In the dying days of Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaign, he gave an interview to The Spectator about lockdown which he was grilled on today at the Covid Inquiry. At the time he was speaking candidly: it was clear that Liz Truss would win the Tory leadership contest. Now, he is Prime Minister and has to defend the record of the Conservative government, including decisions he argued against. So he was in a difficult position when the Inquiry asked him about the interview he gave to me.

When lockdown struck, Sunak had just been made Chancellor and was relatively new to government. There was an aspect of Mr Smith Goes to Washington about his disbelief at the way lockdown was implemented without any admission about the harm it would cause. Why, he asked, should people not be told the truth? Isn’t it basic ethics to run a cost-benefit analysis in any public health question?

The cost-benefit there is called a QALY exercise: counting the pros and cons not in just crude lives lost or saved but ‘quality of life years lost.’ So the death of a 20-year-old is weighted higher than that of a 90-year-old. But there was no interest in anything that acknowledged that lockdown had costs. As Sunak told me in that interview…

The general sense was: no trade-offs. The general sense was: over-index for fear. I was very nervous because my analytical side of me was saying: “Clearly we should be having a QALY analysis… Any health economist would do this analytically with a QALY analysis, because that’s how you do it. That’s how NICE do clinical things. It may sound a bit, you know, kind of robotic.

Sunak was not just worried not just about coming across as a “robotic” bean counter. As he knew, to ask questions mean making himself a target. We now know even the government’s now chief medical adviser ended up calling him “Dr Death”. This toxic atmosphere stopped ministers using the basic government apparatus, through fear of being seen as disloyal. I wrote in my interview that Sunak…

tried not to challenge the prime minister in public, or leave a paper trail.

Sunak was asked about this by Hugo Keith QC in the Inquiry: what did these words mean? Why not leave a paper trail? He dismissed this point by saying these were my words, not his. That’s true. But I was summarising his words. Here’s what he said:

‘So I was indexing for loyalty as well. I’d say a lot of stuff to him in private. This is me being new to it.  So I don’t put 50 things in the system so there’s some written record of everything. Because generally, people leak it. And it causes problems.’

A crucial point – and one this morning’s inquiry skimmed over. Sunak’s crucial challenge – how sure are we that lockdown won’t claim more lives than it saves? – was one he felt could not have been processed in the government machine. He felt that asking this, even in private, would be seen as an act of hostility against the prime minister.

It is a screaming red light that, in a pandemic, a challenge to the PM’s position was regarded as treachery. Such an environment is quite obviously unsuitable for guiding a country through a pandemic. Difficult decisions were not properly challenged; even the Chancellor felt he could not use the Whitehall system to do so. This is why a special red-team is needed next time: an awkward-squad whose job it is to throw every possible challenge at whatever the PM decides. The political apparatus is too easily paralysed by paranoia and tribalism: as we saw. Let’s hope the Inquiry doesn’t suffer the same fate.