Did Tory papers sit on Neil Ferguson sex scandal for FIVE weeks - then unleash it to push for quick end of lockdown?

Professor Neil Ferguson, the UK’s lockdown czar, has been forced to resign after the media revealed his own rule-breaking romantic liaisons. But those took place over a month ago – why have they only just been made public?

Being snared in a sex scandal with a married lover is a classic British newspaper sting. The star of the latest production is Neil Ferguson – or, as he's been rebranded, 'Professor Pants Down'.

He was the czar who was the biggest proponent of the national lockdown, now in its sixth week. Large swathes of the public are sick and tired of it; they're straining at the leash to reopen their businesses and resume their social lives.

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With this in mind, eyebrows are being raised after it transpired that the romantic liaisons captured by the Daily Telegraph occurred on March 30 and April 8. That's means they've been sitting on the story for five weeks and, along with the Sun and the Daily Mail, only opted to release it now.

It doesn't require any investigative prowess to uncover their political loyalties.

Boris Johnson is heavily backed by 'The Daily Torygraph' – and was a £275,000-a-year columnist for them before being made PM. The Sun also backs the Conservatives and is fully behind Boris' personal obsession, Brexit – as is the Daily Mail.

Another big name in the British media landscape, the BBC's Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, quickly tweeted to promote a podcast titled 'Professor Lockdown Steps Down’ before the physical copies of the newspapers were even on sale. She's also widely regarded as being a paid-up member of Boris' fan club.

Someone of Ferguson’s power and influence is obviously expected to practice what they preach, so the outrage that ensued following the revelations was quite justified.

But is this a case of the dead cat? Throw one of them on the table, everybody focuses on that and ignores everything else?

Convenient timing

With social media, any journalist worth their salt is hyper aware that any scoop can be gazumped in a heartbeat. If you manage to hook a big one, then you reel it in bloody fast.

Unless, that is, someone has been keeping a dossier on file and chose the opportune moment to hand it over.

Are Neil Ferguson's secret trysts being made public as the result of an investigation, or is it a marriage of convenience, with everything being sent to the newspapers already fully formed and ready to be printed?

Another chin-stroking element is how the exclusive news perfectly dovetailed with confirmation that Britain had achieved the highest death toll in Europe – and second globally – with 29,427.

As those figures came out, finally some of the scientists who advise the government located their spines and at least offered some acknowledgement of the shambles that Britain's Covid-19 efforts have been.

Sir Patrick Vallance said: “I think that probably we, in the early phases – and I've said this before – I think if we'd managed to ramp testing capacity quicker it would have been beneficial.” Dr Jenny Harries added: “if we had unlimited capacity, and the ongoing support beyond that, then we perhaps would choose a slightly different approach.”

These contributions did feature on the Daily Telegraph's front page, but only in a tiny box at the bottom, below large pictures of Professor Pants Down and his married lover, Antonia Staats.

The experts were absent from the Sun's front page completely, as the tabloid went all-out on the sex scandal and profiling Staats. They didn't appear on the Daily Mail's cover either.

‘One way to pay for the headlines’

This could, of course, be unrelated to the recently revealed £35 million injection the Conservative government handed to newspapers as part of its Covid-19 communications campaign. That cash was like rain in a desert for the press, as the lockdown has starved them of sales and seen advertisers beat a hasty retreat due to a lack of funds. But the public, whose trust in the UK's printed press is already at a record low, is more than a little suspicious, with one description of the grant being “one way to pay for the headlines.”

So could the treatment of the Neil Ferguson story be a way of taking much of the spotlight off Boris and his government's pandemic failings?

Another possible factor – which, again, could be completely unrelated – is that this week the prime minister is set to unveil his plans for lifting the lockdown. What if an individual with a good reputation and respected academic credentials, let's randomly say someone like Professor Ferguson, was to disagree with those plans? That would cause a real jam.

But if that person's reputation was in tatters, then they wouldn't have the momentum to speak out and would have to let the government's plan on lifting lockdown continue unabated, even if they did disagree.

Then there's the newspapers’ insatiable need to stay relevant. Most of the executive teams at the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Sun are used to being puppet masters. They remember the days when what they printed had an impact on daily life in Britain.

That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, as proven by the dropping trust and sales figures. So it's not exactly a leap of faith to assume the dinosaurs want to relive the good old days and seize the zeitgeist again.

Even a blind man can see the public is tired of lockdown. The newspapers involved in this are banking on being given the credit for helping that to end.

For me, the whole Professor Ferguson operation looks like a transparently bad attempt at spin-doctoring. It was not some sort of honey trap setup of the kind the KGB used to do in cliche 80s thrillers. He naturally wanted to see his girlfriend, even if it was a flagrant breach of the rules.

But from that point on, this has been stage managed between the Conservative government and sections of the media. They just haven't done it well – their DNA is all over the place. Britain used to lead the way when it came to newspaper black ops; now we can't even do that.

And while trying to recover from their heinous Covid-19 performance, the government has cocked up too. It would be laughable if so many hadn't already died and thousands of families hadn’t been decimated. Instead of focusing on getting us out of a mess, the government and their facilitators in the media are playing politics.

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