Days before news of the omicron variant broke, the former chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, Dame Kate Bingham, paid a tearful tribute to her liberty-loving late father at an Oxford University lecture, writes Sherelle Jacobs.
Tom Bingham, a law lord, had 19 years earlier addressed the very same room, warning that while freedom from arbitrary detention is the oldest human right, it is the first to be curtailed in an emergency.
It appeared to be a pointed reference as well as a personal one: Dame Kate went on to caution that the taskforce’s win had been converted into an “own goal” as civil servants revert to old practices. She concluded with an ominous call to overhaul a broken Whitehall – not just to protect the vulnerable, but “us all”.
Put more plainly, one might argue that the Whitehall blob is the biggest threat to freedom in Britain today. And the situation has become far more stark in the days since.
For the great risk is that if the blob fails to deliver now, the omicron variant could terrify ministers into leading us back down the path of draconian restrictions – and even into further lockdowns.
