Goodbye Neil Ferguson, the man who rightly forced us into lockdown – but couldn't follow his own rules

Apparently, the scientist Neil Ferguson – “Professor Lockdown" in tabloidspeak – continued to see his lover after he’d recovered from covid-19 because he believed himself to be immune and no longer a danger to anyone, directly or indirectly.

Maybe, maybe not, because we’ve all heard experts giving different lines about that, but he was certainly not immune from criticism. He was charged and found summarily guilty of one of the most serious charges available to the British press; hypocrisy. “Gotcha” journalism, you might say.

Rather than subject all concerned to days of media hounding until he did finally quit, he resigned, or “stood back” in the current euphemism. The work of his Imperial College group and the Sage expert committee he was a member of can continue, relatively undisturbed.

Rules is rules, though, and he was right to go. The “stay home” regime is so crucial to getting the infection rate down, that we should all err on the side of caution. It’s true that there are all manner of anomalies and a few absurdities in the social distancing guidelines, but the point isn’t to try and game the system somehow to get another jog in, but to stop us meeting one another and breaking the chain of transmission. Even if clever professor Ferguson’s calculations of the balance of risk-reward in having his girlfriend come round were impeccable, he sets a poor example. He shouldn’t have done it.

Like Catherine Calderwood, the chief medical officer of Scotland, who was caught visiting her second home with her kids, and had to resign, it looks bad. There are many parents with kids trapped in flats who’d love to bend the rules a bit in an apparently harmless way, but they resist the temptation. Ferguson and Calderwood’s behaviour is offensive and hurtful to them.

I acknowledge that the timing of the publication of the news is handy if you’d prefer to focus on that rather than Britain having the worst coronavirus death toll in Europe, at least on some readings of the data. It’s also a useful stuck for those who wish now to relax the measures more quickly – it smears and discredits Ferguson. But none of that actually renders the story untrue, or makes Ferguson’s resignation wrong.

It is, though, sad. They’re all very modest, selfless and collaborative these scientists (so it seems). but Ferguson probably made a bigger contribution to controlling the spread of the disease than most. His modelling of casualty rates drove the experts and Boris Johnson (via Dominic Cummings in the famous "Damascene moment"), to the hard lockdown announced on 24 March. At the time, the UK death toll had reached a mere 335, and the sense of complacency in government was palpable. Ferguson’s work shook them out of that, and saved many, many lives and that certainly should never be forgotten.

He deserved to lose his public position through an error of personal judgement, (his work goes on) but perhaps in due course his brilliant research might also be recognised in some way. Not at the moment, though.