Professor Neil Ferguson, the discredited Imperial College computer modeller behind Britain’s draconian lockdown policies, has come clean about his inspiration: none of it would have been possible without the shining example of the Chinese Communist Party.

In an extraordinary interview with the Times (of London), Ferguson admits that if it hadn’t been for China’s example, no Western country would ever have dreamed of putting its populace under house arrest.

Back in 2019, about the time someone was getting infected by a bat, no European country’s pandemic plans seriously entertained the prospect of putting a country on pause.

Then, that’s what China did. “I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” Professor Ferguson says.

Ferguson appears to find the idea of emulating a totalitarian state exciting rather than embarrassing or shaming because he boasts about it again later in the interview.

In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention.

“They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”

Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.” In February one of those boils raged just below the Alps. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

That phrase ‘get away with it’ is instructive. It implies that, at least on a subconscious level, Ferguson is aware that copying Communist China’s lockdown policy was not a morally acceptable act, merely one that peculiar circumstances made possible.