The end lockdown question is very interesting and very very complex.

There’s no point in saying we’ll leave it to the experts to give their recommendation.

Because although the experts views are vitally important and must be given absolute considerations, each view represents a facet of a highly complex problem.

To name of few of the expert areas:
- Medical
- Medical logistics
- Epidemiological
- Economic
- Moral / ethical

(I’ve deliberately left out political for obvious reasons)

And each of these areas will have huge complexity and differing opinions.

So how to move towards a view?

The easy part (in a sense) is extracting the views from each different expert constituency. After all, that’s what they are there to do.

A much more subtle problem is how to ensure not that the experts are right / wrong (how would you know?) but that the view they have presented is sufficiently nuanced and representative of the range of possible outcomes.

I wouldn’t particularly want (for example) the epidemiology experts to present me with the ‘answer’ in a one page memo.

I would want a short presentation that explained the epidemiologist’s base case, prudent worst case and prudent best case. I would then want to throughly interrogate all the key assumptions etc.

The trickiest part, arguably, is synthesising the various expert presentations into a representative view.

Who does that? I wonder.

It’s not obviously any one of the expert constituencies. You need someone who’s a polymath and also has a very big brain and an endless appetite for work.

In my experience these people exist but they are very rare. But they’re around. I’m not sure that intellectually the politicians are up to it. There’ll be a few handfuls of people in the civil service who can do this sort of work.