It’s their sheer smallness that is so striking. Their banality. Their triteness. I had hoped, reading The Lockdown Files, to find some explanation for the miseries that were inflicted on us in 2020. Perhaps decisions that looked imbecilic to the rest of us might make sense to those in the control room, able to survey information that we could not see. Perhaps there was a grand plan.
But not a bit of it. What we see in the leaked WhatsApp messages are petty, frightened men at the mercy of events. They obsess over tweets and news reports. They fret about how they are coming across.
