Under brilliant sunshine, in a stiflingly hot marquee, the audience at the Borders Book Festival last Saturday was taken back to the darkest days of the Covid pandemic. Packed shoulder to shoulder, in a manner inconceivable in recent years, we listened as Dame Kate Bingham recounted her time as Chair of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce. Chaired by Michael Moore, former leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, she shared the stage with journalist and academic Tim Hames her co-author on The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain.

From the outset, Bingham’s energy, brio and force of personality were palpable. A venture capitalist, working in the biotech industry, she is the wife of Jesse Norman, the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire (mentioned recently in this column for his biography and economic analysis of Adam Smith). She had also previously worked with Sir Patrick Vallance, the Westminster government’s Chief Scientific Advisor during Covid.

Because of her connections, when Bingham was appointed to this unpaid role in 2020 she faced savage accusations of Tory cronyism. Yet it is to Boris Johnson’s credit – not a phrase you’ll often hear from me – that he asked her to lead the fiendishly difficult process of procuring a vaccine at a time when the chances of finding one were 15% at best. Or, in Bingham’s words, as an expert in the world of big pharma, “vaccines mostly don’t work”. Yet, as probably all of us in the tent felt while in her presence, if she told you to do something, including finding a cure for Covid, you’d do it, and pronto.

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Bingham’s talk could not have been better timed. With the UK Covid-19 Inquiry newly begun, attention is turning to a period most of us would rather forget. She took us right back to the start of that nightmare, and by the hush in the tent, broken only by the gentle pitter-patter of dripping sweat, you could tell everyone was gripped. For an hour, we relived the frightening early months of this alien disease, when we were confined largely to our homes with absolutely no idea if, let alone when or in what shape, we would emerge from the pandemic.

Judging by Bingham’s account, we’d have been even more scared if we had realised that the Westminster Government was just as discombobulated as we were. She explained how she and her international team, combining expertise in science and business, set about building relationships with pharmaceutical companies that might develop a vaccine. The ramifications were complex, not helped by the UK no longer being in the European Union. Quite apart from not knowing if anybody at this point was capable of producing a life-saving product, the challenge her team faced was finding ways in which a successful vaccine could be safely produced at massive scale and rolled out to the most vulnerable in Britain. That they did so, in a matter of months – from May to December 2020 – remains a staggering feat of logistics.

Among the stipulations Bingham made was that she would report directly to the Prime Minister, thereby by-passing the labyrinth of Whitehall apparatchiks, whose involvement would have encased their feet in cement. While Johnson clearly knew zilch about the pharmaceutical trade, his willingness to leave others to deal with the detail was, in this instance, a winning tactic.

I picture Bingham, holed up in her family cottage near Hay-on-Wye, co-ordinating the task force in the manner of Judy Dench’s M at MI5. Her recollections of the obstacles she faced – meddling civil servants, a hostile press, international rivalries, a terrifyingly tight deadline and, last but by no means least, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock – were riveting. They were also sobering. Had any of us appreciated what was going on behind the scenes, I doubt we would have slept. Yet, as Michael Moore said, “cometh the hour, cometh the woman.”

The UK’s unpreparedness for a pandemic did not take Tim Hames by surprise; simple demographics, he said, made us sitting ducks: an ageing population in poor health, with millions in jobs involving commuting and, in London, a metropolis greater than the size of Paris, Berlin and Milan combined. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing as Baroness Hallett’s inquiry gathers steam. Hames is cynical about this process, thinking that, like the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, it will be ineffectual. I’m not certain, though, that they are comparable. The point of this exercise, surely, is not so much the apportioning of blame – although there will doubtless be a great deal of that, as well as self-exculpation – but to examine the country’s preparedness for the pandemic and, by pinpointing inadequacies, give ourselves a fighting chance of dealing more effectively with the next.

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As with Bingham’s description of what it took to make and deliver a vaccine, the government’s woefully belated response to the virus is the stuff of horror movies. Hearing a scientific expert at the inquiry explain the impact of a decade of austerity on the nation’s health and social care system was like watching a car crash in slow motion. And this is only the start. What can’t be allowed to happen, however, is for the inquiry’s findings to be used solely as a rod to beat government. To justify its existence, its purpose must be to inform what happens next, rather than to act as an avenging angel for errors in the past. The sometimes terrible lessons learned from Covid must be put to good use. Among them, according to Bingham, is the urgent need for government to employ more civil servants with a knowledge of science. At the moment the majority are from an arts and politics background, with no understanding of how medicine and pharma work. Nor of how to liaise properly with businesses.

The title of the Scottish Government’s Covid policy advisor Professor Devi Sridhar’s account of the pandemic neatly sums up the situation: Preventable. We need not feel helpless. There are steps governments can take to put us, and others, in a position of strength rather than blind panic when the next threat emerges. Now is the time to be lining up strategies. That way, rather than relying on an inspired appointment such as Bingham, cometh the hour, cometh the blueprint.