Labour’s Anneliese Dodds leads the ranks of Covid Captain Hindsights: Bill Carmichael

In other words they watch the big game on TV on a Sunday afternoon and despite having little expertise in the sport in question they dissect each play with their workmates on Monday morning, pontificating at length about how the quarterback should have done better, usually ending up with the empty boast: “If they had only listened to me they would have won that game.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought out an army of similar characters in the UK – welcome to Captain Hindsight, Colonel Afterthought, Major Flashback and Rear Admiral Retrospect, backed up by Privates Coulda, Shoulda and Woulda.

Despite having no experience in the relevant fields they spend about 30 seconds researching on Google and quickly become self-appointed experts in the fields of epidemiology, virology, computer modelling, disease prevention, vaccine development, public health policy and just about anything else they can bone up on in less than a minute.

And then they start loudly lecturing the politicians and scientists on where it all went wrong. They’ll tell you: “If Boris Johnson had listened to me instead of the Chief Medical Officer there wouldn’t have been a single pandemic death and the economy would be booming!”

These people are easy to spot because they are always 100 per cent right about everything – but only after the event. They never predict with any accuracy what is going to happen next, but once events have unfolded they are always on hand to explain in detail how they were right all along. There is no consistency to their advice, but as the twists and turns of the pandemic have unfolded – totally unforeseen and unpredicted by anyone as far as I can tell – they frequently change tack to reflect the new reality.

So these are the people who in the early days of the crisis were warning darkly that the Government should not over-react to the pandemic by imposing a severe lockdown. But as the death toll began to rise they switched smoothly to argue the lockdown had been imposed too late and was not nearly strict enough.

When the government began to ease restrictions they complained it was happening too quickly and then smugly crowed “I told you so” when rising cases caused the re-imposition of local lockdowns in parts of Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees.

Now with this week’s horrible economic figures, we are witnessing yet another spectacular backflip from know-it-all denizens of I-told-you-so central.

In what Chancellor Rishi Sunak described as an “unprecedented” slump, the economy shrank by over 20 per cent between April and June compared to the first three months of the year.

The UK is now officially in a recession for the first time since 2009 after registering two consecutive quarters of negative growth. And although there was a bounce back of more than eight per cent in June as the restrictions started to ease, there are fears of big increases in unemployment and damage to the economy that could take years to repair.

Immediately, those soothsayers blessed with 20/20 hindsight turned on a sixpence to criticise the government for imposing restrictions that were so harsh as to damage the economy. Take for example the Shadow Chancellor, Anneliese Dodds.

In April she was arguing against the closure of schools and the cancellation of large scale events. A few weeks later she was arguing the government had acted too slowly and lockdown should have begun earlier with stricter controls. Then she criticised the Prime Minister for the “risky” easing of restrictions, and now this week she was complaining about what she called Boris’s “jobs crisis” - caused by the lockdown that she and the rest of the Labour leadership supported.

The simple fact is that no one predicted any of this and the Captain Hindsights who tell you they did are lying.

No doubt many mistakes were made by both politicians and scientists and once the dust has settled lessons need to be learned. But there are no easy choices. People will die if there’s a second spike, but equally there will be fatalities if continuing lockdowns damage the economy. The government is trying to strike a difficult balance and the people constantly shouting “I told you so” from the side-lines aren’t helping.

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James Mitchinson

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