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September 11, 2024 - 10:00am
Liz Truss has admitted that “it would have been better if we’d gone for the Swedish model” in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. Speaking at a live event at the UnHerd Club on Monday evening, the former UK prime minister claimed that Sweden’s management of the virus, which involved limited containment measures rather than full lockdowns, “was a better approach”.
Asked whether she felt that lockdowns were wrong at the time, and whether she now thinks they were wrong, Truss said: “I accepted at the time it had to be done.” She added that “I had no idea what this thing [Covid-19] was: I think we’d all seen the frightening pictures from Italy. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake.”
When the UK entered lockdown in March 2020, Truss was International Trade Secretary, becoming Foreign Secretary in September of the following year. During Monday’s interview, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers asked the former prime minister: “If freedom is your central value, where were you during Covid?” Truss responded that “I was mainly travelling, to be honest […] I spent a lot of time at airports,” and stressed that “I was pretty much excluded from any decision-making about Covid.”
I asked Liz Truss: if freedom is your central value, where were you during Covid? There was no freedom.
She: “In retrospect I think [lockdowns] were a mistake. I think the Swedish approach was a better approach.”
Full interview here:https://t.co/KdEqbp72ED pic.twitter.com/9iOk3Ai7TJ
— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) September 10, 2024
In the early stages of the pandemic, the Swedish model now advocated by Truss was variously denounced as “deadly folly” and “the world’s cautionary tale”. However, in the years since, the Nordic country has recorded a well-below-average tally for excess deaths, a common metric for measuring Covid-19 fatalities. Sweden’s former state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has since claimed that the Government’s decision not to impose mandatory lockdowns or close schools saved the country from a higher number of Covid deaths. The Swedish model has since been praised by senior epidemiologists in other European countries, while British politicians from across the spectrum have acknowledged that the UK could learn from it.
Truss claimed that, despite her exclusion from the decision-making process, she attempted to dissuade colleagues from additional pandemic-era closures. “When I had an opportunity, I argued against closing schools or closing pubs. I was generally in favour of opening things up,” she said. “I was generally on that side of the argument.”
While campaigning to become Tory leader in 2022, Truss argued that the lockdowns went too far, adding that she would not implement similar measures in office in the case of widespread virus and that Boris Johnson’s Covid-19 policies had been “draconian”. At a leadership hustings in August of that year, she stated that “when Covid happened we were all hugely shocked” but that “in retrospect, we did do too much.” During Monday’s event at the UnHerd Club, she also claimed that Johnson “made a massive mistake in who he chose as his chief of staff” in picking Dominic Cummings.
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