PM was 'bamboozled' by Covid graphs and data

Transcript

00:00 You say, late afternoon meeting with the PM on schools.

00:04 My God, this is complicated.

00:05 Models will not provide the answer.

00:07 PM is clearly bamboozled.

00:09 PM asking whether we've overdone it

00:12 on the lethality of this disease.

00:14 He swings between optimism, pessimism, and then this.

00:18 PM still confused on different types of test.

00:21 He holds it in his head for a session, and then it goes.

00:25 Watching PM get his head around stats is awful.

00:28 He finds relative and absolute risk

00:30 almost impossible to understand.

00:31 PM struggled with whole concept of doubling times,

00:35 just couldn't get it.

00:37 Taken through the graphs, real struggle

00:39 to get him to understand them.

00:41 The message that we get from these repeated entries

00:44 appears to describe something,

00:45 at least as far as the Prime Minister is concerned,

00:48 more serious, a repeated failure to understand graphs,

00:53 scientific concepts, and so on,

00:56 forgetting things that had been explained to him

00:58 only a few hours earlier, repeatedly.

01:00 Was there a more serious problem with him

01:04 than that which you describe in the witness statement?

01:07 - Well, I think I'm right in saying

01:08 that the Prime Minister at the time

01:10 gave up science when he was 15.

01:12 And I think he'd be the first to admit it wasn't his forte,

01:17 and that he did struggle with some of the concepts,

01:20 and we did need to repeat them often.

01:23 But it was hard work sometimes to try and make sure

01:25 that he had understood what a particular graph

01:29 or piece of data was saying.

01:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]