Do we like Chris Whitty?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A decent record and a steady voice on public health, with the one gap being that nothing turned up on LGBTQ+ issues either way.
Chris Whitty is England's Chief Medical Officer, the quiet bloke in the glasses who became a household face by standing beside Boris Johnson at the Covid press conferences. He was knighted in the New Year Honours list at the end of 2021 for it. The record we could open is thin on his early life, so the backstory here is basically the job.
The most interesting thing he's done lately is be honest about the pandemic response. At the Covid inquiry in 2024 he said critics could argue the UK overstated the risk early on, and he admitted that communication between infection-control advisers and frontline staff was a failure. That is a public servant owning mistakes rather than dodging them. Nothing new has turned up on him in recent months that rates as a controversy.
He also copped plenty of abuse for doing his job. In 2021 a crowd gathered outside his home shouting “traitor” and “murderer”, and days later he was grabbed by two men in a London park in a video that went viral. One man pleaded guilty to assault and got eight weeks in prison, suspended for two years. Johnson called it “despicable harassment”.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. He told the public that people who spread Covid vaccine untruths “should be ashamed”, saying many of them he thinks know their claims are false. His 2022 annual report pushed for more action on air pollution, which is good for the planet and for lungs. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people either way, so say that gap out loud.
The politics around him were messy. In December 2021 Tory MP Joy Morrissey suggested unelected health advisers should defer to elected MPs, then deleted her post, and other Tory MPs said advisers were overreaching. Downing Street called him “a hugely respected and trusted public servant”. That's a stoush about who calls the shots, not about anything Whitty did wrong.
The good stuff is the career itself: a doctor and epidemiologist who stayed in public service through the worst years the NHS has had. We found no court cases against him and no allegations of mistreating staff or anyone else. The one honest caveat is that this is mostly a public-health record, so we can't tell you how he feels about the things this page cares about most.