Stephen Montefort stood at a Labour Party event to tell us we should not trust doctors, we should not trust science, we should not trust medicine, and we should not trust epidemiology. That’s because we have a better doctor in Robert Abela whom Stephen Montefort commends to us as a fount of infallible knowledge on how to take care of our health. Stephen Montefort is not a maniac anti-vaxxer who thinks Covid is a hoax and Bill Gates is taking over the world, or at least he didn’t say he is. He is a senior public health medic whose advice to go in lockdown was overruled by Robert Abela.

As it turned out, Stephen Montefort says, Robert Abela had been right. Lockdown was not necessary and had the prime minister heeded his advice there would have been an unnecessary economic cost to pay for.

That may very well be true. But outside a Soviet totalitarian state that is no reason to praise a politician.

I am going to presume that when Stephen Montefort recommended a lockdown his advice was what he and his peers, professionals, qualified, and certified to the woman and the man, believed to be the best possible course of action based on the science available to them at the time. We do not expect from scientists to know everything. We do not feed them to pigs when their forecasts or expectations turn out to be wrong. If we expected them to be always right we’d call them witch doctors, not scientists.

We do expect scientists, however, to look at the data, and to make dispassionate recommendations on the basis of the evidence available to them. We also expect them to change their recommendations if the data changes and tells them something different.

And we expect politicians to whom no better science is available to take the best political decisions within the scientific advice given them.

When Robert Abela overruled the medical advice Stephen Montefort gave him, all the prime minister had to base his decision on was intuition, wishful thinking, and fear of the political cost of a lockdown when he had already prematurely declared victory over the virus.

If Robert Abela turned out to be lucky and the virus behaved as he hoped rather than as the scientists expected it to, that is no credit to him. It is just plain luck which can just as well turn sour next time.

Stephen Montefort spoke yesterday like those nuclear energy engineers working at Chernobyl who ranked their training and expertise lower than the brilliant genius of government ministers who stopped studying physics before puberty and owed all their knowledge to multiple readings of Das Kapital and strategic licking of boots of octogenarian members of the politburo.

It is embarrassing to see a fully qualified doctor openly declare that we should get our medical advice from a lawyer, that all the medical studies, all those experts around a table wearing white coats and PhDs and fellowships from the foremost medical colleges in the UK and the USA are worth nothing in comparison with Robert Abela’s supreme and all-knowing genius.

This is dangerous. Next time Robert Abela is faced with professional advice – from doctors in hospital, engineers at the power company, statisticians, urban planners, you name it – he will trust his own judgement more than theirs and he will, as he has already done, manage a medical emergency on the basis of what he remembers from the first aid course he did in case someone at the gym slipped on their sweat.

The sad episode looked like one of those Kim Jong Un tours of nuclear sites where engineers are filmed pretending to furiously take notes of his incompetent utterances. What happened yesterday tells us two things we didn’t want to know. We have a prime minister who trusts his medical opinion more than that of his medical adviser. And we have a medical adviser who trusts the prime minister’s medical opinion more than he trusts his own. It’s a miracle we’re still alive.