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Covid inquiry: Michael Gove defends exempting hunting and shooting from ‘rule of six’ [1]
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Date: 2023-11
Michael Gove has defended the government’s controversial decision to exempt hunting and shooting from ‘rule of six’ restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking at the Covid inquiry today, Gove, who was minister for the Cabinet Office during the pandemic, said he wanted “horizontal rules” that applied to all forms of outdoor activity and did not want to “stoke an argument” over hunting.
On 20 September 2020, “sports gatherings” including shooting and hunting were exempted from ‘rule of six’ measures that restricted people from gathering in groups greater than six indoors or outdoors. The exemption meant shooting and hunting parties could gather in groups of up to 30 people.
In a series of WhatsApp messages from that month shown to the inquiry – including messages from a group named ‘Shoot rules’ – Gove is seen discussing the exemption.
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“I presume you are strongly in favour of exempting but in a way that it doesn’t appear on face of regs”, a member of the group, whose name was redacted, wrote to Gove.
Gove replied: “Yes” before stating: “I think we need to be VERY careful on how it is presented… Shooting is defensible economically and environmentally… Fox hunting not so much.”
Chief counsel to the inquiry Hugo Keith asked whether an exemption that “doesn’t appear on the face of the regs” was a “sleight of hand” and why if there were “proper reasons” to exempt shooting and hunting from rules they weren’t discussed directly.
Gove said this wasn’t the case, and insisted they were not at the time running through different types of sports and outdoor activities one-by-one.
A later WhatsApp exchange involving Gove, MP Nigel Adams and others on 14 September confirmed that shooting had been exempted.
“Amazing what a bit of lobbying can do”, wrote Adams.
Keith asked Gove what lobbying this referred to, but Gove did not answer.
UK ‘too slow’ to lock down
Gove said the UK was too slow to lock down in March 2020 and should have taken stricter measures before eventually introducing tiered restrictions in late October.
When questioned by Keith, he said there were several areas where he felt the government could not award itself “high marks”, including how Covid testing was implemented.
“I believe that while it was admirable that we succeeded in building testing capacity so quickly, the strategic approach to who should be tested and why and what the tests were for was not as rigorously thought through as it might have been,” Gove told the inquiry.
He said he was also concerned the government did not pay enough attention to the impact of Covid on children and vulnerable children.
“I also believe that the approach that we took towards PPE procurement deserves at the very least a reflection,” he added, but was not asked for any further detail on this point.
Gove later said he had come to the conclusion during the week of 9 March 2020 that a national lockdown was necessary. He said he pushed for “the most vigorous actions possible” in his role as minister for the cabinet but should have been more forthright.
Cabinet Office response
The inquiry was shown a series of WhatsApp exchanges between Gove and Dominic Cummings, special adviser to Boris Johnson, in early March 2020.
A message sent to Cummings by Gove on 4 March 2020 stated: “You know me. I don’t often kick off. But we are fucking up as a government and missing golden opportunities. I will carry on doing what I can but the whole situation is even worse than you think and action needs to be taken or we'll regret it for a long time[.]”
When asked what he was referring to in this message, Gove said it referenced the work needed to improve operations and efficiency in the Cabinet Office rather than just the government’s response to the pandemic.
Later in the same WhatsApp exchange, Cummings says he is in “corona hell” and describes the Cabinet Office as a “fucking joke”. “They told us they had plan. Obv bollocks[.],” he wrote.
‘Strong personalities’
The culture in Downing Street during the early days of the pandemic has previously been described by other witnesses to the inquiry as toxic with sexism, “presenteeism” and “macho posturing”.
In her evidence to the inquiry on 1 November, Helen McNamara, the government’s deputy cabinet secretary until 2021, raised concerns about Hancock and his “pattern of being reassured that something was absolutely fine and then discovering it was very, very far from fine”.
When asked whether he took this view of the culture in Number 10, Gove disagreed, saying he believed it was a case of strong personalities that “sometimes clashed”. During his evidence, he also said he had “a high opinion” of Hancock as a minister.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-michael-gove-hunting-shooting-rule-of-six/
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