Matt Hancock, it may be remembered, was the Minister who was forced to resign when found to have violated the British lockdown rules. He was caught on camera groping his mistress in the corridors of power.

A bit like Professor Pantsdown, Neil Ferguson, the academic modeler who was one of the key architects of the entire British fear campaign over COVID.

MISTRESS

He was also caught violating lockdown rules to visit his mistress. Hancock got the chop. Ferguson, alas, lived on to fight other days.

Matt Hancock is a nondescript try-hard Tory who emerged from the swamp of the Cameron-Osborne era of so-called non-toxic Tory rule a decade ago.

Inevitably, the COVID protectorate has sought to place the recent revelations as a case of problematic media morality and as a threat to public health. Really. Blame the whistleblower.

Well, it is The Conversation, after all. This is more important than what is revealed? Damages journalism? Give me a break.

What about the damage done to people’s faith in their elected (sometimes professedly conservative) governments, and hence to the body politic? No, the State is circling the wagons. Look over there!

Another take is that Hancock is being made the patsy. This is another element of the circling of the wagons. If he takes all of the heat, then we can all move on in the age of COVID non-exceptionalism and the people (like vaccine injury victims) won’t come after us. After all, the voters already loathe Hancock.

Then there is the notion of the so-called limited hangout. This is the idea that the State is happy for the public to know some of the bad things it has done and to know some of the bad actors. Better than the whole truth coming out.

That is, that the whole show might have been deliberate and done for evil purposes. This is the theory of the hidden agenda. It is not a stretch to think that the British Government actually sanctioned the leaks. Even arranged them.

Editor of The Spectator UK Fraser Nelson sees the real problem not as Hancock and his ilk, but in the absence of contrarian voices among decision-makers: “ ‘When do we deploy the variant’, asks Matt Hancock after talking of the need to ‘frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain’. The messages yet again remind us of the mindset, at this stage in the pandemic, of the small group of men who had given themselves complete power during lockdown…

“My takeaway from spending all that time with the Lockdown Files was not the stories – extraordinary and appalling though they are – but by what we do not see. Mainly, where are the voices of caution in the fear messaging? Where is the person in the room saying: hang on, what about the unintended consequences?”

UNCENSORED

Release the variant? So, the memes were spot on. The ruling class controlled the variants. Was Hancock just making this up? Or was he linked to those who were in the COVID Lab working on new variants? Should we take him at his uncensored word?

The HancockGate revelations show so much more.

The release of his WhatsApp messages confirms a number of things that we already know about modern day democratic politics and politicians, and how they played out during the pandemic:

• Our worst fears about our politicians are underlined;
• The COVID decision-making framework was built upon fear;
• There was precious little science;
• Optics and “comms” were everything;
• The politicians were clueless;
• The vaccine was always seen as a get-out-of-jail-free card for the political class, nothing more and nothing less;
• The thesis that the lockdown versus vaccine narrative, instigated by Bill Gates, was always a false binary.

Just for starters.

This leads us to the tiresome “stupid versus evil” debate. And the virtue signalling of those who are determined that no one will ever call them a “conspiracy theorist”.

To be sure, conspiracy was helped along by corruption, collusion, compliance and there were a thousand aspects to the entire sorry tale, many misunderstandings, accidents and interruptions. Many consequences were unintended. But many, if not all, were intended.

And the closure of the narrative, the tying up of the narrative by government and media, meant that these parties were conspiring, consciously and coercively, against the public.

They were conspiring against anyone who attempted to reveal any aspect of the conspiracy; they used the term “conspiracy theory” as a clever way of distracting from their own conspiring; and they should not be let off the hook.

Conspiracy theorising is just as important as cock-up theorising. Each is almost worthless without the other. Both are required.

DUMB

There seems to be an almost incomprehensible effort to prove that politicians are dumb but never evil. Never.

Yet nothing revealed suggests that there are not other, malign forces at work which mobilised at the outset of the plandemic, indeed long before.

It is entirely possible that the politicians are stupid and there has been an organised conspiracy. That the Hancock class is made up of useful idiots. We know, for example, from senior Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings’ earlier statements, that Bill Gates was in there lobbying for lockdowns and vaccines very, very early in the saga.

We know of all of the connections between British and other Western leaders with the globalists. Think Jacinda Ardern. Justin Trudeau. Macron. Greg Hunt. And the rest. These connections are fact.

The whole conspiracy versus stuff-up issue has the feel of a false binary.

First, a primer on conspiracy theories.

Kelly M Greenhill is a political science professor in the USA. Being a political scientist myself, I have a reflexive disposition to listen to my colleagues. Conspiracy theories are, at bottom, theories about the nature of power and the dynamics of political decisions. So, it is wise to listen to the experts.

Greenhill suggests: “The term means different things to different people. For some, conspiracy theory is employed as a catchall term to describe a broad array of generally outlandish and almost invariably false alleged clandestine plots that are usually – but not always – devised by rich, powerful actors and/or governments to dupe and/or exploit others. A wide range of wacky and eye roll inducing conspiratorial claims certainly do exist. But to describe all conspiracy theories with such a broad brush is both analytically misleading and politically unhelpful.”

She goes on to mention Watergate as a conspiracy theory. The chief perpetrators here were lionised. They even made a movie about them. Conspiracy theory became conspiracy fact.

WEAPON

It all changed, of course, when the old Left, the source of most conspiracy theories of the 20th century realised that abusing the “Right’s” conspiracy theories could be a useful tactical weapon.

Greenhill also describes the characteristics of conspiracy theories. 

Here are mine. Rather, they are assumptions underlying such theories.  One, political decisions are often hidden. Second, their intent and agendas are not always stated. Third, there is generally collusion among various actors.

Anyone who has ever worked in government and who has observed politics, even casually, will know immediately that all three assumptions are patently true.