per cent, for the sake of argument) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe,” UK Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty texted to Hancock.

Hancock, like Andrews, claimed to have acted on the authority of the best medical advice.

But for some reason the British politician didn't think it was prudent to share that comforting medical advice with the public.

Four months later in June 2020, Hancock received the encouraging results of a study by professor Lord Darzi that reported a dramatic fall in the virus reproduction rate.

The media was telling a different story, seizing on a Cambridge University finding that transmission rates were high in some parts of Britain.

In an exchange of messages with the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, Hancock cites Darzi’s “very interesting” study, but continues: “Just done a presser where the media interest is only in the gloomy Cambridge survey. But, if we want people to behave themselves maybe that’s no bad thing.”

Vallance replies: “Agree, suck up their miserable interpretation and over deliver.”

Hancock’s chronic vanity emerges in exchanges about vaccines.

He is desperate to claim the glory after early signs of success.

In April 2020 he messages his media adviser, Damon Poole: “Front pages on vaccine are unreal. You are totally right. I should own this.”

In response to more positive coverage of the vaccine on December 26, Hancock messages Poole: “The thing that p****s me off is that the Mail on Sunday links it to Rishi [Sunak]. What’s that all about?

His mood lifts a fortnight later as the positive coverage continues.

“This is a Hancock triumph!” he messages Poole.

Yet Hancock senses an anti-lockdown backlash in the wind.

Rather than ease the unnecessarily tough restrictions then in place, he seizes on a new virus strain to reinforce the narrative of foreboding:

Poole: Rather than doing too much forward signalling, we can roll the pitch with the new strain

Hancock: We frighten the pants of (sic) everyone with the new strain.

Poole: Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour (sic) change

Hancock: When do we deploy the new strain

It was Britain’s misfortune to enter the pandemic with a weak character like Hancock in charge of the health portfolio.

Ordinary British people had entered the lockdowns with the stoicism with which their forebears had entered shelters in the Blitz.

The least they could have expected was a leader whose judgement was not clouded by his vanity.

They deserved to be treated with respect, not played for fools by a condescending minister who sought to convert their anxiety into political capital.

By the same token, Victorians could have hoped for a leader with greater substance than the current Premier, one better able to distinguish between policies that served the interests of Victorians from those that served to bolster Brand Dan.

This week’s Freedom of Information release of correspondence between the Premier’s department and research company QDOS, reported by The Australian, reveals that Andrews’ personal approval ratings became a prime metric for measuring success.

It shows that while the recommendations of senior advisers on health, economics, education or social policy were deeply important to him during the pandemic, so was keeping himself in power.

Taxpayer-funded research on the impact of lockdown measures conducted by QDOS paid scant attention to their effectiveness as public health measures, the damage to the Victorian economy, mental health or children’s education.

They were prepared to wear public anger or frustration provided it wasn’t directed at the Premier.

The government’s actions were seen to “reinforce the competence brand”, QDOS observed after one round of focus groups.

The hotel quarantine scandal had been successfully deflected towards “companies trying to make a quick buck” and “individual stupidity”, presumably not including the stupidity of the Premier.

“We can safely conclude that the Government and the primary spokesperson, Dan Andrews, still have the credibility and confidence of the people,” QDOS reassured the Premier’s department.

The politics of fear is commonly assumed to be a weapon wielded by would-be demagogues as an excuse to grant themselves extra power to control the crisis they invented.

Yet, as Australia’s longest serving prime minister Robert Menzies perceptively observed in two radio broadcasts at the height of World War II, fear-mongering politicians are hostage to fears of their own.

A politician who plays the fear card is likely to “be sufficiently spineless to abandon his own reasoned convictions for fear of losing his seat in Parliament”.

Menzies, by contrast, said that if he came to an honest conclusion with which his electors disagreed, his duty was to try to persuade them that his view was right.

“If I fail in this, my second duty will be to accept the electoral consequences,” he said.

Winning freedom from fear, Menzies concludes, required “victory not only in our war against Germany and Japan, but a constant war against ourselves”.

We should be thankful that the COVID pandemic was not bigger than World War Two, as some excitable commentators claimed it was at the time.

There is little sign of the unshakable conviction in those who presumed to lead us through the pandemic crisis that drove wartime leaders like Menzies, John Curtin and Winston Churchill.