Keep scientists in the research room and out of politics | Fiona Fox

The simple messaging favoured by media advisers doesn't chime with a discipline that is messy and incomplete

Matt Hancock's views about the independent experts advising government, detailed in the Lockdown Files, are revealing. They were totally unreliable" and wacky" (Dame Kate Bingham); a totally offside... loudmouth" (Sir Jeremy Farrar); and a prize idiot" (Prof Jon Deeks); while Prof Sharon Peacock, the amazing scientist who set up Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), was deemed a total outrage", because she didn't warn him months earlier that the Alpha variant was coming (revealing Hancock's misunderstanding of the work of these genome sequencers). Nor was it just Hancock who seemed to view these pesky scientists as an inconvenience. When asked to deal with Farrar, one of Hancock's special advisers replied: What is your ask? Get rid or neutralise?"

Now I'm not averse to a bit of ripe language myself and I am mindful that these messages were intended to be private. But they do reinforce my belief that science and politics are best when bathed in the clear blue waters of separation. We need scientific advice to government at times of crisis and I think Sage did that very well. But the rolling of science into politics through government communications is where things get problematic.