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Yesterday’s post introduced Matt Hancock’s hunger for absolute control during the coronavirus debacle.
The story, with excerpts from The Telegraph‘s The Lockdown Files, continues after a brief interlude.
Giles Coren: ‘we all broke the rules’
On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 22, broadcaster and Times columnist Giles Coren, son of the late humourist and Punch editor Alan Coren, gave a radio interview in which he said that ‘we all broke the rules’, meaning during the pandemic.
The subject arose as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was taking his place at the parliamentary Privileges Committee hearing to defend himself over Partygate.
As a result, Giles Coren trended on Twitter — and not in a good way:
A few of the cleaner tweets follow:
However, this next tweet nails it. Giles Coren doesn’t mean average Britons. He’s referring to the media class and other privileged oafs:
Which brings me neatly to Matt Hancock.
Hancock wants immunity over care home deaths
On March 4, 2023, Chronicle Live recapped an article from the Mirror about a talk that the former Health and Social Care Secretary gave to a group of top-flight London lawyers about who was to blame for care home deaths (emphases mine):
Matt Hancock told a gathering of city lawyers he should be immune from court action over Covid blunders, The Mirror reports – just days before shocking WhatsApp messages he sent during the pandemic were published.
Mr Hancock said he should not be held personally responsible for failings during the fight against Covid-19, such as the Department of Health and Social Care’s failure to safeguard care home residents, simply because he was Secretary of State. Instead he said that “HMG” – the whole Government – should take the blame.
This comes even as prominent campaigners call for the ex-minister to be prosecuted.
He was heard saying that he believes lawyers pursuing him personally “were chasing tabloid headlines”. He was speaking to lawyers from firm Mishcon de Reya in a talk over his book, Pandemic Diaries, coming just months after his stint in the I’m A Celebrity jungle.
Mr Hancock has furiously denied claims that his leaked WhatsApp messages show he ignored Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty’s advice to test all people going into care homes.
His department’s policy of discharging untested patients into them from hospital was ruled unlawful by the High Court in April in a case brought by Dr Cathy Gardner, who lost her father. At the time of the ruling, union GMB said the department had shown a “callous disregard” for care homes.
The messages leaked to the Daily Telegraph this week by Isabel Oakeshott, journalist and the co-author of Mr Hancock’s memoir, show he thought committing to testing people coming into care homes from the community – including staff – didn’t “add anything” and “muddies the waters” …
And 12 days ago he held an online question and answer session with top lawyers from Mishcon de Reya and told them it was wrong that a Secretary of State of a department should be held legally responsible for failures and it should be “HMG” instead. Currently, the defendant in any judicial review against a Government department has to be the Secretary of State.
But Mr Hancock said: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the courts to essentially go chasing tabloid headlines. You know, ‘Hancock broke the law’ – I didn’t break the law.” In the Q&A, Mr Hancock also claimed to have “banned alcohol” in his department to stop his team being “more social”.
Some of the leaked WhatsApp messages reveal then-aide Gina Coladangelo – who is now his partner – telling him there were drinks in the fridge to celebrate hitting his testing target in May 2020. She wrote, adding a beer glasses emoji: “Drinks cold in fridge at DH. Feel free to open before we are back.”
A spokesperson for Mr Hancock confirmed he did not introduce a booze ban until the next January. Mr Hancock also blasted criticism of the Tories’ bungled PPE procurement as “offensive” in the Q&A and justified writing off £12billion of PPE, most of it unusable, saying: “I’d rather save lives.”
… Meanwhile, activist Gina Miller, leader of the True and Fair Party and who took the Government to court over Brexit, has written to Met Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley calling for Mr Hancock to be prosecuted.
She wrote: “The threshold has been met to investigate Mr Hancock for gross negligence manslaughter… a common law offence that carries a maximum of life imprisonment.”
‘Mr Vaccine’
As 2020 dragged on for many of us, Hancock was keen for his moment of glory, as The Telegraph related in ‘Inside Matt Hancock’s desperate bid to be known as ‘Mr Vaccine”’.
Emphases mine below:
Matt Hancock feared he would not get credit for the UK’s vaccine success and described the speeding up of the jabs rollout as a “Hancock triumph”.
The former health secretary’s WhatsApp messages show he fought to be the face of Britain’s vaccine campaign at the height of the pandemic and became furious if he thought others were getting the credit.
And he was told by his media advisers that fronting Britain’s vaccine programme would allow the press and public to “forgive” him for imposing lockdowns and that “politically” he must balance the two.
However, the Department of Health and Social Care had to work with the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on the vaccine procurement.
Hancock was unhappy:
Mr Hancock had already battled with his Cabinet colleagues over who should have overall control of the procurement strategy, and struck an uneasy compromise between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The announcement of the Pfizer vaccine made things worse for him:
In November 2020, the Department of Health caught wind that Pfizer was planning an imminent announcement that its vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective against Covid-19.
The Pfizer vaccine was the first to report its interim trial data and went on to be the first to be administered to the public in the UK the following month …
On hearing that the news was about to break, Mr Hancock bemoaned he was not live on camera and worried he would be overshadowed by Alok Sharma, the then business secretary.
The article has a screenshot of the WhatsApps he exchanged with adviser Damon Poole:
Pity I’m not up in the Commons!
I should do a clip
We should pump out the NHS doc
Do No10 know?
When Poole answered in the affirmative, Hancock was eager to do the media round the next morning:
I should DEFINITELY do the round tmrw
Just to reinforce the point, he messaged Poole again:
It MUST NOT be Alok!
On December 8, Hancock appeared on ITV’s breakfast show, Good Morning Britain (GMB), to watch the first Britons, a man and a woman, both elderly, get their ‘jabs’:
… Mr Hancock gave one of his most memorable interviews of the pandemic …
Wiping a tear from his eye, he told the programme it had “been such a tough year for so many people” and he was relieved that people could at last “get on with their lives”.
The lady was Margaret Keenan, aged 90 at the time. She received her jab in Coventry.
The man’s name was William ‘Will’ Shakespeare. He was 81 at the time and has since died (nothing to do with the vaccine). When the presenter announced his name, it was hard to know whether Hancock was laughing at it or crying about his step-grandfather who died of Covid (more here).
The frames extracted from that moment don’t exactly make for comfortable viewing. Thank goodness someone online captured them for posterity. Don’t miss the caption:
However, there was no immediate big media momentum for Hancock after those initial jabs, even though millions of people watch GMB.
On Boxing Day 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock to ask if he had spoken with journalists from the Sunday papers. Poole did not like all the articles about the vaccine, which he called ‘this vaccine spray’. As it was the day after Christmas, Hancock hadn’t looked at the papers until he heard from Poole:
Now I’ve seen it. Sure it’s not No10?
Poole replied:
I’m pretty sure it’s them
MOS [Mail on Sunday]/Times/Tele[graph]
Hancock fired back:
The thing that p—–s me off is the Mail on Sunday links it to Rishi. What’s that all about?
The first few days of 2021 proved no better for Hancock’s desired media exposure. On January 7, Hancock asked Poole to send him the link to a Mail story with the headline ‘Vaccine approval is finally cut from TWENTY days to five’. Poole sent him the link and added:
MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency] briefing [I’m] pretty sure
Hancock asked if that was true. Poole said he thought it was and sent him a link to a tweet of the Mail‘s front page:
Hancock replied:
I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph! And if it IS true we neeed [sic] to accelerate massively.
The Lockdown Files article continues:
The strategy of taking credit for the vaccine, and therefore the impact on lockdown restrictions, was eventually given its own slogan: “Own the exit.”
The phrase is repeated several times between Mr Hancock and his aides in the months that followed.
Then, finally, there was success at last. On January 11:
… the day the official vaccine delivery plan was published, Mr Hancock sent Mr Poole screenshots of news articles about his announcement.
Hancock messaged Poole:
These shots are extraordinary. Positive coverage in the Sun AND Mail.
Poole replied:
Keep riding it through to spring – own the exit!
Well, Hancock owned his own exit that June. That’s for sure.
‘Headless chicken’ over vaccines
Not everyone who worked with Hancock would call him ‘Mr Vaccine’.
Clive Dix wrote a first-person article for The Telegraph about his experience, ‘I worked with Matt Hancock on Covid vaccines – he’s a headless chicken’:
I worked with Matt Hancock the whole time I was at the Vaccine Taskforce and he was, without doubt, the most difficult of all the ministers because he didn’t take time to understand anything.
He was all over the place, a bit like a headless chicken. He often made statements saying “we are going to do X and we want to let the world know about it”, but we were dealing with an uncertain situation in bringing the vaccines forward.
The manufacturing process was brand new and any process like this is fraught with problems, which we need to fix as we go along, but normally you would spend two or three years stress-testing something like this.
Hancock was laying down timelines by saying things like “we will vaccinate the whole population”, and these timelines drove his behaviour.
Hancock was upset when there was a problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine production:
When we said the AstraZeneca vaccine had manufacturing problems, that is when Hancock panicked.
He didn’t believe us. We were working night and day to make it work and he was turning around and saying: “I have said the UK population will all get vaccinated.”
But we couldn’t change the nature of the process and he didn’t get that. He thought it was like procurement. That is where his behaviour came from. He panicked and that led to them going to India and taking vaccines that had been meant for the developing world.
I thought that ethically it was very wrong to take doses that it had been agreed would go to the developing world just to meet an arbitrary timeline. This is why I ended up resigning, because I could no longer advise a government that acted on these terms.
Nonetheless, the team pressed on with getting doses from India:
Here, we were taking 10 million doses from the developing world just to meet Hancock’s timeline and it was a timeline that had just been plucked out of the air. We were still well ahead of the majority of the world, ministers should have been upfront and said that we can vaccinate everyone within a month, but we won’t quite hit the timeline. They should have admitted that they were slightly wrong.
I couldn’t stop them doing it, because it wasn’t my job to make policy decisions about where we get the vaccine from. But I said if this is where you are, then I don’t want to advise this government anymore. I didn’t resign there and then, but I did resign in March 2021. I didn’t want to disrupt the work.
It was all driven for the wrong reasons and then Hancock – rather than put his hands up – blamed the Vaccine Taskforce for stalling.
For him to be sending messages and saying Kate Bingham [head of the Vaccine Taskforce] was not reliable is appalling.
On October 4, 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock a link to a Financial Times article: ‘Less than half UK population to receive coronavirus vaccine, says task force head’.
Hancock replied that he didn’t have a subscription to the paper, which is behind a paywall. He asked Poole:
… is that Kate?
When Poole responded in the affirmative, Hancock messaged back:
If so we absolutely need No10 to sit on her hard. She has view [sic] and a wacky way of expressing them & is totally unreliable. She regards anything that isn’t her idea as political interference
Poole messaged back, agreeing, saying he’d had a ‘blazing row’ with her when he was working at No. 10.
Clive Dix resumes his story, alive with memories of Hancock:
We were working as hard as we could and he thought he could just come in and make a bold statement to the public and tell us that we have got to do it. I don’t think he understood the process. He was a loose cannon.
Dix tells us more about how Health and Social Care worked with BEIS. Here, too, Hancock had to have his own way:
The taskforce sat in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and that is where the budget came from. We reported to Alok Sharma and then Nadhim Zahawi came in as vaccines minister. Hancock wanted to get involved and because he was secretary of state, Alok stepped aside.
He was using the vaccine to protect his reputation.
Dix, who was a volunteer, gives us an insight into the wider politics involved:
I had worked for nine months from 4am until midnight without any pay to do this.
It is certainly extraordinary to see how two-faced they are. They were all nice to me to my face but to see what they were saying to Boris Johnson was particularly unpleasant.
It reflects badly on Nadhim and all the civil servants who worked so hard to get this right. In my humble opinion, Hancock was actually the problem.
Hancock hoped to treat French Covid patients
Incredibly, during lockdown, Hancock wanted to appeal to French president Emmanuel Macron to allow his nation’s coronavirus patients to be treated in the UK.
With the NHS under pressure, Hancock somehow thought he managed to find spare beds … for the French.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the French as much as I love the British and the Americans, in no particular order. They’re the three societies I know the best. But this was a step too far.
After all, the Government locked down the UK to save the NHS, right? So how was it that Hancock suddenly found spare beds, especially for patients from other countries?
Meanwhile, British patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses couldn’t get a look in to a doctor, never mind a hospital.
The Telegraph‘s ‘Matt Hancock’s secret plan to import French Covid patients’ says that, in November 2020:
Matt Hancock planned to bring French Covid patients to the UK for treatment during the second wave of the pandemic, despite national lockdown restrictions in force to protect the NHS.
Messages between the then health secretary, his advisers and Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, show he hoped to offer “spare” intensive care unit beds to Emmanuel Macron to help the French president deal with a major outbreak in his country in November 2020.
At that time, Britain was under a second national lockdown that was sold to the public as necessary to prevent the “medical and moral disaster” of an overwhelmed NHS.
But Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care created a secret plan to transfer Covid patients from the busiest French hospitals, bringing more cases of Covid to the UK.
However, that wasn’t enough. Hancock also wanted to make the same offer to Italy. The article has screenshots of the relevant WhatsApp messages.
That aside, let’s continue with France:
The plan is not thought to have ever been implemented, but Mr Hancock said: “We may need to make a similar offer to Italy,” despite exponential increases in Britain’s own case numbers.
On Nov 13, Mr Hancock shared with his top advisers a letter that he planned to send to Olivier Veran, the French health minister, offering to import French Covid patients to the UK for treatment.
“I have seen the pressure on your hospitals, and that some patients are being transferred abroad,” the letter said. “We have our epidemic largely in the north of England, and some spare capacity in London and the south.
“We could provide some ICU beds to which you could transfer some patients. Would that be helpful to relieve pressure on your most affected regions? Our countries have always stood by each other in times of need.”
By this point in the European second Covid wave, the UK was looking to Europe as case numbers exploded in France, Italy and Spain, with a second national lockdown imposed in an attempt to reduce transmission.
France had already been taken off the UK’s travel corridor list, meaning that any person travelling to Britain from France was required to quarantine for 14 days or face a fine. By late November, France and Britain had similar rates of the virus, with around 275 cases per 100,000 people.
However, on October 31, Boris stated publicly that the UK had reached capacity:
In an address to the nation on Oct 31, Mr Johnson said that even in the south-west of England, where Mr Hancock had proposed housing French patients, “it is now clear that current projections mean they will run out of hospital capacity in a matter of weeks unless we act”.
He said that if new measures were not imposed, the growth of Covid numbers would mean that “doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would get oxygen and who wouldn’t”, adding: “The overrunning of the NHS would be a medical and moral disaster beyond the raw loss of life.
“It is crucial to grasp that this general threat to public health comes not from focusing too much on Covid, but from not focusing enough, from failing to get it under control.”
It should be noted that Hancock got this mad idea from a life peer and was immediately swept up by it:
An earlier WhatsApp conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Johnson about the idea shows it originated with Lord Llewellyn of Steep, who was then serving as Britain’s ambassador in Paris.
“I love this idea of Ed Llewellyn’s to offer Macron (privately) to treat some of their cases where they have pressure on the health system,” Mr Hancock wrote to Mr Johnson on Oct 2, 2020. “Because we have a regional problem we also have regional capacity in East Anglia (Cambridge?) or the SW.”
Lord Llewellyn is now serving as the UK’s ambassador to Italy. He is a former Downing Street chief of staff, serving in Number 10 under David Cameron.
The mind boggles.
That’s enough Matt Hancock for one day.
Don’t worry. There’s more to come.
Soon.
Just as they did with their exposé of the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, The Telegraph‘s journalists have excelled themselves with their exploration of the Government’s handling of coronavirus in The Lockdown Files.
Don’t miss my first and second entries, which include reaction from sources elsewhere.
The Telegraph‘s focus on Friday, March 3, was on policing and quarantining holidaymakers.
Boris’s sister speaks
Rachel Johnson, Boris’s sister, wrote about how she and their father were tracked down during the pandemic in ‘As police pursued my father during Covid lockdown, my lonely mother endured care home prison’:
She talks about her brother’s handling of the pandemic and her own views (emphases mine):
… I opposed lockdowns on a cellular level. Still do. I have to accept that ultimately schools were closed, the entire population pretty much incarcerated in their own homes, with our sick, vulnerable, frail and elderly people rotting in solitary for months and months on end, and it was all signed off by him.
And I admit that I’ve been cheered to see that the Hancock cache of WhatsApps – which The Telegraph, via Isabel Oakeshott, has done such a majestic public service in revealing – shows him in his truer colours when it came to all the generally pointless non-pharmaceutical interventions we had to put up with for far too long.
He was much more of a sceptic than a zealot, they show, often bounced into U-turns or Covid-sanitary fascism by being presented with selective fatality graphs and other data dashboards in order that he did what either Hancock or Cummings – gibbering control freaks, both – wanted.
She describes a visit from the police and being spied on by a national newspaper, ending with her mother’s loneliness in isolation:
The plight of those in care homes fills me with the most unquenchable rage, even to this day. Many still have visiting restrictions and a Covid mentality. My widowed mother ended up in one, and even from June 2021 residents were isolated in their rooms for 10 days minimum if anyone in the home had tested positive.
Before June, though, my mother lived on her own with a carer. When I called her or Zoomed her, she would whisper: “I’m lonely.” It broke my heart.
I continued to see her, even though she was not in my ludicrous “bubble” as she had a carer. I took her Christmas dinner in 2020. It was against the rules and the laws or whatever. In my view, that was immaterial.
Every Covid restriction broke the laws of nature, and nothing and nobody – and I mean nobody – was going to tell me not to see my mother on her last Christmas on Earth.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and I completely support Isabel Oakeshott’s bravery in showing us how the sausage of doom was made.
It must never, ever, happen again.
Boris’s and Rachel’s mother died in 2021.
Most of us in the UK remember the news story from November 2020 about the woman who attempted to take her mother out of a care home only to find that the police swarmed around them in a car park. Her daughter, Leandra Ashton, who filmed the incident, talked about what a painful moment that was for her mother and grandmother. Police arrested her mother and took her grandmother back to the care home. Dr Renee Hoenderkamp, a GP, is the other lady in the interview with GB News’s Patrick Christys:
Dr Hoenderkamp shares her experience when she spoke to doctors who did not want to listen to her:
It should be noted that over the course of the pandemic, Dr Hoenderkamp changed her mind about coronavirus measures, e.g. masks. The first tweet is part of a long thread:
How Boris’s libertarian instinct disappeared
On Thursday, March 2, we discovered how Boris changed his common sense attitude towards the pandemic in ‘Lee Cain and James Slack – the media advisers who helped shape the decisions that changed our lives’:
WhatsApp messages sent between Boris Johnson and his ministers show the extent to which media advisers were able to influence policy during the coronavirus pandemic.
In June 2020, for example, the then prime minister considered ending some lockdown restrictions early – but dropped the idea after “Slackie and Lee” said it was “too far ahead of public opinion”.
He was referring to James Slack and Lee Cain, his two most important media advisers at the time. Here we take a closer look at the two former journalists who had the prime minister’s ear.
The article says that Lee Cain was remarkably powerful in No. 10 in 2020:
Mr Cain’s influence within Number 10 was such that when the Prime Minister was in hospital with Covid in April 2020, colleagues said – only half-jokingly – that Mr Cain was left “running the country”.
His official role was as the then prime minister’s director of communications. However, WhatsApp exchanges have shown that Mr Cain’s remit went beyond advising on communications and involved helping to decide the policies themselves …
When Chris Heaton-Harris, then the rail minister, suggested to Mr Johnson in May 2020 that the border with France could be reopened, Mr Cain intervened.
He wrote: “Quarantine surely an essential part of any exit strategy – and opening up a flank to an entire continent would seem to leave a substantial hole. Public will think (rightly) we are potty. Overwhelming support for tougher action at our borders!!”
It was Cain who suggested kowtowing to Nicola Sturgeon on masks. He planted doubt in Boris’s mind, saying that she might be right:
In Aug 2020, when Mr Johnson asked ministers and officials for their views on whether face masks were necessary in schools, Mr Cain told him: “Considering Scotland has just confirmed it will [impose them] I find it hard to believe we will hold the line. At a minimum I would give yourself flex and not commit to ruling it out …
“Also why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?”
His pivotal role in government raised eyebrows among some former colleagues who had not seen him as a high-flyer in his previous jobs.
Sturgeon’s mask policy — later Boris’s — came up Thursday night on GB News with Patrick Christys, Neil Oliver and Prof. David Paton lamenting how much damage it did to children:
The article says that Cain had previously worked for The Sun and The Mirror before going into public relations. He began working on the Vote Leave (Brexit) campaign in 2016, which brought him into contact with Dominic Cummings. Interestingly, he had previously applied to be part of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign but lost out. He claimed he was primarily interested in a political career.
After the successful Brexit referendum result, Cain worked for Andrea Leadsom MP then for Boris when he was Foreign Secretary. Even after Boris resigned that post in the summer of 2018, Cain remained loyal, working for Boris without remuneration. He was confident great things were in store for him.
Ultimately, he ran afoul of Mrs Johnson and set up his own PR firm:
He left Downing Street, together with Mr Cummings, in Nov 2020 after losing what was widely regarded as a power struggle with Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie. He later set up his own corporate communications firm.
James ‘Slackie’ Slack was the third member of the trio who advised Boris on policy:
Along with Mr Cain and Mr Cummings, he was never far from the prime minister’s side and his input helped to shape key decisions dictating people’s freedoms.
Like the prime minister himself, Mr Slack had no background in science, behavioural psychology or even public relations – but Mr Johnson would rarely make a move without first consulting “Slackey”, “Caino” and “Dom”.
… It was he who updated the waiting world on Mr Johnson’s condition as he fought for his life in intensive care.
Along with Mr Cain, he helped to shape lockdown policy by expressing concern that lifting restrictions too soon would be too far ahead of public opinion.
In a similar vein, he told ministers and advisers on March 8 2020 that the newly-imposed first national lockdown was out of kilter with public opinion.
He wrote that: “I think we’re heading towards general pressure over why our measures are relatively light touch compared to other countries. Also why we aren’t isolating/screening people coming back from Italy. We’ll need to explain very calmly that we’re doing what actually works.”
The Telegraph has screenshots of various WhatsApp messages discussing coronavirus measures.
Slack entered the Downing Street orbit in 2016 when he was the political editor of the Daily Mail. Theresa May had just become Prime Minister and hired him in February 2017 to be her official spokesman in order to improve her public image.
After May’s departure, Boris retained Slack:
regarding him as a safe, trustworthy pair of hands. Mrs May rewarded him for his loyal service to her with a CBE in her resignation honours list.
Slack got on well with reporters, which was another plus, then:
He briefly succeeded Mr Cain as No 10 director of communications – a political role, rather than a Civil Service posting – at the start of 2021.
His time in Downing Street ended soon afterwards:
Mr Slack’s Downing Street career came to an unexpectedly shameful end, when The Telegraph revealed he held his leaving party in April 2021 on the eve of the late the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.
Mr Slack, who had moved back into journalism as deputy editor of The Sun, issued a public apology for his behaviour.
Laughing at quarantined holidaymakers
Another pivotal personality in the pandemic was Simon Case, a career civil servant who worked for then-Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May before taking a break to be Prince William’s Private Secretary between 2018 and 2020.
As I recall, Prince William highly recommended Case to Boris Johnson. In August 2020, Boris appointed Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service. Case continues in that post today under Rishi Sunak.
In the UK, civil servants have long been called ‘mandarins’, which explains this story, ‘Top mandarin mocked holidaymakers “locked up” in Covid quarantine hotel rooms’. It, too, has several screenshots of WhatsApp conversations.
The article begins:
Those unlucky enough to be caught up in Britain’s pandemic-era quarantine hotel policy likened it to being held prisoner.
Messages seen by The Telegraph show that ministers and officials shared the sentiment and joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms.
In February 2021, Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, was in WhatsApp contact with Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, as Britain began a forced quarantine for returning holidaymakers.
On February 16, 2021, Case asked Hancock how many people had been ‘locked up’ in hotels the day before. Hancock responded:
None. But 149 chose to enter the country and are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!
To which Case replied:
Hilarious
The Telegraph shared experiences from those quarantined:
Those on the receiving end of the quarantine policy described the misery of being held captive in tiny hotel rooms.
“It feels like I’m in Guantanamo Bay,” one woman who was forced to spend 10 days in a government-approved hotel told The Telegraph at the time. “I honestly believe this would destroy most people’s sanity.”
Another furious traveller said: “It’s total abuse. It has abused basically every single human right that we have.”
In January 2021, Matt Hancock had convinced Boris as well as Case and other senior officials that toughening up travel rules with £10,000 fines was the way to go:
Mr Hancock said it was “BRILLIANT” when he saw reports of people being stopped by police at airports, while Boris Johnson, the prime minister, said news of a traveller being fined £10,000 for breaking quarantine rules was “superb”.
The enforcement of the quarantine rules, including severe punishments for those who broke them, became a major priority for Mr Hancock in the next weeks …
The next month, Mr Hancock shared a story with Mr Johnson directly about two people who were fined £10,000 for failing to quarantine after returning to the UK from Dubai.
Officials had scrambled to put the quarantine policy together amid rising concern in the Government about positive cases slipping into Britain from “red list” countries.
Mr Hancock and Mr Case expressed concern that no single government department had control of the border, describing the situation as “mad” and something the prime minister needed to fix.
Later, doubt arose as to whether the quarantine policy actually worked:
The hotel quarantine policy itself has since been criticised in reports by two parliamentary committees, which said it wasted taxpayers’ money without restricting the spread of Covid.
In a report last April [2022], the transport select committee that “using case numbers as an indicator, there is no evidence that the requirement for travellers from certain countries to quarantine at a hotel, rather than at a location of their choice, has improved the UK’s coronavirus situation compared with other European countries”.
In a submission to the public accounts committee, the Cabinet Office said the Government was unable to determine how successful the quarantine policy had been because “it is difficult to isolate the effects of one of a number of interventions from the other ones”.
The committee concluded that the Government “does not know whether it achieved value for money from the £486 million that it spent implementing measures”.
One tour operator tweeted his disgust at Case’s and Hancock’s cavalier response to quarantined passengers, which affected his own business and others:
Hancock encouraged heavy-handed policing
We knew from the beginning that Matt Hancock wanted police to get tough with normal people trying to survive the pandemic in 2020, but another article has more detail, ‘”Get heavy with police” to enforce lockdown, Matt Hancock told ministers’.
Here, too, Simon Case had some involvement. On August 28, 2020, he WhatsApped Hancock:
Blimey! Who is actually delivering enforcement?
Hancock replied:
I think we are going to have to get heavy with the police
The article explains:
The leaked messages also show that the pair again returned to their fears that police were failing to crack down on alleged lockdown breaches.
However, the police were heavy-handed from the beginning of lockdown in March 2020, with each police force in England deciding how far to go with fines and arrests:
Heavy-handed policing was one of the most controversial issues of the pandemic and saw members of the public fined for going for a walk with a cup of coffee, leaving home “without a lawful reason” and taking part in vigils and protests.
Many of the 118,000 fines were challenged in court and overturned, and officers were later criticised for “Orwellian” tactics that included the use of drones, roadblocks and helicopters to catch rule-breakers.
Meanwhile, in Downing Street, things were very different late in December 2020:
The Telegraph can reveal that Mr Johnson took the decision to create a Tier 4 alert level, effectively cancelling Christmas for 16 million people, while a lockdown party was taking place in the same building.
Timestamps on messages from Mr Case and Mr Hancock, who attended the meeting remotely, show that the “Covid-O” meeting to decide the policy coincided with a Number 10 Christmas party on Dec 18, 2020.
Fines subsequently reviewed
I was very happy to read on Thursday that all the fines issued at the height of the pandemic have since been reviewed, with many rescinded.
‘How Covid turned Britain into a curtain-twitcher’s paradise’ tells us more:
Blameless citizens complained that a family get-together would merit a knock at the door from police, but that they showed no such interest if a burglary was reported.
By March 2022, police forces in England and Wales had issued 118,978 fixed penalty notices for breaches of Covid restrictions.
Fines were issued for uncovered mouths and noses in public places, for failing to self-isolate, for meeting too many friends at once, for having a picnic, for going home after entering the country, and much else besides.
Coronavirus regulations changed more than 60 times over the course of the pandemic, meaning many officers struggled to keep up with the latest iteration of the rules and fines were issued unlawfully.
At the time, senior police officers were understood to be concerned about what they were being asked to do. Having spent years building up trust with communities that were in some cases suspicious of the police, they privately expressed fears that long-term damage would be done to their ability to police by consent.
Early on in the pandemic, Derbyshire Police, which turned out to be one of the most draconian forces of the period, set the tone by pouring black dye into a Peak District beauty spot known as the Blue Lagoon to discourage people from going there for exercise.
The same force deployed drones to spy on people exercising away from their local area, and two women drinking coffee while on a walk together were fined £200 each after their hot drinks were deemed to be “a picnic”.
Their fines were later withdrawn and they received an apology – but the damage was done as far as public opinion was concerned.
A report by HM Inspector of Constabulary in 2021 accepted that there had been “a reduced service” in some areas of policing as “some forces increased the number of crimes they decided not to investigate because they were unlikely to be solved” and reduced in-person visits to registered sex offenders …
The low point came in March 2021 during an open air vigil for Sarah Everard, the marketing executive who was abducted and murdered by an off-duty police officer, at which four people were arrested for breaching Covid regulations.
A High Court judge later found that police had breached the human rights of the organisers of the vigil, in particular the right to freedom of speech and assembly …
The House of Commons joint committee on human rights concluded that a “significant number” of fines had been wrongly issued, but that many people felt too intimidated to challenge them.
MPs were so concerned about the heavy-handed approach of some police forces, and the wildly differing interpretations of the rules across different forces, that the committee recommended a review of every fine issued.
It discovered that when people who had been issued with fixed penalty notices opted to take the matter to court, rather than simply paying the fine uncontested, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) found that around a quarter of the charges were incorrect.
Even more extraordinary was the CPS’s disclosure, in 2021, that every prosecution brought under the Coronavirus Act had been unlawful.
The Act was set up to allow the authorities to detain any “potentially infectious” person who refused to take a Covid test, and a CPS review found that all 270 charges under the legislation had been withdrawn when they got to court, or overturned after innocent people were convicted.
However, the fine mentality has affected policing long-term:
There is evidence that this push for ever-greater numbers of fines for petty offences has permanently affected the police’s mentality.
Chief Superintendent Simon Ovens, of the Metropolitan Police’s Roads and Transport Policing Command, told a meeting of the London Assembly last year that Transport for London was targeting one million speeding prosecutions in the capital each year, compared with the 130,000 issued from fixed speed cameras in 2018.
Rather than targeting road safety and fewer deaths and injuries on the roads, the police were targeting enforcement – a reversal of the Peelian principle that success should be measured in a lack of crime, not an increase in arrests.
Lockdown — and Covid fines — also adversely affected courts:
Already facing an inevitable backlog of cases because of the closure of public buildings, courts found themselves dealing with the extra caseload generated by Covid fines when they reopened after lockdown.
In November last year, Max Hill, the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, disclosed that almost 75,000 defendants were awaiting trial, up from 70,200 in August 2020, meaning the post-Covid backlog of cases has increased rather than being gradually reduced.
The Government’s target is to reduce the waiting list to 53,000 cases by March 2025, which may seem unambitious – but even that target is in danger because of a squeeze on public spending, said Mr Hill …
Clare Waxman, the Victims’ Commissioner for London, said the courts system was “still in crisis” and the delays were having a “devastating” effect on victims.
Former police chief objects to Government policy
During parliamentary debates on lockdown policing, the topic of enforcement arose occasionally. MPs who spoke up said that the police were often confused about what and when to enforce something related to the pandemic. Furthermore, were these actually laws or mere guidance?
On Friday, March 3, The Telegraph published an article on this subject, ‘Former police chief rejects Matt Hancock’s Covid “marching orders” in leaked WhatsApp texts’:
After a meeting on Jan 10, 2021, shortly after another lockdown had begun, Mr Hancock wrote to Mr Case about a meeting in Downing Street with senior police officers on enforcement, with the message finishing by saying: “The plod got their marching orders.”
Reacting to the latest exposé on Friday morning, Sir Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police between 2008 and 2015, said: “Lots of people in the police service won’t be surprised at the tone of these remarks.
“They were faced with an unprecedented situation, this legislation was rushed out, it was confused, it had poor definitions in it, there was this constant confusion between what was legislation and what was guidance; often it seemed ministers themselves didn’t understand the impact of the legislation.”
Sir Peter suggested he would not have rolled over had he been called into Number 10 and told to get tough.
“No, the conversation would be ‘sorry the legislation is not clear enough, the definitions are not clear enough, we’re trying to do our best but you’ve not given us the powers to enforce the legislation’… I know those were the messages going back into Government as police were trying to do their best,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
But the former officer of 34 years said “police were stuck in the middle” as some members of the public wanted stronger enforcement while others “felt it was turning into a police state”.
Police forces were repeatedly criticised for being over-zealous during the Covid crisis, prompting Neil Basu, then the Met Police assistant commissioner, to warn in this newspaper at the time that “how we police this pandemic will be remembered for many years to come”.
Nigel Farage targeted
In ‘Can we lock up “pub hooligan” Nigel Farage, asked Hancock’s team’, we discover how they relented:
Matt Hancock’s team asked if they could “lock up” Nigel Farage after he tweeted a video of himself at a pub in Kent, WhatsApp messages have revealed.
On July 4, 2020, the leader of the Brexit Party shared a video of himself drinking his “first proper pint in 103 days” at The Queens Head pub in Downe Village.
A fortnight earlier, Mr Farage had been filmed attending a Donald Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the time, anyone entering England from abroad was required to quarantine at home for 14 days or face a fine of at least £1,000.
Messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed that Mr Hancock asked his team to contact the Home Office to see whether they were “considering” pursuing Mr Farage for the apparent breach.
At 4.28pm that day, Mr Hancock messaged the “MH top team” WhatsApp group with a link to a Sky News report claiming Mr Farage had breached quarantine rules. “We need to discuss urgently”, he said.
The group chat, which included his special advisers and senior officials, quickly sprang into action.
Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, at this time one of Mr Hancock’s aides, replied: “Does he count as a pub hooligan? Can we lock him up?”
A senior civil servant also responded to ask whether he “needed anything” and suggested that this might be a matter for Priti Patel, then home secretary.
The police are operationally independent of the Home Office. Despite this, Mr Hancock instructed his team to contact Ms Patel’s private office …
Three minutes later, Mr Njoku-Goodwin responded to say that he had “just spoken to HO [Home Office] spads”. He said: “Sounds like we need to get PHE to do one of their ‘spot checks’ and prove that he isn’t at home.”
Mr Hancock then requested that Mr Farage’s case was dealt with “like any other” and that any enforcement action was taken by the Home Office, not the Department of Health.
At the time, Mr Farage insisted he had not broken the rules because he had already completed the 14-day isolation period and tested negative, tweeting a photo of him in a pub with the caption: “Sorry to disappoint you. Cheers!”
But the former Ukip leader told The Telegraph on Thursday that he believes he was in fact in breach, saying: “If I was being honest with you, after the first set of lockdowns I wasn’t really prepared for some little pipsqueak like Matt Hancock to tell me how to live my life, quite frankly.
“That photo was taken when I came back from America, on the day the pubs opened. It was pretty nip and tuck … which means I probably was in breach. I’m probably a Covidiot.”
Mr Farage said he had three visits from the police during the pandemic. “The idea that headmaster Hancock was after me – I love it,” he said.
Farage opened his March 2 GB News show with the story:
Piers Morgan another Government obsession
According to Isabel Oakeshott, to whom Hancock turned over 100,000 WhatsApp messages in compiling his Pandemic Diaries, Piers Morgan was another Government obsession, which I find strange as he was pro-lockdown, pro-masks and pro-vaccines at the beginning. Apparently, he changed his mind partway through:
Contrarian Prof Carl Heneghan speaks
Oxford physician and researcher Prof Carl Heneghan, a Covid contrarian, has been one of my heroes throughout the pandemic.
He wrote an article for The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files about his experience with Downing Street in late 2020, ‘I warned that second lockdown data was wrong — but I was ignored’:
It was a Saturday morning when I was asked if I could Zoom into Downing Street for 1 pm.
I was in the midst of a morning shift in urgent care – having just walked out of a care home with a seriously unwell patient, I was a little flustered, to put it mildly.
My role has never been to make the decisions, but to ensure that the decisions are based on the best available evidence. In this case, though, it was vital that decisions affecting the whole of society were made on accurate information.
I work with a great team, who forensically look at the data and notice details that most overlook. We met daily, and it had become clear that the slides leaked to the BBC on estimated Covid deaths and that would later be presented at the government press conference were out of date and the reported deaths were way too high.
I spent Saturday informing advisers that there needed to be a better understanding at the heart of the Government.
While several others on that call were also trying to aid the understanding of the data, the message was clear – the Government was about to lock down again, based on the wrong information.
I couldn’t help but think that the public won’t forgive you when they find out they are being fed a narrative of fear based on untruths.
But nothing changed. By Saturday night, the Downing Street press conference went ahead. “Unless we act, we could see deaths in this country running at several thousand a day,” said the PM. The second lockdown was announced that evening.
Heneghan contacted the health editor of The Telegraph who published an article shortly after the second lockdown was announced.
Heneghan also got in touch with Dr Raghib Ali, a new Covid Government adviser at the time:
He organised a second call with Downing Street late on Sunday.
The Lockdown Files reveal that the Prime Minister told his WhatsApp group that I’d said “the death modelling you have been shown is already very wrong”, as it was out of date, having been drawn up three weeks previously.
However, it did not make a blind bit of difference:
By Nov 6, Downing Street insisted the incorrect death toll data was “a mistake”. The error in the graphs made the numbers too high, but by then it was too late to change course. The second lockdown had already begun.
How terrible when a government cannot admit the greater mistake of lockdown.
Hancock still aggrieved by The Lockdown Files
Matt Hancock says he still feels betrayed by his former book collaborator, Isabel Oakeshott.
Since The Lockdown Files have appeared, someone posted this 2022 tweet of his wherein he says that even when data bring challenges, the final outcome is always better with them than without:
That’s something he should keep in mind now, rather than licking his wounds.
On Thursday, Oakeshott told Hancock, via Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkTV show, that this story is much bigger than he. It’s about an entire nation’s suffering:
Hartley-Brewer tweeted about Hancock and betrayal. She received an apposite response:
On Thursday afternoon, Oakeshott issued a formal statement on the betrayal issue, which is well worth reading:
Much in our nation could well take decades, if ever, to recover from — in my words — Hancock’s disastrous and dictatorial policies.
However, GB News’s Patrick Christys said that ‘failings extended much further beyond Matt Hancock’:
On Thursday, author Lionel Shriver told Jacob Rees-Mogg how sorry she feels for the many children adversely affected by lockdown. It was World Book Day. As such, many schoolchildren dressed up as their favourite literary characters:
The left hand WhatsApp exchange below shows what a farce it was to lock down an entire nation. The mortality rates were quite low overall. When the elderly died, most of them were well into their 80s. People under 35 rarely died. As for Edwina Currie, she single-handedly tanked Britain’s egg market in the late 1980s with her salmonella scare:
No doubt, many of us could rail on and on about this. I have done over the past three years.
On the other hand, no words can express the betrayal we — and those in many other Western countries — experienced from elected representatives who are notionally our public servants.
More to follow next week.
Tuesday, February 28, was a busy news day in the UK.
As it is March 1, may I wish the Welsh a happy St David’s Day:
The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files, starring Matt Hancock
As King Charles would say, ‘Dear, oh dear’.
At the end of 2022, I wrote a seven-part series on Matt Hancock, our former Health Secretary, who, thankfully, is standing down at the next general election:
Last night, The Telegraph posted its initial entries of a new exposé on his handling of the pandemic: The Lockdown Files.
Regular readers of mine probably won’t learn too much that’s new, however, the bulk of the public probably will.
That said, a few articles stood out for me, thus far.
The first is Isabel Oakeshott’s ‘Why I had to make Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApps public’. She co-authored Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, published late last year:
There’s no secret about how I came to be in possession of this communications treasure trove. The common thread is Matt Hancock, the former health secretary.
Throughout the pandemic, he used the messaging service WhatsApp to communicate with colleagues practically every minute of every day. Following his resignation in June 2021, he downloaded the records from his phone and shared them with various people, including me. I was helping him to write his book about the crisis, and we drew heavily from the material to reconstruct his day-by-day account. Suffice to say there was plenty of important material left over.
Precisely what needed to be done as the virus began its deadly rampage at the beginning of 2020, and how the response should have evolved as the nature of the threat was better understood, is a debate that has only intensified with the passage of time. While most people can forgive early mistakes by politicians and policymakers, bitter divisions remain over whether some of the measures that caused the most lasting hurt and damage – and the unprecedented assault on civil liberties – were ever justified. We need urgent answers.
Oakeshott tells us that other European nations either have completed their coronavirus inquiries or they are well underway, whilst the UK’s is only just starting:
Sweden wrapped up its investigation a year ago. The verdict, delivered in a neat 800-page report, was that avoiding mandatory lockdowns – an approach that made Sweden a global outlier – ultimately worked out quite well. After an early wobble over spiralling infection rates, Swedish ministers doubled down. They were rewarded with one of the lowest levels of excess mortality in Europe.
The French didn’t hang around with their public inquiry either. It began in July 2020, quickly involving police and prosecutors. In Oct 2020, officers raided the homes of senior government and health officials, presumably searching for sensitive documents. Among the properties targeted were those of Olivier Veran, the then health minister, and the director of France’s national health agency. It might seem extreme, but at least it shows they mean business. In Italy, the early epicentre of the outbreak in Europe, the formal inquiry has also made considerable progress.
As for the UK? It took the best part of 18 months just to agree terms of reference.
Announced in May 2021, our public inquiry – which has already cost up to £85 million – has yet to begin formal hearings. Alarmingly, it does not appear to have any specific timeframe or deadline.
We all know what this means – it will drag on forever. After all, the investigation into Bloody Sunday took 10 years and was nowhere near as daunting a task …
The sheer volume of this material and the complexity of cross-referencing messages between individuals and groups with what was being said elsewhere in government and indeed in public at the time makes extracting the most pertinent information a gargantuan mission. Who knows whether everything that is demonstrably in the public interest will end up where it should – in the public domain?
Hence the Telegraph investigation – because every single person in this country was affected by the pandemic and many are still suffering as a result. We were asked to make extraordinary sacrifices and generally did so more than willingly, to protect ourselves and each other. Doubtless lives were saved, but at a terrible price. The post-mortem is now urgent.
In March, Baroness Hallett, who presided over the inquests into the victims of the 7/7 terror attacks, will finally begin hearing evidence from the first set of witnesses.
Fraser Nelson, who also edits The Spectator, agrees on the urgency of the facts to be brought to light in ‘Stripping away the Covid secrecy offers a unique insight into the health crisis of our time’:
Over the next few days, the Lockdown Files will show how much political concerns shaped policy – with “the science” used, all too often, as verbal dressing. If you suddenly find out that people don’t need to self-isolate for as long as you once thought, what do you do? Apologise, and let them away earlier? Or delay sharing the advice to avoid embarrassment? The closed-loop decision-making process, the confidence that no one might ever know, encouraged all kinds of political misbehaviour …
And yes, there will be a Covid inquiry, but it seems to be moving at the same pace as the Bloody Sunday inquiry and may serve as a device to obscure rather than uncover the truth, rather than disclose it.
That’s why the Lockdown Files matter. We can see, with a degree of transparency never before offered to journalists or historians, how some crucial decisions were made. This transparency can, right away, lead to reflection as to whether we still have a system that is fit for purpose when (and it will be when) the next pathogen is identified and the next panic starts.
The historian Andrew Roberts told me recently about the problem caused by the death of diaries: historians rely on them, yet no prime minister since Macmillan has kept daily notes. So how are we to learn from the steps and missteps of the recent past if it’s all lost to memory? The difference, Roberts said, would be WhatsApp messages – the forum now for so much of government discussion …
That moment has now arrived: 2.3 million words from the messages of those who decided the fate of millions at a time when they probably felt they’d never have to answer to anyone. No one really thought that they were in the process of building the most comprehensive real-time glimpse of government documentation that has ever been made public in a Western democracy. Similar conversations will have happened the world over, but only in Britain do we have a chance to see what those conversations were …
Those whose children were ordered out of school or told to wear a mask, those banned from visiting or mourning dying relatives, those whose self-isolation period was extended not for public health reasons but to save political blushes: they all deserve answers. The Lockdown Files should provide them.
A third is ‘Matt Hancock rejected Covid testing for care homes advice, WhatsApp messages reveal’, in which we learn (purple emphases mine):
The Telegraph has obtained more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then health secretary and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic.
The messages comprise 2.3million words – three times as many words as the King James Bible contains.
The communications span the years of the pandemic and reveal discussions between the then health secretary and those at the heart of the decision-making process, including the then prime minister, Boris Johnson.
Other conversations involve Sir Chris, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, its chief scientific adviser.
The messaging groups have names such as “Top Teams”, “Covid 19 senior group” and “crisis management” – the name of a group created to deal with the fallout from Mr Hancock’s relationship with his aide, Gina Coladangelo.
Over the coming days, the Telegraph will reveal the messages, which lay bare the extent to which groupthink among aides and ministers affected pandemic decisions.
The messages also reveal the often casual approach that ministers took to making major decisions, including the call to close classrooms, introduce face masks in schools and provide testing in care homes.
With regard to care homes, Hancock rejected Chris Whitty’s advice on testing Covid-stricken care home residents before they returned from hospital:
Matt Hancock rejected the Chief Medical Officer’s advice to test for Covid all residents going into English care homes, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph reveal.
Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the then health secretary early in April 2020, about a month into the pandemic, that there should be testing for “all going into care homes”. But Mr Hancock did not follow that guidance, telling his advisers that it “muddies the waters”.
Instead, he introduced guidance that made testing mandatory for those entering care homes from hospital, but not for those coming from the community. Prior to the guidance, care homes had been told that negative tests were not required even for hospital patients. The guidance stating that those coming in from the community should be tested was eventually introduced on Aug 14.
Between April 17 and August 13, 2020, a total of 17,678 people died of Covid in care homes in England.
Who could forget Hancock’s declarations that he had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes? This video is from May 15, 2020:
Camilla Tominey’s article, ‘Far from a “protective ring”, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift’ says:
It was during a Downing Street press conference on May 15 2020 when Matt Hancock first claimed to have thrown “a protective ring” around care homes.
Although the former health secretary appeared on the Andrew Marr show in June 2021 insisting he had not uttered the phrase until “much later”, he in fact used that form of words on at least three occasions to describe the action taken during the first wave of the pandemic.
On May 15 2020, Mr Hancock said: “Right from the start, it’s been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most. So right from the start, we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes.”
Then, on May 18 2020, when questioned on this wording, Mr Hancock told the House of Commons: “We absolutely did throw a protective ring around social care, not least with the £3.2 billion worth of funding we put in right at the start, topped up with £600 million worth of funding on Friday.”
He used the phrase again, a day later, telling MPs: “I am glad that we have been able to protect the majority of homes, and we will keep working to strengthen the protective ring that we have cast around all our care homes” …
The health secretary insisted he was following the science, but this appeared to be a political decision. He would more than a year later concede to the health and social care committee on June 10 2021: “The strongest route of the virus into care homes, unfortunately, is community transmission.”
The last-minute change of mind is all the more puzzling since the April 15 guidance was released to replace a disastrous diktat from April 2, which stated that infected patients could be discharged into care homes without a test.
The widely criticised policy was blamed for care homes accounting for roughly half of all excess deaths (25,374) between March 7 and Sept 18 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as coronavirus ripped through facilities caring for 400,000 residents in England.
Far from feeling a “protective ring” had been thrown around them, private care providers found themselves having to deal with infected residents without sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE), which at that point was largely being stockpiled for the NHS …
Even when the vaccinations were finally rolled out in Jan 2021, just one in 10 residents and 14 per cent of staff were initially injected – despite Boris Johnson’s insistence that they would be “first in line” for a jab.
Camilla Tominey’s father, a physician, owned a care home at that time:
Summing up the mood, my father Dr Damian Tominey, a former GP and care home owner, wrote in The Telegraph in Sept 2020: “The Government should have been better prepared for the Covid-19 crisis, and its shambolic response to the pandemic has compromised one of the most vulnerable groups in our society – the elderly.
Six months into the pandemic, he described the testing of staff and residents as an “unresolved fiasco” – pointing out that they had never received results back within 24 hours as Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock had promised, with the delays resulting in asymptomatic staff and residents unwittingly infected others.
He went on to describe the reams of “buck-passing” paperwork that kept on being sent to care homes from the county council and associated bodies – whilst elderly and vulnerable residents were denied face-to-face appointments with their GP, even when they tested negative.
“I have no doubt that if infections run rampant through care homes again, these same agencies will blame us because they have given us copious but often useless advice in the absence of a robust testing system,” he argued …
Sadly, the water on care homes is not muddy but crystal clear – those who most needed a ring of protection largely found themselves cast adrift.
Another article, ‘The leaked WhatsApp messages that expose how Britain’s elderly were failed on Covid’, has a selection of exchanges between Hancock and then-Social Care Minister Helen Whately.
The Spectator‘s Steerpike chose four highlights from The Lockdown Files and added a fifth, that Hancock is allegedly ‘contemplating legal action’. An excerpt follows, emphases in bold theirs:
How Hancock met his 100,000 tests a day target
We always suspected Hancock achieved his headline 100,000 tests a day through some statistical jiggery pokery. And now we know how: the target was hit by counting tens of thousands that were despatched but which might never be processed. Hancock also expressed fears that testing in care homes could ‘get in the way’ of his target.
Hancock sought to guarantee favourable press coverage
To keep up political momentum, Hancock got in touch with an old friend and former boss – George Osborne, the editor of the Evening Standard at the time. He said he could ‘really do with a testing splash’ to help meet his famous 100,000-tests-a-day target, according to the messages. ‘Yes – of course – all you need to do tomorrow is give some exclusive words to the Standard and I’ll tell the team to splash it’, Osborne replied. One for the journalism text books?
The WhatsApps also reveal Osborne’s dry style of texts, telling Hancock bluntly that ‘no one thinks testing is going well, Matt’ at one point.
Hancock is now contemplating legal action
A bullish 1 a.m. statement was released by Hancock’s spokesman. ‘Matt is considering all options available to him’ they declared ominously. Team Hancock is accusing the Telegraph of ‘a partial, agenda-driven leak of confidential documents’ and says the proper place to examine all this is the official Covid inquiry.
Well they can hardly not discuss them now…
Politico‘s March 1 Playbook entry says that The Lockdown Files set Westminster alight at 11 p.m. last night. As I write this afternoon, lightweight Helen Whately, now Health and Social Care Minister, is answering an Urgent Question in Parliament from Labour about The Telegraph‘s revelations. Not surprisingly, Conservative MPs are closing ranks, saying that the proper place for the information is at the coronavirus inquiry.
Their article also says (bold in the original):
Pushing back hard: Hancock’s team was last night also threatening legal action and accusing Oakeshott of breaching the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. A spokesperson for Hancock told Playbook at 1.17 a.m.: “Having not been approached in advance by the Telegraph, we have reviewed the messages overnight. The Telegraph intentionally excluded reference to a meeting with the testing team from the WhatsApp. This is critical, because Matt was supportive of Chris Whitty’s advice, held a meeting on its deliverability, told it wasn’t deliverable, and insisted on testing all those who came from hospitals. The Telegraph have been informed that their headline is wrong, and Matt is considering all options available to him.” Team Hancock is accusing the Telegraph of “a partial, agenda-driven leak of confidential documents” and says the proper place to examine all this is the official COVID inquiry …
There’s more to come: In the coming days, the Tel promises to reveal “how children’s education was sacrificed” to avoid political rows, how isolation rules “that brought the economy to its knees could have been lifted sooner” and how ministers “sought to frighten the public” to get people to follow lockdown rules — none of which is going to dampen claims that the paper is pursuing an agenda. In its leader, the paper argues it is exposing a structural problem with top-level government decision-making.
In closing, Whately has just told Labour MP Emma Hardy that there is nothing she can do to get the public inquiry to move more quickly.
No surprise there.
Anyone who has a tip-off for The Lockdown Files can fill in The Telegraph‘s form here or here.
Thus far, most of my series on Matt Hancock has focused on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Those who missed them can catch up on parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Even though the vaccine was about to be distributed throughout the UK, people in England were frustrated by the restrictions which the Government had imposed indefinitely. Effectively, we had had a Christmas lockdown, with more restrictions that came in on Boxing Day. As I covered in my last post, even at the end of the year, Hancock could not say when they would be lifted.
This post covers the first half of 2021 with excerpts from Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries as serialised in the Mail along with news I had collected during that time. Pandemic Diaries entries come from this excerpt, unless otherwise specified.
Vaccines and side-effects
Former Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott co-authored Pandemic Diaries. On December 7, The Spectator posted her impressions of Hancock and the pandemic.
This is what she had to say about the vaccine policy (emphases mine):
The crusade to vaccinate the entire population against a disease with a low mortality rate among all but the very elderly is one of the most extraordinary cases of mission creep in political history. On 3 January 2021, Hancock told The Spectator that once priority groups had been jabbed (13 million doses) then ‘Cry freedom’. Instead, the government proceeded to attempt to vaccinate every-one, including children, and there was no freedom for another seven months. Sadly, we now know some young people died as a result of adverse reactions to a jab they never needed. Meanwhile experts have linked this month’s deadly outbreak of Strep A in young children to the weakening of their immune systems because they were prevented from socialising. Who knows what other long-term health consequences of the policy may emerge?
Why did the goalposts move so far off the pitch? I believe multiple driving forces combined almost accidentally to create a policy which was never subjected to rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Operating in classic Whitehall-style silos, key individuals and agencies – the JCVI, Sage, the MHRA – did their particular jobs, advising on narrow and very specific safety and regulatory issues. At no point did they all come together, along with ministers and, crucially, medical and scientific experts with differing views on the merits of whole-population vaccination, for a serious debate about whether such an approach was desirable or wise.
The apparent absence of any such discussion at the top of government is quite remarkable. The Treasury raised the occasional eyebrow at costs, but if a single cabinet minister challenged the policy on any other grounds, I’ve seen no evidence of it.
In Hancock’s defence, he would have been crucified for failing to order enough vaccines for everybody, just in case. He deserves credit for harnessing the full power of the state to accelerate the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab. He simply would not take no or ‘too difficult’ for an answer, forcing bureaucratic regulators and plodding public health bodies to bend to his will. He is adamant that he never cut corners on safety, though the tone of his internal communications suggest that in his hurtling rush to win the global race for a vaccine, he personally would have been willing to take bigger risks. I believe he would have justified any casualties as sacrifices necessary for the greater good. Fortunately (in my view) his enthusiasm was constrained by medical and scientific advisers, and by the Covid vaccine tsar Kate Bingham, who was so alarmed by his haste that at one point she warned him that he might ‘kill people’. She never thought it was necessary to jab everyone and repeatedly sought to prevent Hancock from over-ordering. Once he had far more than was needed for the initial target group of elderly and clinically vulnerable patients, he seems to have felt compelled to use it. Setting ever more ambitious vaccination rollout targets was a useful political device, creating an easily understood schedule for easing lockdown and allowing the government to play for time amid the threat of new variants. The strategy gave the Conservatives a big bounce in the polls, which only encouraged the party leadership to go further.
Now on to side-effects:
Given the unprecedented speed at which the vaccine was developed, the government might have been expected to be extra careful about recording and analysing any reported side-effects. While there was much anxiety about potential adverse reactions during clinical trials, once it passed regulatory hurdles, ministers seemed to stop worrying. In early January 2021, Hancock casually asked Chris Whitty ‘where we are up to on the system for monitoring events after rollout’ …
Not exactly reassuringly, Whitty replied that the system was ‘reasonable’ but needed to get better. This exchange, which Hancock didn’t consider to be of any significance, is likely to be seized on by those with concerns about vaccine safety.
January 2021
On January 2, Hancock hoped to ease red tape allowing NHS physicians to come out of retirement to be part of the vaccination drive:
On January 3, The Conservative Woman‘s co-editor and qualified barrister Laura Perrins blasted the Government for keeping Britons under ‘humiliating and undignified treatment‘:
Schools reopened in England on Monday, January 4. They closed again by the end of the day.
Monday, January 4:
Millions of children returned to school today, only to be told schools are closing again tomorrow. After sleeping on it, Boris agreed we have no choice but to go for another national lockdown.
On Thursday, January 7, Hancock appeared before the Health and Social Care Select Committee to answer questions about lockdown. He came across as arrogant, in my opinion:
A message from a friend tipping me off that straight-talking cricket legend Sir Geoffrey Boycott is very unhappy about the delay in the second dose. He’s a childhood hero of mine, so I volunteered to call him personally to explain. I rang him and made the case as well as I could, but it was clear he was far from persuaded.
That morning, Guido Fawkes’s cartoonist posted his ghoulish perspective on Hancock: ‘A nightmare before vaccination’. It was hard to disagree:
A bunch of GPs are refusing to go into care homes where there are Covid cases. Apparently there are cases in about a third of care homes, meaning many residents aren’t getting vaccinated. Evidently I was naive to think £25 a jab would be enough of an incentive. We may have to use the Army to fill the gap.
Not only is [Sir Geoffrey] Boycott in the Press having a go at me; now [former Speaker of the House of Commons] Betty Boothroyd is kicking off as well. Given that I personally ensured she got her first jab fast, it feels a bit rich. It’s particularly miserable being criticised by people I’ve grown up admiring and went out of my way to help, but welcome to the life of a politician.
On Wednesday, January 13, Hancock still had no answer as to when restrictions would be lifted. Many of us thought he was enjoying his power too much:
Friday, January 15:
An extraordinary row with Pfizer bosses, who are trying to divert some of our vaccine supply to the EU!
When I got to the Cabinet Room, the PM practically had smoke coming out of his ears. He was in full bull-in-a-china-shop mode, pacing round the room growling.
What really riled him was the fact that only last night he was speaking to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and Bourla made no mention of it! I was wary: when the PM is in this mood, he can really lash out. I knew I’d need to be as diplomatic as possible if I wanted to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
Monday, January 18:
Pfizer has relented. Following a robust exchange between Bourla and the PM, lo and behold, they’ve located an ’emergency supply’, which is now heading our way.
On Tuesday, January 19, Hancock got coronavirus and had to self-isolate. This was his second bout. The first one was earlier in 2020:
Julia Hartley-Brewer of talkRADIO posed an interesting question about re-infection and T-cells. Hmm:
[Social Care minister] Helen Whately wants to find a way of allowing indoor visits again. I’m hardline on this: we cannot have Covid taking off in care homes again.
Monday, January 25:
The EU health commissioner has tweeted that ‘in the future’ any company that produces vaccines in the EU will have to provide ‘early notification’ if they want to sell it to a third-party country. In other words, they’ll need permission. Totally desperate stuff! They’re doing it purely because they screwed up procurement.
Tuesday, January 26:
Today we reached a really grim milestone in the pandemic: more than 100,000 deaths in this country. So many people grieving; so much loss.
Wednesday, January 27:
A humiliating climbdown from the EU, who clearly realised their ‘export ban’ wouldn’t end well. It followed frantic diplomacy on our side, plus our lawyers confirming that they wouldn’t be able to block our supply anyway. What a ridiculous waste of time and energy.
Tonight I’m doing a night shift at Basildon Hospital [in Essex]. Front-line staff are still under horrendous pressure, and the best way for me to understand is to see it for myself.
Thursday, January 28:
The night shift has left me completely drained. I don’t know how they do it day in and day out: heroic. I donned full PPE, and got stuck in, helping to turn patients and fetch and carry. In intensive care, I watched a man consent to being intubated because his blood oxygen levels weren’t sustainable.
He spoke to the doctor, who said: ‘We want to put a tube in, because we don’t think you’ll make it unless we do that.’
His chances of waking up were 50:50. He knew that. It was an unbelievably awful moment. He reluctantly agreed, and within a minute he was flat out on the ventilator. The doctor next to me said: ‘I don’t think we’ll see him again.’
When my shift was over, I went down to the rest area. One of the registrars told me he’d just had to phone the wife of the patient to say he’d been intubated.
‘We’re doing this, we all know it’s our duty, we’re coping with a second wave — but we can’t have a third,’ he said. Then he burst into tears.
That day, an article appeared in Spiked about the Government’s censorship of lockdown sceptics. ‘Shouldn’t we “expose” the government rather than its critics?’ says:
It’s true ‘lockdown sceptics’ have made mistakes. But the government’s survival depends on none of us ever understanding that lockdown sceptics are not in charge – it is.
… they’re gunning for people like Sunetra Gupta, the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University …
Pre-Covid, I would estimate 97 per cent of the population couldn’t have picked Matt Hancock out of a police line-up if he had just mugged them. So when he stood up in the House of Commons, last January, to state that ‘the Chinese city of Wuhan has been the site of an outbreak of 2019-nCoV’, there was no reason to doubt him when he said ‘the public can be assured that the whole of the UK is always well-prepared for these types of outbreaks’. In February, he explained ‘our belts and braces approach to protecting the public’ and insisted that ‘the clinical advice about the risk to the public has not changed and remains moderate’.
On 23 March, he made a complete volte-farce. (That was not a typo.) The ‘risk to the public’ wasn’t ‘moderate’ at all. ‘It is incredibly important that people stay more than two metres away from others wherever they are or stay at home wherever possible’, he told the Today programme, adding those who weren’t doing so were ‘very selfish’. Four days later, Hancock tested positive for coronavirus. Seven days after that (3 April), he opened the Nightingale hospital (‘a spectacular and almost unbelievable feat’), while ‘blowing his nose’ and not appearing ‘to be at 100 per cent’. Two days after that, he threatened to change the rules again so that people who weren’t ill couldn’t go outside at all: ‘If you don’t want us to have to take the step to ban exercise of all forms outside of your own home, then you’ve got to follow the rules’ …
We’ll skip over Hancock’s botching of track and trace, the dodgy private contracts he’s had a hand in rewarding, how he breaks the rules he makes for us while cracking jokes about it, or his intervention into the debate about whether scotch eggs constitute a ‘substantial meal’.
In the autumn of 2020, pubs could only open if they served a plate of food. Why, I do not know.
The article mentions Hancock’s tears on Good Morning Britain as he watched the first two people get the first doses of the vaccine. Then:
Days later, all this ‘emotion’ had gone down well, so Hancock did more of it – in parliament – announcing that his step-grandfather had died of Covid-19. (‘He was in a home and he had Alzheimer’s – the usual story’, Hancock’s father told the Daily Mail. ‘It was just a few weeks ago.’)
‘Beware of men who cry’, Nora Ephron once wrote. ‘It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.’ Was Hancock crying because he was devastated that his step-grandfather was not kept alive long enough to receive the vaccine (suffering from Alzheimer’s – so it would not be a leap to fear – bewildered, confused, and very likely denied the comfort of the touch of anyone he loved for most of the year)? Or was it because the political survival of the Conservative government depends on being proved right about lockdown – and that depends on one thing: the vaccine …
Hancock told the Spectator that Covid-19 will never be eradicated. But he sees no reason for his extraordinary powers as health secretary to cease even if – by some miracle – it does. In late November, Hancock told a Commons health and science committee that he wants to end the British culture of ‘soldiering on’. Having built a ‘massive diagnostics capacity’, he said, ‘we must hold on to it. And afterwards we must use it not just for coronavirus, but everything. In fact, I want to have a change in the British way of doing things, where if in doubt, get a test. It doesn’t just refer to coronavirus, but to any illness that you might have.’
The idea that we would continue to test, track and trace healthy people who have cold symptoms is so psychotic it’s a struggle to understand whether the man is even aware of how many people weren’t tested for cancer last year. The only hero in this context is Professor Sunetra Gupta. All she’s done is express her fears that lockdown – long-term – will do more harm than good – which is what she believes. In China, Zhang Zhan was also worried that people were dying and the government didn’t want anyone to know about it, so she tried her best to warn everyone in society that more people were going to die if nothing was done. If China had been honest about the outbreak from the start, maybe, just maybe, 100,000 lives would have been saved from Covid-19 here …
Maybe anyone who shares Gupta’s fears are ‘fringe cranks’, but ‘fringe cranks’ have as much right to say what they think as anyone else. And especially when the government has stripped us of all our rights to do pretty much anything else, while refusing to reveal when – if ever – our rights will be returned. This isn’t China. It’s Britain. And we do things differently here. Or at least we used to – in those halcyon days when none of us had a clue who Matt Hancock was …
Scandalous behaviour by certain care home operators, who are unscrupulously using staff with Covid. Inspectors have identified no fewer than 40 places where this is happening.
Wow. I am shocked. It underlines why we need to make jabs mandatory for people working in social care. The PM supports me on this.
February 2021
Monday, February 1:
A YouGov poll suggests 70 per cent of Britons think the Government is handling the vaccine rollout well, while 23 per cent think we’re doing badly. I forwarded it to [NHS England chief executive] Simon Stevens.
‘Who the heck are the 23 per cent, for goodness’ sake!!’ he replied.
I don’t know. Maybe the same 20 per cent of people who believe UFOs have landed on Earth? Or the five million Brits who think the Apollo moon landings were faked?
Thursday, February 4:
Tobias Ellwood [Tory MP] thinks GPs are deliberately discouraging patients from using vaccination centres so they get their jabs in GP surgeries instead. I’m sure he’s right. That way, the GPs make more money.
On Saturday, February 6, The Telegraph reported that Hancock wanted to ‘take control of the NHS’. Most Britons would agree that something needs to be done — just not by him:
On Sunday, February 7, The Express‘s Health and Social Affairs editor said a specialist thought that the Government was using virus variants to control the public. Many would have agreed with that assessment:
Monday, February 8:
We’ve now vaccinated almost a quarter of all adults in the UK!
I’ve finally, finally got my way on making vaccines mandatory for people who work in care homes.
Because of that, a lot of employees resigned from their care home posts and have gone into other work, especially hospitality.
A poll that day showed that the public was happy with the Government’s handling of the pandemic. John Rentoul must have looked at the wrong line in the graph. Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor, came out the best for shaking the magic money tree:
On Tuesday, February 9, Hancock proposed 10-year jail sentences for people breaking travel restrictions. This referred to people travelling from ‘red list’ countries, but, nonetheless, pointed to a slippery slope:
The Conservative Woman‘s co-editor and qualified barrister Laura Perrins pointed out a logic gap in sentencing:
Spiked agreed with Perrins’s assessment in ‘Matt Hancock is behaving like a tyrant’:
Health secretary Matt Hancock announced new, staggeringly authoritarian enforcement measures in the House of Commons today.
Passengers returning from one of the 33 designated ‘red list’ countries will have to quarantine in government-approved hotels from next week. Anyone who lies on their passenger-locator form about whether they have visited one of these countries faces imprisonment for up to 10 years. As the Telegraph’s assistant head of travel, Oliver Smith, has pointed out, this is longer than some sentences for rape (the average sentence is estimated to be eight years).
In addition, passengers who fail to quarantine in hotels when required to do so will face staggering fines of up to £10,000.
This is horrifying. Of course, we need to take steps to manage the arrival of travellers from countries with high levels of infection, particularly since different variants of Covid have emerged. But to threaten people with a decade behind bars or a life-ruining fine for breaching travel rules is a grotesque abuse of state power.
During the pandemic, we have faced unprecedented attacks on our civil liberties. We have been ordered to stay at home and have been banned from socialising under the threat of fines. But this latest move is the most draconian yet …
… we have now reached the stage where a 10-year sentence is considered an appropriate punishment for lying on a travel form.
Matt Hancock is behaving like a tyrant.
Meanwhile, Hancock’s fellow Conservative MPs wanted answers as to when lockdown would end. The Mail reported:
Furious Tories savaged Matt Hancock over a ‘forever lockdown‘ today after the Health Secretary warned border restrictions may need to stay until autumn — despite figures showing the UK’s epidemic is firmly in retreat.
Lockdown-sceptic backbenchers took aim at Mr Hancock when he unveiled the latest brutal squeeze aimed at preventing mutant coronavirus strains getting into the country …
… hopes the world-beating vaccine roll-out will mean lockdown curbs can be significantly eased any time soon were shot down today by Mr Hancock, who unveiled the latest suite of border curbs and warned they could last until the Autumn when booster vaccines will be available.
As of Monday travellers from high-risk ‘red list’ countries will be forced to spend 10 days in ‘quarantine hotels’, and all arrivals must test negative three times through gold-standard PCR coronavirus tests before being allowed to freely move around the UK. Anyone who lies about whether they have been to places on the banned list recently will face up to 10 years in prison.
The fallout continued the next day. See below.
Wednesday, February 10:
Meg Hillier [Labour MP], who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, has started an infuriating campaign accusing ‘Tory ministers’ of running a ‘chumocracy’ over PPE contracts. How pitifully low. I’m incandescent.
What Meg fails to acknowledge is that when the pandemic kicked off, of course we had to use the emergency procedure for buying, which allows officials to move fast and not tender everything for months.
And when people got in contact [about] PPE, of course we forwarded on the proposals for civil servants to look at.
Even the Labour Party were getting involved — it was a national crisis and these leads have proved invaluable.
[Shadow Chancellor] Rachel Reeves wrote to Michael Gove at the time, complaining that a series of offers weren’t being taken up. Officials looked into her proposals, too.
I’m even more offended because I used to respect Meg. It’s so offensive for a supposedly grown-up politician to bend the truth in this way.
Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner was angry at the Conservatives. What else is new?
This story has not gone away. There was a debate about it in the Commons this month.
Fallout continued from February 9 over Hancock’s never-ending lockdown.
His fellow Conservative, Sir Charles Walker MP, gave an interview saying that Hancock was ‘robbing people of hope’. He was also appalled by the prospect of a 10-year prison term for travelling from a red list country:
With regard to lockdowns, recall that at the end of 2020, Hancock said that only the vulnerable needed vaccinating, then we could all, in his words, ‘Cry freedom’. In the space of a few weeks, he had a change of tune:
Thursday, February 11:
So here we are, in the depths of the bleakest lockdown, with the virus still picking off hundreds of victims every week, and Test and Trace officials have been having secret talks about scaling back. Unbelievable!
I told them there was no way they should stand down any lab capacity, but I’m told they’re getting a very different signal from the Treasury.
Friday, February 12:
The Left never ceases to amaze. The bleeding hearts who run North West London CCG (one of many health quangos nobody will miss when they’re abolished) have taken it upon themselves to prioritise vaccinating asylum seekers. They have fast-tracked no fewer than 317 such individuals — ‘predominantly males in their 20s and 30s’.
So, while older British citizens quietly wait their turn, we are fast-tracking people who aren’t in high-risk categories and may not even have any right to be here?
Meanwhile, some of our vaccine supply has met an untimely end. I’d just reached the end of a tricky meeting when a sheepish-looking official knocked on my office door. He’d been dispatched to inform me that half a million doses of the active ingredient that makes up the vaccine have gone down the drain.
Some poor lab technician literally dropped a bag of the vaccine on the floor. Half a million doses in one dropped bag! I decided not to calculate how much Butter Fingers has cost us. Mistakes happen.
On February 22, CapX asked, ‘Why isn’t Matt Hancock in jail?’
It was about Labour’s accusations about procurement contracts for the pandemic. The article comes out in Hancock’s favour:
On Thursday, Mr Justice Chamberlain sitting in the High Court ruled that Matt Hancock had acted unlawfully by failing to to publish certain procurement contracts …
It is worth noting that there was no suggestion in Mr Justice Chamberlain’s judgment that Matt Hancock had any personal involvement in the delayed publication. The judgment was made against the Health Secretary, but in his capacity as a Government Minister and legal figurehead for his Department, rather than as a private citizen. In fact, the failure to publish was actually on the part of civil servants in the Department who, in the face of the pandemic, saw a more than tenfold increase in procurement by value and struggled to keep up.
Indeed, on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Mr Hancock did not apologise for the unlawful delays, saying it was “the right thing to do” to prioritise getting the PPE to the frontline rather than ensuring timely transparency returns. I wonder how many of those calling for Mr Hancock’s imprisonment would rather he had published the contracts in the required timeframe even if it meant there was less PPE available for NHS workers.
As a general rule, we should be able to see how the Government spends our money, what it is spent on and to whom it is given. Transparency improves governance. It is right that the Secretary of State is under a legal duty to publish contracts such as those at the heart of this case. However, this case – and the way it has been reported – is likely to have a much more invidious impact than simply improving transparency in public procurement policy.
Opposition politicians and activists have attacked the Government with claims that it has been using procurement during the pandemic as a way to funnel money to its political supporters and donors. It is certainly true that the sums spent by the Government have been large, and have been spent quickly.
What is certainly not true is that Mr Justice Chamberlain in his judgment gave any credence to this line of attack. He accepted evidence from an official at the Department of Health and Social Care that the delay was due to increased volume in contracts and lack of staff. However, that has not stopped figures linking the judgment to the attack line, such as Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth who tweeted that the delay was ‘Cronyism’. In fact, there was no evidence to suggest that was so.
Vanishingly few people will read Mr Justice Chamberlain’s judgment in full, or even in part. Most people will only see the headlines in the press. Coupled with tweets such as those by Mr Ashworth, the public at large is likely to come to the conclusion that a court has found against the Government for cronyism, when that is not the case. And this will likely fuel further resentment that the Cabinet are not serving decades behind bars.
Justice must be done and it must be seen to be done. Justice has been done in this case – the Secretary of State has been found to have acted unlawfully – but too many lack the ability and willingness to see.
Sunday, February 28:
A potentially dangerous new variant — which we think originated in Brazil — has been identified in the UK, but we can’t find Patient Zero. Whoever it is failed to provide the correct contact details when they took their Covid test, so we don’t know who or where they are. Cue a frantic search.
March 2021
Monday, March 1:
When a lab technician first spotted the new variant, we didn’t even know which part of the country the positive test had come from. Since then, thanks to some fancy sequencing and a high-quality data system, we’ve been able to identify the batch of home-test kits involved, and narrowed it down to just 379 possible households. We’re now contacting every single one.
Tuesday, March 2:
The net’s closing. We now know that the PCR test was processed at 00.18hrs on Valentine’s Day and went to the lab via a mailing centre in Croydon [south London].
Thursday, March 4:
Test and Trace have found Patient Zero! He was on the shortlist of 379 households and eventually returned calls from officials at 4 pm yesterday.
Apparently, he tried to register his test but got the details wrong. We now know his name and age (38) and that he has been very ill. He claims not to have left his house for 18 days.
This is extremely good news: assuming he’s telling the truth, he has not been out and about super-spreading. What amazing detective work.
Friday, March 5:
Covid deaths have nearly halved within a week. The vaccine is clearly saving lives.
On Saturday, March 6, The Conservative Woman‘s Laura Perrins, a qualified barrister, pointed out that mandatory vaccinations — she was probably thinking of health workers — is ‘criminal battery’:
Wednesday, March 10:
Can you imagine if we hadn’t bothered to set up a contact tracing system? And if we’d decided it was all too difficult and expensive to do mass testing? Would we ever have been forgiven if we’d failed to identify clusters of cases or new variants?
No — and rightly so. Yet a cross-party committee of MPs has come to the conclusion that Test and Trace was basically a gigantic waste of time and money. I felt the red mist descend.
Yesterday, we did 1.5 million tests — in a single day! No other European country has built such a capability.
Thursday, March 11 (see photo):
The Test and Trace row is rumbling on, as is a ridiculous story about me supposedly helping a guy who used to be the landlord of my local pub in Suffolk land a multi-million-pound Covid contract. As I’ve said ad nauseam, I’ve had nothing to do with awarding Covid contracts. I find these attacks on my integrity incredibly hurtful.
The story rumbles on in Parliament, including in a debate this month.
Oh well, at least [retired cricketer, see January’s entries] Geoffrey Boycott is happy. He texted me to say he’d got his second dose. He seems genuinely grateful. I resisted the temptation to tell him that good things come to those who wait.
Tuesday, March 16:
To my astonishment, hotel quarantine is working. There’s a weird new variant from the Philippines, but the two cases we’ve identified have gone no further than their Heathrow airport hotel rooms.
Wednesday, March 17:
Today was my son’s birthday. We had breakfast together, but there was no way I could join the birthday tea with family. I hope to make it up to him — to all of them — when all this is over.
On Tuesday, March 23, the first anniversary of lockdown, Boris did the coronavirus briefing. Below is a list of all the Cabinet members who had headed the briefings in the previous 12 months. I saw them all:
On Wednesday, March 24, Hancock announced the creation of the sinister sounding UK Health Security Agency. SAGE member Dr Jenny Harries is at its helm:
Tuesday, March 30:
How did Covid start? A year on, we still don’t really know, and there’s still an awful lot of pussyfooting around not wanting to upset the Chinese.
No surprise to learn that the Foreign Office has ‘strong views on diplomacy’ — in other words, they won’t rock the boat with Beijing and just want it all to go away.
Sometime in March, because magazine editions are always a month ahead, the publisher of Tatler, Kate Slesinger, enclosed a note with the April edition, which had Boris’s then-partner/now-wife Carrie Symonds on the cover. It began:
As I write this letter, the Prime Minister has just announced an extension to the nationwide lockdown, to be reviewed at around the time this Tatler April issue goes on sale — an opportune moment for us to be taking an in-depth look into the world of Carrie Symonds, possibly the most powerful woman in Britain right now.
April
On April 5, a furious Laura Perrins from The Conservative Woman tweeted that Hancock’s policies were ‘absolute fascism’, especially as we had passed the one year anniversary of lockdown and restrictions on March 23:
Note that lateral flow tests, as Hancock tweeted above, were free on the NHS. The programme continued for a year.
The civil service seems determined to kill off the Covid dogs idea, which is so much more versatile than normal testing and really worthwhile. The animals are amazing – they get it right over 90 per cent of the time – but officials are being very tricky.
We should have started training dogs months ago and then sending them to railway stations and other busy places, where they could identify people who probably have Covid so they can then get a conventional test.
Unfortunately, even though I’ve signed off on it, the system just doesn’t buy it.
So far we’ve done a successful Phase 1 trial, but Phase 2, which costs £2.5 million, has hit the buffers. The civil service have come up with no fewer than 11 reasons to junk the idea.
That’s one idea I actually like. It sounds great.
On Friday, April 16, someone posted a video of Hancock breezing into No. 10. He had his mask on outside for the cameras, then whisked it off once he entered. Hmm. The person posting it wrote, ‘The hypocrisy and lies need to stop!‘
That day, the BBC posted that Hancock had financial interests in a company awarded an NHS contract — in 2019:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock owns shares in a company which was approved as a potential supplier for NHS trusts in England, it has emerged.
In March, he declared he had acquired more than 15% of Topwood Ltd, which was granted the approved status in 2019.
The firm, which specialises in the secure storage, shredding and scanning of documents, also won £300,000 of business from NHS Wales this year.
A government spokesman said there had been no conflict of interest.
He also said the health secretary had acted “entirely properly”.
But Labour said there was “cronyism at the heart of this government” and the party’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth has asked the head of the civil service to investigate whether Mr Hancock breached the ministerial code.
In March this year, Mr Hancock declared in the MPs’ register of interests that he had acquired more than 15% of the shares in Topwood, under a “delegated management arrangement”.
Public contract records show that the company was awarded a place in the Shared Business Services framework as a potential supplier for NHS local trusts in 2019, the year after Mr Hancock became health secretary.
The MPs’ register did not mention that his sister Emily Gilruth – involved in the firm since its foundation in 2002 – owns a larger portion of the shares and is a director, or that Topwood has links to the NHS – as first reported by the Guido Fawkes blog and Health Service Journal.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “Matt Hancock has to answer the questions… He can’t pretend that the responsibility lies elsewhere.”
But he said he was “not suggesting” the health secretary had broken any rules.
Here’s photographic proof of share ownership:
Saturday, April 17:
Prince Philip’s funeral. The Queen sat alone in a pew, in widow’s weeds and a black face mask. Looking at her in her grief, I felt an intense internal conflict, almost an anguish, between the overwhelming sense of duty I have had to save lives on the one hand and the painful consequences of my own decisions on the other. Out of duty, out of an abundance of caution, and to show leadership, the Queen took the most proper approach. It was humbling, and I felt wretched.
Monday, April 19:
The police rang to warn me that anti-vaxxers are planning a march on my London home. They suggested I liaise with [my wife] Martha so she can tell me if it’s happening.
Great that they spotted it, but asking my wife to keep an eye out of the window while a baying horde descends on the family home is not exactly British policing at its finest. I asked for more support. Then I went home to make sure I was there if it kicked off, but there was no sign of anyone.
A policeman explained that the anti-vaxxers had posted the wrong details on social media so were busy protesting a few streets away. What complete idiots.
Thursday, April 22:
Boris has completely lost his rag over Scotland.
He’s got it into his head that Nicola Sturgeon is going to use vaccine passports to drive a wedge between Scotland and the rest of the UK and is harrumphing around his bunker, firing off WhatsApps like a nervous second lieutenant in a skirmish.
He’s completely right: Sturgeon has tried to use the pandemic to further her separatist agenda at every turn.
Now the Scottish government is working on its own system of vaccine certification, which might or might not link up with what’s being developed for the rest of the UK.
On April 26, the vaccine was rolled out to the general population. Hancock is pictured here at Piccadilly Circus:
I cannot tell you how many phone calls and letters we got in the ensuing weeks. Not being early adopters of anything, we finally succumbed in early July, again a few months later and at the end of the year for the booster.
On April 29, Hancock and Deputy Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam had a matey vaccination session together, with ‘JVT’, as Hancock called him, doing the honours:
May
Saturday, May 1:
Another outright death threat today in my inbox that said simply: ‘I am going to kill you.’ Lovely. The threats from online anti-vaxxers are getting far more frequent and violent.
As a result, I’m now being assessed for the maximum level of government security.
Tuesday, May 4:
Today, I was out campaigning for the local elections in Derbyshire. Gina [Coladangelo, adviser] drove me up. My relationship with Gina is changing.
Having spent so much time talking about how to communicate in an emotionally engaged way, we are getting much closer.
On Wednesday, May 12, the London Evening Standard interviewed Hancock. ‘Matt Hancock: Let’s put our year of hell behind us’ is more interesting now than it was then:
Matt Hancock today struck his most upbeat note yet on easing many of the remaining lockdown restrictions next month, with Britain set to be “back to life as normal” within a year.
The Health Secretary, who has been one of the most powerful voices arguing for lockdown to save thousands of lives, stressed that the Government would lay out the low risks of further Covid-19 infections if, as expected, it presses ahead with the final relaxation stage in June.
“Our aim on the 21st is to lift as many of the measures/restrictions as possible,” he told the Standard’s editor Emily Sheffield in a studio interview aired today for its online London Rising series to spur the city’s recovery from the pandemic. “We’ve been putting in place all these rules that you’d never have imagined — you’re not allowed to go and hug who you want,” while adding he hadn’t seen his own mother since July and he was looking forward to hugging her.
“I am very gregarious,” he added, “and I really want to also get back to the verve of life. For the last year, we have had people literally asking ministers, ‘Who can I hug?’”
Mr Hancock also criticised as “absolutely absurd” protests outside AstraZeneca’s offices in Cambridge, where demonstrators have been calling for the pharmaceutical giant to openly licence its vaccine. He stressed that the Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs were already being offered to many countries “around the world” at cost price.
During the interview, for the business and tech section of London Rising, he admitted being too busy to keep a diary of the year’s extraordinary events.
He also said he hadn’t had time to help with the housework as he was “working full-time” on the pandemic and that he had spent more hours than he cared to remember in his home “red room” office, which went viral.
In a boost for going back to offices, he admitted that he was now back at Whitehall, adding: “I get most of my work done there.”
… He also said he had not heard Mr Johnson say he was prepared to see “bodies pile high” rather than order another lockdown, a phrase the Prime Minister has denied using, saying: “No I never heard him talk in those terms.” But he admitted there were very lengthy, serious debates and “my job is to articulate the health imperative”.
He added: “By this time next year, large swathes of people will have had a booster jab. That means we’ll be able to deal with variants, not just the existing strains, and I think we’ll be back to life as normal.”
In the interview, Mr Hancock also:
-
- Warned that another pandemic hitting the UK was “inevitable” and “we’ve got to be ready and more ready than last time. Hence, we are making sure we have got vaccines that could be developed in 100 days and the onshore manufacturing” and that health chiefs would be better equipped to defeat it …
- Told how he hoped that England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty, his deputy Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance are “properly thanked” for their work in steering the country through the crisis. Pressed on whether they should be elevated to the Lords, he said: “That’s a matter for Her Majesty the Queen” …
- Backed Boris Johnson, enjoying a “vaccines bounce” which is believed to have contributed to Tory success in the recent elections, to be Tory leader for a decade.
Indeed, the Queen did reward Whitty, Van-Tam and Vallance with knighthoods.
Boris seemed invincible at that point, until Partygate emerged in November that year. Someone was out to get him. They succeeded.
Four days later, on May 16, Wales Online reported ‘Matt Hancock sets date for next lockdown announcement; he also says local lockdowns are not ruled out’. This is interesting, as he seemed to walk back what he told the Evening Standard:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has confirmed the date for the next lockdown lifting announcement by the Government, but has said local lockdowns ‘have not been ruled out’.
Speaking on Sky News this morning Mr Hancock said their strategy was to continue with the lockdown lifting roadmap as planned, but said they would be monitoring the data very closely.
He said there had been just over 1,300 cases of the Indian variant detected in the country so far, with fears it could be 50% more infectious than Kent Covid.
Mr Hancock said: “It is becoming the dominant strain in some parts of the country, for instance in Bolton and in Blackburn.” But he said it has also been detected ‘in much lower numbers’ in other parts of the country …
He added: “We need to be cautious, we need to be careful, we need to be vigilant.”
Asked if lockdown lifting could be reversed he said: “I very much hope not.” but on local lockdowns he said: “We haven’t ruled that out.”
Mr Hancock said: “We will do what it takes to keep the public safe as we learn more about this particular variant and the virus overall.”
The Health Secretary said an announcement on the next stage of lockdown lifting would be made on June 14 …
It was thought at the time that lockdown would be lifted on June 21.
Wednesday, May 26:
Dominic Cummings has told a select committee I should have been fired ‘for at least 15-20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions’.
Apparently I lied about PPE, lied about patients getting the treatment they needed, lied about this and lied about that.
Later, the PM called. ‘Don’t you worry, Matt. No one believes a word he says. I’m sorry I ever hired him. You’re doing a great job — and history will prove you right. Bash on!’
I went to bed thinking, ‘Thank goodness I kept vaccines out of Dom’s destructive hands or that would have been a disaster like everything else he touched.’
I watched that session. Everyone was at fault except for Dominic Cummings. Anyone who presents himself in such a way is probably not all he seems.
Thursday, May 27:
When I got into work, I heard that the Prof [Whitty] had called my private office volunteering to support me in public if need be.
This spectacular vote of confidence meant the most.
Shortly before I headed home, [Defence Secretary] Ben Wallace sent a nice message asking if I was OK. ‘The Cummings evidence can be summed up as the ‘ramblings of a tw*t’,’ he said.
Also:
Of all the many accusations Dom Cummings has hurled at me, the media seem most interested in his claims that I lied about the arrangements surrounding hospital discharges into care homes at the beginning of the pandemic.
Annoyingly, it was only after this evening’s [Downing Street] press conference that I received some very pertinent PHE [Public Health England] data. They analysed all the Covid cases in care homes from January to October last year and found that just 1.2 per cent could be traced back to hospitals.
The vast majority of infections were brought in from the wider community, mainly by staff.
Overall, England did no worse at protecting care home residents than many countries, and better than some — including Scotland, where [Nicola] Sturgeon’s team has been responsible for decision-making. Regardless, the awfulness of what the virus did to people in care homes around the world will stay with me for the rest of my life.
That day, YouGov published the results of a poll asking if Hancock should resign. Overall, 36% thought he should and 31% thought he should remain in post:
Saturday, May 29:
Boris and Carrie got married at Westminster Cathedral. I’m not entirely sure how much the PM’s mind was on his future with his beloved, though, because this afternoon he was busy texting me about the latest Covid data.
‘Lower cases and deaths today. So definitely ne panique pas,’ I told him.
Then again, perhaps he’s just very good at multi-tasking and can examine infection graphs, pick bits of confetti off his jacket and give his new bride doe-eyed looks all at the same time.
Sunday, May 30:
‘Keep going, we have seen off Cummings’s bungled assassination,’ Boris messaged cheerfully.
It was lunchtime and the PM didn’t appear to be having any kind of honeymoon, or even half a day off.
Nevertheless, that day, the Mail on Sunday reported that the Conservatives were beginning to slip in the polls and had more on Cummings’s testimony to the select committee:
The extraordinary salvo launched by Mr Cummings during a hearing with MPs last week appears to be taking its toll on the government, with a new poll suggesting the Tory lead has been slashed by more than half.
Keir Starmer tried to turn the screw today, accusing Mr Johnson and his ministers of being busy ‘covering their own backs’ to combat the Indian coronavirus variant.
The Labour leader said ‘mistakes are being repeated’ as the Government considers whether to go ahead with easing restrictions on June 21.
‘Weak, slow decisions on border policy let the Indian variant take hold,’ he said.
‘Lack of self-isolation support and confused local guidance failed to contain it.
‘We all want to unlock on June 21 but the single biggest threat to that is the Government’s incompetence’ …
Mr Cummings, the Prime Minister’s former adviser, told MPs on Wednesday that ‘tens of thousands’ had died unnecessarily because of the Government’s handling of the pandemic and accused Mr Hancock of ‘lying’ about testing for care home residents discharged from hospital – a claim he denies.
Separately, the Sunday Times highlighted an email dated March 26 from social care leaders warning Mr Hancock that homes were being ‘pressured’ to take patients who had not been tested and had symptoms.
Lisa Lenton, chair of the Care Provider Alliance at the time, told Mr Hancock managers were ‘terrified’ about ‘outbreaks’.
‘The following action MUST be taken: All people discharged from hospital to social care settings (eg care homes, home care, supported living) MUST be tested before discharge,’ she wrote.
However, the government’s guidance on testing was not updated until April 15.
Instructions issued by the Department of Health and the NHS on March 19 2020 said ‘discharge home today should be the default pathway’, according to the Sunday Telegraph – with no mention of testing …
An insider told the Sun on Sunday on the spat between Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock: ‘Boris returned from convalescence at Chequers when he heard the news. He was incensed.
‘Matt had told him point blank tests would be carried out. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been. For a moment he lost it with Matt, shouting ”What a f***ing mess”.
‘At least three ministers told Boris Matt should be sacked.’
However, Mr Johnson refused to axe Mr Hancock reportedly saying that losing the health secretary during a pandemic would be ‘intolerable’.
Sir Keir said the situation in care homes had been a ‘betrayal’, adding: ‘We may never know whether Boris Johnson said Covid ”was only killing 80-year olds” when he delayed a second lockdown.
‘What we do know is that the man charged with keeping them safe showed callous disregard for our elderly, as he overlooked the incompetence of his Health Secretary.’
June
Tuesday, June 1:
For the first time since last summer, there were no Covid deaths reported yesterday. We really are coming out of this.
Things might have looked good for Hancock at the beginning of the month, but the mood would sour rapidly.
England’s 2021 reopening on June 21 looked as if it would not happen. Not surprisingly, members of the public were not happy.
On June 6, Essex publican Adam Brooks tweeted Hancock’s words about personal responsibility back at him, calling him a ‘liar’:
Brooks, who owned two pubs at the time, followed up later, threatening that the hospitality industry would issue another legal challenge to coronavirus restrictions:
The next day, June 7, The Sun sounded the death knell for a reopening on June 21:
BRITS’ holiday hopes have been dashed AGAIN as Matt Hancock warns that the new variants are the “biggest challenging” to our domestic freedom.
The Health Secretary told MPs that restoring international travel is an “important goal” – but is one that will be “challenging and hard.”
Health Secretary Mr Hancock said the return to domestic freedom must be “protected at all costs”.
It comes after he confirmed that over-25s in England will be invited to receive their Covid jabs from Tuesday as the Delta variant “made the race between the virus and this vaccination effort tighter”.
Matt Hancock told the Commons this afternoon: “Restoring travel in the medium term is an incredibly important goal.
“It is going to be challenging, it’s going to be hard because of the risk of new variants and new variants popping up in places like Portugal which have an otherwise relatively low case rate.
“But the biggest challenge, and the reason this is so difficult, is that a variant that undermines the vaccine effort obviously would undermine the return to domestic freedom.
“And that has to be protected at all costs.”
The Health Secretary added: “No-one wants our freedoms to be restricted a single day longer than is necessary.
“I know the impact that these restrictions have on the things we love, on our businesses, on our mental health.
“I know that these restrictions have not been easy and with our vaccine programme moving at such pace I’m confident that one day soon freedom will return.”
The next day, nutritionist Gillian McKeith tweeted her disgust with Hancock:
On Wednesday, June 9, the Health and Social Care Select Committee, which former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt headed, posed questions to Hancock in a coronavirus inquiry session:
On Thursday, June 10, The Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings would tell all about coronavirus as well as Brexit on his new Substack:
Dominic Cummings is planning to publish a paid-for newsletter in which subscribers can learn about his time inside Downing Street.
Boris Johnson’s former top aide has launched a profile on Substack, a platform that allows people to sign up to newsletter mailing lists.
In a post on the site, Cummings said he would be giving out information on the coronavirus pandemic for free, as well as some details of his time at Downing Street.
However, revelations about “more recondite stuff on the media, Westminster, ‘inside No 10’, how did we get Brexit done in 2019, the 2019 election etc” will be available only to those who pay £10 a month for a subscription …
It follows Cummings taking aim at Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, and the government in general as part of evidence given last month to the health and social care select committee and the science and technology committee.
Cummings, who left Downing Street after a behind-the-scenes power struggle in November last year, accused the health secretary of lying, failing on care homes and “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” on testing.
However, the parliamentary committees said Cummings’s claims would remain unproven because he had failed to provide supporting evidence.
On Friday, June 11, Labour MP Graham Stringer — one of the few Opposition MPs I admire — told talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer that ‘things went badly wrong’ on Hancock’s watch and that the Health Secretary should not have ‘blamed scientific advice’:
On Monday, June 14, talkRADIO’s Mike Graham told listeners forced to cancel a holiday to sue Hancock, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, SAGE and ‘every single one of them, personally’, otherwise ‘they will think they’ve won’:
[Lingerie tycoon] Baroness (Michelle) Mone has sent me an extraordinarily aggressive email complaining that a company she’s helping isn’t getting the multi-million-pound contracts it deserves.
She claims the firm, which makes lateral flow test kits, ‘has had a dreadful time’ trying to cut through red tape and demanded my ‘urgent help’ before it all comes out in the media.
‘I am going to blow this all wide open,’ she threatened.
In essence, she’s not at all happy that a U.S. company called Innova has secured so many contracts while others ‘can’t get in the game’. She claims test kits made by the company she’s representing, and by several others, have all passed rigorous quality control checks but only Innova is getting the business.
‘This makes it a monopoly position for Innova, who to date have received £2.85 billion in orders,’ she complained.
By the end of the email, she seemed to have worked herself into a complete frenzy and was throwing around wild accusations. ‘I smell a rat here. It is more than the usual red tape, incompetence and bureaucracy. That’s expected! I believe there is corruption here at the highest levels and a cover-up is taking place . . . Don’t say I didn’t [warn] you when Panorama or Horizon run an exposé documentary on all this.’
She concluded by urging me to intervene ‘to prevent the next bombshell being dropped on the govt’. I read the email again, stunned. Was she threatening me? It certainly looked that way.
Her tests, I am told, have not passed validation — which would explain why the company hasn’t won any contracts. I will simply not reply. I won’t be pushed around by aggressive peers representing commercial clients.
In December 2022, Baroness Mone announced that she would be taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords. Her Wikipedia entry states:
Mone became a Conservative life peer in 2015. From 2020 to 2022, in a series of investigative pieces, The Guardian reported that Mone and her children had secretly received £29 million of profits to an offshore trust from government PPE contracts, which she had lobbied for during the COVID-19 pandemic. The House of Lords Commissioner for Standards and National Crime Agency launched investigations into Mone’s links to these contracts in January 2022. Mone announced in December 2022 that she was taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords “to clear her name” amid the allegations.
Also that day came news that, after Parliament voted on coronavirus restrictions that week — June 21 having been postponed to July 19 — the NHS waiting list was much larger than expected. It was thought to be 5 million but was actually 12 million:
LBC reported:
The Health Secretary told the NHS Confederation conference that up to 12.2 million people are in need of elective procedures delayed due to the pandemic.
This includes 5.1m people already on waiting lists.
Health bosses believe there could be as many as 7.1m additional patients who stayed away from hospitals because of the risk of Covid-19.
Mr Hancock told the NHS conference that there is “another backlog out there” and that he expected the numbers to rise even further.
NHS leaders have warned the backlog could take five years to clear …
Prof Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said the current wave of cases would “definitely translate into further hospitalisations”.
On Saturday, June 19, a YouTube video appeared, which has since been deleted. These are my notes on it:
June 19, coronavirus: 24 mins in — Matt Hancock says unvaccinated will not receive health treatment if NHS is overwhelmed, also mentioned are Birmingham deaths, FOIA Pfizer vaccine information forwarded to Special Branch re Warwickshire and four Birmingham hospitals; Mark Sexton, ex police constable – YouTube.
I have no idea what ensued.
On Friday, June 25, Dominic Cummings posted this article on his Substack: ‘More evidence on how the PM’s & Hancock’s negligence killed people’.
It’s quite lengthy, but begins as follows:
Below is some further evidence including a note I sent on 26 April regarding how we could shift to Plan B with a serious testing system.
It helps people understand what an incredible mess testing was and why care homes were neglected. Hancock had failed terribly. The Cabinet Office did not have the people it needed to solve the problem. Many were screaming at me that Hancock was failing to act on care homes and spinning nonsense to the Cabinet table while thousands were dying in care homes.
There are clearly errors in my note but the fact that *I* had to write it tells you a lot about how the system had collapsed. As you can see it is a draft for a document that needed to exist but didn’t because Hancock had not done his job properly and was absorbed in planning for his press conference at the end of April, not care homes and a serious plan for test-trace.
The Sunday Times‘s Tim Shipman summed up the article with Boris Johnson’s impressions of test and trace:
Returning to Hancock, it was clear that he would have to go, but no one expected his departure would be so dramatic.
To be continued tomorrow.
So far, my series on Conservative MP and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has covered a summary of his current activities as well as his actions during the coronavirus pandemic: parts 2 and 3.
Today’s post reviews the events surrounding the pandemic between October and December 2020, mostly in England. Positive cases spiked in October that year, particularly in certain regions of England, causing the development of a tiered system of restrictions. Christmas ended up being cancelled, a great loss to the hospitality sector, which had been open since July 4.
There was one ray of hope to get everyone out of this: the vaccine.
Dissenters must be silenced
The Mail has been running excerpts from Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries which he co-wrote with former Times journalist, Isabel Oakeshott.
One thing I have not found in the excerpts is any mention of dissent among the public or medics who were not on SAGE.
However, Isabel Oakeshott provides insight about the Government’s view of dissenters in an overview of Pandemic Diaries that she wrote for The Spectator, posted on December 7, 2022. Emphases mine below:
As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down. His account shows how quickly the suppression of genuine medical misinformation – a worthy endeavour during a public health crisis – morphed into an aggressive government-driven campaign to smear and silence those who criticised the response. Aided by the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health harnessed the full power of the state to crush individuals and groups whose views were seen as a threat to public acceptance of official messages and policy. As early as January 2020, Hancock reveals that his special adviser was speaking to Twitter about ‘tweaking their algorithms’. Later he personally texted his old coalition colleague Nick Clegg, now a big cheese at Facebook, to enlist his help. The former Lib Dem deputy prime minister was happy to oblige.
Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the general population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.
For his part, [Boris] Johnson occasionally fretted that they might have a point. In late September 2020, Hancock was horrified to discover that one of the architects of the Declaration, the Oxford epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta, and her fellow signatory Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, had been into Downing Street to see the prime minister. Anders Tegnell, who ran Sweden’s light-touch approach to the pandemic, attended the same meeting. Hancock did not want them anywhere near Johnson, labelling their views ‘absurd’.
Anti-lockdown protests were quickly banned. When, in September 2020, the Cabinet Office tried to exempt demonstrations from the ‘rule of six’, Hancock enlisted Michael Gove to ‘kill it off’, arguing that marches would ‘undermine public confidence in social distancing’. Gove had no qualms about helping.
Keep in mind that, in June 2020, BLM protests took place in English cities. Police did nothing to stop them, even though we were not supposed to be gathering in the streets, particularly without social distancing. Members of the police responded by taking the knee in front of protesters. Talk about double standards!
Oakeshott had more dismal news emerging from Hancock’s diaries.
Masks
Oakeshott says:
Hancock, [Chief Medical Officer Chris] Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because [Boris’s top adviser] Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because [Scotland’s First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency.
I do despair.
It was exactly as the sceptics said at the time: theatre designed to show the Government’s power over the people.
Care homes
Even worse was — and, in some places, still is — the situation in care homes. Patients and their loved ones were separated for many months. There were no hugs, no kisses, no caresses. Instead, patients and family members met at a window, pressing their hands against glass, aligning them with those of their loved ones — just as one would do at a prison visit.
Oakeshott writes:
Hancock is more sensitive about this subject than any other. The accusation that he blithely discharged Covid-positive patients from hospitals into care homes, without thinking about how this might seed the virus among the frail elderly, or attempting to stop this happening, upsets and exasperates him. The evidence I have seen is broadly in his favour.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it was simply not possible to test everyone: neither the technology nor the capacity existed. Internal communications show that care homes were clearly instructed to isolate new arrivals. It later emerged that the primary source of new infection in these settings was in any case not hospital discharges, but the movement of staff between care homes. Politically, this was very inconvenient: Hancock knew he would be accused of ‘blaming’ hardworking staff if he emphasised the link (which is exactly what has now happened).
He is on less solid ground in relation to the treatment of isolated care-home residents and their increasingly desperate relatives. His absolute priority was to preserve life –however wretched the existence became. Behind the scenes, the then care home minister Helen Whately fought valiantly to persuade him to ease visiting restrictions to allow isolated residents some contact with their loved ones. She did not get very far. Internal communications reveal that the authorities expected to find cases of actual neglect of residents as a result of the suspension of routine care-home inspections.
October through December 2020
Pandemic Diaries entries for these months come from this instalment, unless otherwise indicated.
October
Saturday, October 3:
A day dominated by the discovery of a hideous blunder involving a week’s worth of Covid data. Somehow or other we have failed to log around 16,000 cases, which all had to be piled into today’s figures. We might as well just hang a giant neon sign above the Prof’s ‘next slide please’ screen, saying ‘See here: Spectacular Screw-Up.’ [The Prof is the nickname for chief medical officer Chris Whitty.]
[Head of the Vaccine Taskforce] Kate [Bingham] has been telling the Financial Times we should only vaccinate the vulnerable. Except she has nothing to do with the deployment – only the buying. And what she’s criticising is the Government’s agreed policy.
‘We absolutely need No 10 to sit on her hard,’ I told the spads [special advisers], adding that I consider her ‘totally unreliable’.
Monday, October 5:
For reasons best known to themselves, No 10 are rowing back on tiers [putting areas of the country into tiers with different levels of restrictions depending on the Covid risk] and has pulled the planned announcement from this week’s grid. They want tough action; then they don’t want tough action; then someone gets to the PM and he changes his mind all over again. FFS.
The Economist has got wind of an old vaccine deployment plan. I instinctively asked my spads if Kate might be behind it. ‘I have some evidence to suggest it might have been – ie the fact she had a meeting yesterday with the journalist who has the story,’ came the reply. Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Saturday, October 10:
Boris has finally agreed to announce tiers on Monday.
Monday, October 12:
In the six weeks since I proposed the tiers system, there’s been delay and watering down at every stage — while the virus has grown faster than the worst-case scenario. What’s most frustrating is that I’m being portrayed as the one who’s pushing for lockdown, whereas actually it’s those with their heads in the sand who will lead us to a full-blown national lockdown.
Thursday, October 15:
Today I announced that London and a few other places are going into Tier 2. The original draft statement was quite bullish on vaccines, but No 10 freaked, ordering me to delete anything that made it sound as if we think vaccines are the way out.
This really annoyed me, because they are the way out. Since that’s our strategy, it’s ridiculous to be told I can’t say it. I will not be blown off the vaccine drive by the sceptics — in No 10 or anywhere else.
This was a problem for Iain Duncan Smith MP, who pointed out that some London boroughs are relatively virus-free, therefore, it is wrong to impose the same restrictions on all of them. With a lot of umms and ahhs, Hancock said that it was only right that the same restrictions were imposed on all boroughs. Iain Duncan Smith looked as if he were about to blow a gasket — and rightly so:
Friday, October 16:
Boris has been studying what they did during the plague and messaged this morning about how tiering worked in the old days.
‘In 1606, the Privy Council decreed that theatres should be closed if deaths from plague exceeded 30 per week,’ he told us. ‘Not sure about these fixed thresholds,’ I replied warily. Thankfully this was the end of the history lesson.
Saturday, October 17:
Woke up to another briefing against me from No 10, this time in the i [newspaper]. Apparently ‘Matt Hancock is the only person here who thinks there is actually going to be a vaccine . . . It’s a running joke with other departments’.
If so, I’m happy to own it. Thank God I banned the team from talking to No 10 about the [vaccine] rollout. They’d just trash it.
Had a bit of a counselling session from Nadine [Dorries, mental health minister] this evening. ‘You are too nice too often,’ she told me.
Could labradors be our secret weapon against the pandemic? A bizarre and cheering morning watching disease-detecting dogs on the concourse at Paddington Station demonstrate what they can do on a crowd that included the Duchess of Cornwall.
Inside, I was panicking. I couldn’t stop worrying that the mutts might pick out Camilla, or indeed me, as having the dreaded disease. ‘Please, please, don’t do that,’ I willed silently.
Luckily, the labs correctly identified the man with the T-shirt that had been worn by an affected patient. I was impressed.
These dogs can pick up the scent of Covid just like they pick up the scent of drugs. I want them at airports and train stations to sniff out super-spreaders.
The [Health] department’s briefing was: ‘Evidence base too thin.’ It’s absurd. Just because they aren’t conventional tests, officialdom can’t see the point.
I’ve pushed it and asked Jim [Bethell, a Health Minister in the Lords] to follow up.
Thursday, October 29:
We’re putting so many new areas into Tier 3 that it’ll soon be a national lockdown in all but name. Had we brought in tougher tiers three weeks ago, as the Prof and I were arguing for, we wouldn’t be in this position. And for goodness’ sake, why aren’t we pushing harder on ventilation as well as masks? We have known since a Spanish study proved it in the summer that Covid spreads more like smoke than droplets — yet the comms is still geared to masks, which are less important than ventilation.
Friday, October 30:
This afternoon I was called to a meeting of Covid-S, the strategy group chaired by the PM. At the end: victory.
Boris grudgingly accepted the stark, painful facts: that cases, hospitalisations and deaths are all rising and the NHS will run out of space unless we act. The upshot is four weeks of lockdown then back to souped-up tiers.
Having won the lockdown argument, I was exhausted but elated and literally ran up the stairs to my office, stopping off to see the Prof, who’d fought hard alongside me via Zoom.
‘Secretary of State, you’ve saved many lives with what you’ve done today,’ he replied.
As I headed off to Suffolk [his constituency], I finally relaxed. We took the children for a curry at Montaz in Newmarket, where the staff seemed excited to see us. It was horrible to think they were going to have to close again on Thursday and I couldn’t tell them.
I really, really wanted to forget the pandemic, just for half an hour, when [ITV political editor] Robert Peston’s number flashed up on my phone. I almost choked on my chapati.
‘I understand that this pm you, PM, Chancellor and [Michael Gove] met. Am told 99 per cent likely there will be a full national lockdown from next Wed or Thurs,’ Peston said.
So the cat is out of the bag — already! Furious, I forwarded the message to my spads [special advisers] and No 10 comms. How the f*** had it leaked already? Only a handful of people knew!
By the time I got home, I had an enraged Boris on the phone saying his media people had told him hacks were pointing the finger at me.
‘Whoever is telling you that is lying to you,’ I replied furiously.
How had this happened? My money is firmly on Dominic Cummings via his acolytes. The agenda? To bounce the PM into announcing the lockdown sooner [rather] than later and stop him U-turning. If they got me sacked into the bargain, that would be a bonus.
I texted the PM to say that obviously the accusations against me were untrue and I could prove that if necessary. Half an hour later, he messaged asking me and [spad] Damon to bring our phones into Downing Street on Monday.
‘With pleasure,’ I replied coldly.
Peston wouldn’t have texted me for confirmation if I was the source. Plus: it’s not like I benefit from this information being out early.
‘I’m taking a huge amount of flak to do the right thing and protecting you in the process,’ I told Boris.
‘Understood, everyone overwrought,’ he replied soothingly, but with Dom dripping poison in his ear, I very much doubt that will be the end of it. So everything hangs in the balance. Either the PM has to rush into announcing the lockdown or there’s such a backlash, especially from our truculent backbenchers, that he bottles it again.
‘It’s a f***ing disgrace,’ I told [Cabinet Secretary] Simon Case. ‘I hope you have a full inquiry.’
As lockdown approaches, I should be focused on testing, the vaccine and getting the new measures right to get us all out of this nightmare. Instead I’m fighting for my political life. This is no way to run a country.
Saturday, October 31:
I hardly slept. Consternation from friends about how it all came out. Jim [Lord Bethell, health minister in the Lords] described it as ‘the fastest leak since Nick Clegg was on world-record form’ — he was notorious when we were in coalition.
Nadine was raging, telling me the culprit ‘needs putting in front of a firing squad’.
Thankfully, at the press conference the PM gave it his all, warning of thousands of deaths a day if we don’t do more.
Lockdown will be a little lighter than last time because we’ve got better evidence about what works. After the s*** I’ve taken, I don’t feel triumphant, but at least we’ve avoided a complete collapse in the NHS and those Lombardy scenes in our hospitals. For now at least.
November
Sunday, November 1:
Boris was still far from reconciled to the lockdown he’d so grudgingly authorised, continuing to fret that we’d be accused of ‘blinking too soon’.
Meanwhile, Cummings is deliberately ignoring my calls and messages. Extraordinary. We’re in the middle of a national crisis in which hundreds of people are dying every day and I’m in charge of the health service. Yet he won’t talk to me. It’s pathetic, petty and downright irresponsible.
Tuesday, November 3:
I think someone’s trying to smear me. First, I’m falsely accused of being in a Commons bar after 10pm, then I’m falsely accused of leaking, and now The Sun wants to know if I went to have a haircut with Michael Gove at the weekend. Nothing to declare there.
One of my allies received a message from a journalist saying, ‘We need to talk about who is framing Matt at some stage . . .’ I think I can take an educated guess.
Tuesday, November 10:
After months of working it up in secret, today I presented the vaccine rollout plan to the PM. I’ve rarely seen him as enthusiastic. Finally I think he realises this really is going to happen.
‘Can we go faster?’ he boomed, banging the table.
As expected, the price of success is that No 10 has gone from not believing the vaccine will happen to getting completely carried away. Yesterday they started putting it out that ‘ten million people’ could get the jab before Christmas.
This was never the plan, is never going to happen, and [my spad] Damon spent half the day trying to kill it.
Friday, November 13:
Cummings has gone! I am elated and, more than anything, relieved for the sake of the vaccine and the country. He’s been such a frightening, damaging, negative force for so long.
‘Now we can actually build a government that works effectively,’ I told Simon Case excitedly.
We talked about restoring proper processes and ensuring everything that should come to me does come to me, instead of being diverted to one of many random groups Cummings set up to interfere/cut me out of the loop/attempt to control everything.
My team — officials and advisers — are thrilled.
Sunday, November 15:
The Sunday Times thinks we’ve been dishing out multi-million-pound contracts to ‘cronies’. Really? I’m absolutely fuming. I’ve not been involved in either the pricing or the decision-making behind who’s been awarded government contracts.
With all my years of experience as a politician, would I seriously just bung millions of pounds’ worth of deals to my mates, just kind of hoping nobody would notice? So galling.
Friday, November 20:
I met my Slovakian opposite number to talk about their government’s super-ambitious ‘let’s make the entire population take a Covid test all on the same day’ initiative. I have my reservations but Boris is super-keen.
Saturday, November 21:
The PM has been talking to the Slovakian PM and is incredibly eager to give it a go. Today’s the day I had to get ministerial approval on the plan. It did not go well — bluntly, the Cabinet think it’s crazy.
Doing my best to ignore the increasingly incredulous expressions on the faces of the Zoom attendees, I walked everyone through what would be required: nothing less than the entire military and every part of the NHS that could be harnessed to the cause. The price tag? A cool £1 billion.
Knowing this one came straight from the top, I gave it both barrels. [Environment Secretary] George Eustice dismissed it as ridiculous. The Treasury said they wouldn’t pay for it. [Defence Secretary] Ben Wallace said the military was already deployed on other missions.
Afterwards, I picked up my phone to [spad] Emma. ‘Well, that was a drive-by shooting if ever I’ve seen one. Shows the limit of the PM’s powers, even in a pandemic. Cabinet government lives!’ I said cheerfully.
Much too late, I realised I’d forgotten to press ‘Leave Meeting’ on Zoom. Around 20 ministers and officials were still on screen, listening to every word.
Sunday, November 22:
I’m under fire from The Observer over Gina [Coladangelo’s] appointment to the [health department] board. They’ve described her as my ‘closest friend from university’ (true — one of) but are also making a song and dance of the fact that she’s a ‘director of a lobbying firm’.
The truth is she hasn’t been actively engaged with that company for years and every aspect of her appointment [as adviser] to the department went through all the proper channels. She was appointed after she proved herself during her stint as a volunteer just trying to do her bit for the country.
December
Tuesday, December 1:
Jim [health minister in the Lords] came to tell me he’d just formally signed the Pfizer vaccine off. I walked into the Cabinet Room, where the PM was standing behind his chair with Rishi, Simon Case and a few others dotted around.
‘We have a vaccine! It’s been formally approved!’ I announced as I walked in.
Boris danced a little jig, his jubilant moves giving every impression that he hadn’t had much dance practice of late.
We were all elated. We know this is the only way out. So many people feared it would never happen. But here it is, the first in the world, in under a year.
On the way out of Downing Street I bumped into Rishi, who gave me a man-hug and thanked me for pulling off the vaccine. Tomorrow is going to be massive.
Wednesday, December 2:
The announcement to the markets was due at 7am sharp. From the privacy of a green room in the bowels of the BBC building, my first call was to my counterparts in the devolved administrations. Ridiculously, we’d had to keep them in the dark about the impending announcement because we were worried about leaks. Then moments after 7am, I was on air telling the world.
Unfortunately, Boris’s good humour didn’t last long. By mid-afternoon, I was just finishing answering questions in the Commons when I got a series of texts from an increasingly desperate-sounding Emma [spad], saying he was ‘going mad’.
She said Boris wasn’t happy that we’re launching on Tuesday, not Monday; wasn’t happy with the time frame for vaccinating care-home residents; wasn’t happy about the way we’re working with the devolved administrations; and had a bee in his bonnet about the use of wholesalers to get the vaccine to GPs.
‘Oh FFS,’ I replied. I wish he’d take a moment to congratulate the team and keep their morale up, not lose it like this.
Thursday, December 3:
A cloak-and-dagger operation to get the first 800,000 doses of the vaccine into the UK. We weren’t taking any chances. Imagine if rogue actors or hostile states tried to hijack the vehicle or seize the goods?
At lunchtime, a drama: in hushed tones, officials told me that the team was switching route ‘as a precaution’ following a credible security threat. It was amazing work by our intelligence agencies and the private-sector company who first spotted it, and just goes to show that we were not being paranoid.
Then, mid-afternoon, came confirmation that all 800,000 doses were safely in the UK. Relief!
As news spreads, we’re beginning to get sheepish requests from VIPs around the world. A Middle Eastern diplomat reached out to Nadhim Zahawi [vaccine deployment minister] asking if we’d be willing to send 400 shots for the royal household. Nadhim sounded embarrassed and assumed we’d have to find a polite way of saying no.
In fact, I’m up for these small diplomatic efforts — so long as the Foreign Office agrees, of course. Done appropriately, it pays dividends for international relations. Nadhim sounded relieved, saying that the king himself is asking.
That morning, Hancock told talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer that restrictions could be lifted once all of the most vulnerable people have received the vaccine, rather than waiting until everyone has been vaccinated:
Friday, December 4:
The first big setback: Pfizer say the vaccine isn’t brewing as fast as they’d like. It means we’re unlikely to get the ten million doses we’re due to receive before the end of the year, and production estimates for early 2021 are being scaled back. Thank goodness we didn’t let the plans go public.
Tuesday, December 8:
Shortly after 6am, I received confirmation that the first person had been inoculated, and I hurried off for the morning media round.
Gina and [spad] Damon accompanied me to the broadcast studios [ITV’s Good Morning Britain]. ‘You need to relax’ was Gina’s advice, by which she meant: ‘Stop being so buttoned up.’ What she did not mean was that I should lose it altogether, which unfortunately is exactly what happened.
I was on my own in a dark windowless booth, answering questions, when they played the video of [the first person] getting her jab. Suddenly I completely lost it, blubbing away, battling to regain my composure as tears streamed down my face. ‘For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together,’ I told myself desperately. Then the camera was back on me, my microphone was live and my watery red eyes were there for all to see. When I tried to answer the next question, my voice came out in a weird sort of croak. Gina said at least I’d shown how I felt.
Much later, I was on my way to bed when my phone rang. Nobody rings at 11.43pm unless it’s bad news, least of all the Prof [Whitty], whose number was flashing ominously. In that calm, professorial voice of his, he explained that three people had suffered a serious adverse reaction to the vaccine. One had nearly died.
We tried to calculate the statistical risk. If three out of 400 vaccinated today had a massive reaction, then that’s 38,000 out of the whole population. And 38,000 is an awful lot of people.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I thought, feeling physically sick. We may well have to halt the entire vaccination rollout. ‘Perhaps all three have a history of anaphylaxis?’ I asked hopefully. Still feeling nauseous, I slumped into bed, knowing I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.
Wednesday, December 9:
At 5.30am my phone went. ‘All three had a clinical history of anaphylaxis,’ said Natasha [head of Hancock’s private office].
‘[Prof Whitty] recommends that anyone with a history shouldn’t take this vaccine, that we introduce a 15-minute wait after vaccination to monitor people, restrict the rollout to hospitals for the next couple of days and get on with it,’ she said.
I can’t remember ever being so relieved in my life.
The following entries come from this extract in the Mail, unless otherwise stated.
Friday, December 11:
There’s a new [more infectious] variant. This explains why the Covid numbers in Kent have been so stubbornly high.
Monday, December 14:
I announced the new variant in a statement to Parliament. Even normally reasonable MPs are going tonto [crazy]. Everyone can see Christmas falling apart, and judgment is going out of the window.
That day, Hancock announced a shorter self-isolation period, from 14 to ten days:
Thursday, December 17:
A grim day dominated by the announcement of new tiers, which effectively cancel Christmas. Worse for me, they also scupper [wife] Martha’s birthday dinner tonight, which was set to be our first night out in months. I feel terrible about it.
I’ve come to hate the tiers: the boundaries are impossible to draw sensibly, and the whole thing doesn’t keep us together as a country. I hadn’t appreciated how important that is.
Later JVT [Jonathan Van-Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer] called. He and the Prof [nickname for Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty] have worked out that since the first dose of the vaccine gives about four times the level of protection as the second dose, the best way to save lives might be to give the first dose to as many people as possible and then delay the second.
[Former Speaker of the House of Commons and former Labour MP] Betty Boothroyd called the office, asking if there’s any way she can get her jab soon. She’s 91 and very vulnerable. I called her back myself as I was in the car home.
I’d never met her, but she’s something of a hero of mine. As Speaker, she was a real trailblazer for women in politics. I said yes, we can get you your jab — given her age, she’s entitled to it — but the deal is you have to have it on camera.
She readily agreed. I gave her number to Nadhim Zahawi, who is going to fix it.
Friday, December 18:
Boris has reluctantly caved to the inevitable and agreed to cancel Christmas. Frankly, we’d have been far better off saying it would be a Zoom Christmas from the start.
That morning, Labour MP Graham Stringer — one of the good guys in the Opposition — criticised Hancock’s maintaining Manchester in Tier 3, accusing him of ‘playing silly schoolboy games’:
Saturday, December 19:
There’s no good time for Test and Trace to crumble, but this is literally the worst. There’s a critical shortage of pipette tips. Our failure to get hold of these little bits of plastic has led to a backlog of 182,000 tests.
Meanwhile, various people, including vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee Charles Walker, are calling for my head over the Christmas farce. It’s an irony, because I wasn’t involved in the Christmas decision at all. Maybe I should have come in and played hardball over it right from the start — but I can’t be Mr Miseryguts on everything.
On December 20, The Sun on Sunday‘s political editor could foresee the tiers extending well into 2021:
She was not wrong. Hancock appeared on LBC radio later that morning to say the same thing. He even acknowledged that the November lockdown did not help:
Someone parodied Hancock’s Christmas card: ‘In Tier 6, you will be eating your pets’:
Retired Southampton footballer Matt Le Tissier, a sceptic from the start, conducted his own Twitter poll showing that 89.7% of respondents did not trust Matt Hancock to tell the truth:
We’ve finally started vaccinating care home residents. We’re paying GPs £25 per resident, pretty nice money for something that only takes a few minutes.
The public were sceptical about Hancock’s claims that the new variant, the South African one, was more transmissible. Here is Hancock’s announcement from that afternoon:
A South African studying the data said there was no evidence to support that claim:
Hancock also announced that more parts of England would be in Tiers 3 and 4 from Boxing Day:
That same day, then-London Assembly member David Kurten (UKIP at the time) noted that the Nightingale hospitals were lying empty, rightly calling them a waste of money (see second tweet):
Thursday, December 24:
Boris has been fretting that America has now jabbed more people than we have [Churchmouse’s note: thanks to President Trump]. I had to explain last night that, as a proportion, that means we’re six times ahead. Very unhelpfully, there’s a major Covid outbreak at the largest testing lab in the country, in Milton Keynes, adding to the backlog.
Friday, December 25:
Today is my first real day off since summer.
Monday, December 28:
There are now 20,426 people in hospital with the virus — more than at the peak of the first wave.
We’ve announced the plan to extend the interval between the first and second doses of the jab. Lo and behold, who pops up to claim credit? None other than Tony Blair!
That day, Hancock gave an interview to Mark Dolan, who was at talkRADIO at the time, saying he had no date as to when we could come out of restrictions, even with a vaccine:
That afternoon, the Mail reported that only 530,000 doses of the AstraZeneca (Oxford) vaccine were available, when the Government had claimed in May that 30 million would be available by December 2020:
Britain will only have 530,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine at its disposal from Monday, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed today after the game-changing jab was approved by the UK medical regulator.
The initial doses fall significantly short of the number touted by the Government in recent months. In May, officials suggested 30million doses of Oxford’s jab would be ready by the end of the year and last month the UK’s vaccine tsar toned the estimate down to 4million, citing manufacturing problems.
But the UK has ordered 100million doses in total and AstraZeneca has promised to deliver 2million a week by mid-January, raising hopes that 24million of the most vulnerable Britons could be immunised by Easter.
Vaccine or not, the public’s patience was waning.
The first half of 2021 was dismal, beginning on January 4.
To be continued tomorrow.
My series on Matt Hancock MP continues.
Those who missed them can catch up on parts 1 and 2.
Today’s post takes us further into the late Spring up to the early autumn of 2020. The Government’s policy on coronavirus held the UK hostage at home, for varying amounts of time, depending on what part of the country one lived in.
Testing centres popped up around the country. Hancock, who was Health Secretary at the time, urged everyone to go to one of these centres to find out if they had the virus. The narrative was that the asymptomatic could still have it and transmit it to someone else. What a load of cobblers. As Mike Yeadon, who used to work for Pfizer said, if you’re ill, you’ll know about it.
A mobile phone app also appeared: Test and Trace. Another load of rubbish, which was very expensive. Surprisingly, many Britons with smartphones used it. Another good reason for not having a smartphone.
Imperial College’s SAGE modeller, Prof Neil Ferguson, was discovered to have broken lockdown with his mistress, who lived on the other side of London.
In May, news emerged that Boris’s top adviser Dominic Cummings slipped off from London with his wife and son to Barnard Castle, County Durham. As penance, Boris made Cummings give a 90-minute press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden. Excruciating.
England’s Independence Day was declared on the Fourth of July. Then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s hospitality plan, Eat Out to Help Out, started a short while later, boosting restaurant sales.
During this time, the borders were open and people could travel freely. The problem were the sudden embargos which interrupted holidays at inconvenient hours of the day. Britons were often told to return home from a European country, mostly France and Spain, at midnight or 4 a.m.
However, it wouldn’t be long before the long tentacles of SAGE would find more doom and gloom in the autumn.
More extracts from Matt Hancock and Isabel Oakeshott’s Pandemic Diaries, serialised in the Mail, continue, with news items I bookmarked from the time. Emphases mine below.
May 2020
Amazingly, Hancock managed to achieve his testing goal of 100,000, which seemed impossible when he announced it only a month earlier.
These are the principal extracts from the Mail for the entries below, unless otherwise indicated.
Friday, May 1:
We did it, and with a very comfortable margin. 122,347 tests! Let the naysayers put that in their pipe and smoke it! I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed my moment, given how desperately certain people were willing me to fail.
Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fascinated by Australia’s low rate of infection. Little did he know at the time that Australia would go into a prolonged lockdown lasting months.
Sunday, May 3:
We still haven’t figured out what to do about borders. [Dominic] Raab, [Grant] Shapps and Sunak all want to keep the borders open. Crucially, they’re supported by the Prof [Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty]. On the other side, Priti Patel and I are in favour of far tougher measures, as is Boris.
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was enjoying her power over her people, starring in daily briefings which the BBC televised. She gave her briefings at lunchtime. The UK government gave theirs in the early evening.
Monday, May 4:
Tonight, Nicola Sturgeon announced a ‘summer push to elimination [of Covid]’, a policy which has about as much hope of working as Chairman Mao’s attempt to eliminate sparrows by getting the Chinese population to bang pots and pans.
Much as I’m sure Nicola would love to build a Trump-style wall between her fiefdom and the rest of Great Britain, we’re all in this together. One person who’s clearly not keen on a hermit lifestyle is Prof Neil Ferguson [who was advising the Government on its Covid response].
I wasn’t particularly sympathetic when I heard he’d been caught breaking the rules [by meeting with his lover]. He’s issued a grovelling apology, but it was obvious he couldn’t continue to act as a Government adviser.
Ferguson resigned from SPI-M, SAGE’s modelling team, but was reinstated in 2021.
The care home situation continued to loom large. Infections and deaths were ever present. Furthermore, families were rightly distressed by having to press up against a window to see their elderly loved ones, a situation that persists in some care homes even today.
Boris suggested that Hancock hire Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist with a background in pharmaceuticals, as the head of the Vaccine Taskforce.
Also on May 4, we discovered that Good Morning Britain‘s star presenter Piers Morgan was a ‘Government-designated essential worker’. His test was negative, but he was experiencing symptoms, so he stayed off air for a few more days. The Mail reported that Hancock tweeted his best wishes before Morgan got the results of his test:
Mr Hancock, who had his own battle with coronavirus and who has previously clashed with the GMB host on the ITV morning show, tweeted that he hoped if Mr Morgan did test positive for Covid-19 that the symptoms would be mild.
On May 7, Hancock announced that Baroness Dido Harding would head the Test and Trace programme:
On May 9, the Mail on Sunday reported that Boris and Cabinet members were clashing with the beleaguered Health Secretary:
Matt Hancock is living on ‘borrowed time’ as Health Secretary following clashes with the three most powerful members of the Government over the Covid crisis, The Mail on Sunday has been told.
Mr Hancock is understood to have pleaded ‘give me a break’ when Boris Johnson reprimanded him over the virus testing programme – leading to open questioning within Downing Street over Mr Hancock’s long-term political future.
His run-in with Mr Johnson follows battles with both Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove over the best strategy for managing the pandemic.
Shortly after Mr Johnson returned to work at No 10 a fortnight ago, he and Mr Johnson had a tense exchange about the the Health Department’s ‘grip’ on the crisis, during which Mr Hancock said to the Prime Minister, in what has been described as a ‘petulant’ tone: ‘That’s not fair – give me a break.’
He is also being blamed in some Government quarters – or scapegoated, according to his allies – for not moving quickly enough to do more to protect care homes from the epidemic.
On Wednesday, May 13, Hancock announced a new genomics initiative in order to better understand the virus:
People are starting to blame us for discharging elderly people from hospital into residential settings without testing them properly, before we introduced strict rules. The evidence simply doesn’t bear that out: care home outbreaks rose sharply long after we had enough tests to put that right.
That day, a Labour peer was mystified as to why the Government did not know how much PPE there was:
Friday, May 22:
Westminster is abuzz with claims that Cummings broke lockdown rules, going to stay with his parents while he had Covid, which looks like a mega breach.
Saturday, May 23:
Downing Street called asking if I’d do some media [to support Cummings], but I’m uneasy. Despite all the reassurances, it feels off.
In the end, I issued a supportive tweet, saying he was right to find childcare for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill.
[Former Chancellor] George Osborne messaged me this evening warning me not to stick my neck out for Cummings again. ‘Lie low’ was his advice.
Sunday, May 24:
I spent much of the day fielding angry messages, many of them questioning why the PM is still standing up for Cummings. The answer is that he rules through fear and intimidation, squashing those who dare to challenge him or get in his way.
Monday, May 25:
Cummings tried to draw a line under the Barnard Castle affair by holding a press conference in the Downing Street garden. He sat behind a table, squinting awkwardly into the sun, looking like a sulky teenager who’d been sent outside to do his work for disrupting the class.
Afterwards, I found myself feeling strangely sorry for Boris.
Cummings has only one setting – divide and destroy – and now the boss is having to say some pretty stupid things as he machetes his way through the resulting mess.
The only thing for it was to keep backing Cummings – silence from me would only create an unhelpful story – so this evening I tweeted that I welcome the fact that Cummings ‘has provided substantive answers to all the questions put to him’. Apparently it got me some credit in No 10, but I can’t say I felt good about it.
Away from the Cummings s*** show, we had a Cabinet meeting to discuss plans for easing restrictions. It was a bizarre Cabinet, held on Zoom without a single mention of the Cummings-shaped elephant in the room.
In fact, an absurd amount of bandwidth was occupied by a discussion about whether – when we allow two households to get together outside – people should be permitted to walk through a house to get to a friend’s garden.
It’s fine by me, but are people going to ask whether they will also be able to go inside to use the loo? ‘If they’re quick and disinfect the handle?’ the Prof replied.
Who could believe that under a Conservative government, the long arm of the State would find its way into people’s loos?
On Tuesday, May 26, a Sky News reporter called out to Hancock asking if he was going to sack Cummings. Ermm, it wasn’t Hancock’s responsibility, only Boris’s:
June 2020
Thursday, June 4:
Boris messaged me at 6.43am saying he was ‘going quietly crackers’ about not testing enough people. He told me he sees it as our ‘Achilles heel’. He was in a proper flap. ‘What is wrong with our country that we can’t fix this?’ he complained.
I tried to calm him down. ‘Don’t go crackers,’ I said. ‘We now have the biggest testing capacity in Europe.’ Tempting as it was, I refrained from saying we did this against the obstruction of his own No 10 operation.
Wednesday, June 17:
In an embarrassingly crude power grab, [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen is trying to wrest control of vaccine research and procurement from EU member states.
Never mind that health is a matter for individual countries: the woman who once sent German army units on manoeuvres with broomsticks – because they didn’t have any rifles – wants to move responsibility for scientific development and manufacture into the sticky paws of Brussels bureaucrats.
I may have voted to Remain, but it’s enough to make a Brexiteer out of anyone.
Friday, June 19:
A massive blow-up with Kate [Bingham, head of the Vaccine Taskforce]. She simply doesn’t see the need to order 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine – she wants 30 million – and can’t seem to grasp almost everyone may want or need it.
I warned her during today’s meeting that if we don’t get our ducks in a row on this one, we risk a complete car crash.
She pushed back hard. But with the other elected Ministers on my side, I won the argument [for buying 100 million doses].
‘I’m not happy with that meeting,’ Kate snapped afterwards. ‘Nor me,’ I replied.
‘We will create a guide for you to explain what we are doing – there are enormous risks with this,’ she said, as if I don’t spend all my time thinking about how to save lives.
Kate pressed on, claiming that the technology that underpins the vaccine Oxford is working on [Astra-Zeneca] ‘is neither proven nor scaled’, and that she has ‘an expert team who are working round the clock, pushing hard’.
I told her: ‘We need to have tried everything feasibly possible to accelerate delivery. I’ve been asking the same question over and over again and not yet had a satisfactory answer – hence my frustration.’
This only seemed to wind her up further, prompting a mini-lecture about the dangers of trying to go too far too fast.
‘The worse case is we kill people with an unsafe vaccine,’ she said. ‘We need to tone the comms to register the fact this is risky and unproven.‘
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being patronised.
On Wednesday, June 24, Hancock, riding high as the chap in charge of the nation’s health, appeared on Robert Peston’s ITV current affairs show:
July 2020
July 4 was Independence Day from coronavirus in England.
However, separate regulations applied in Leicester, which still had a high rate of infection. Even so, nothing was stopping them travelling elsewhere to socialise or shop:
On Sunday, July 5, Hancock expressed concern over high infection rates and overcrowded working conditions in certain factories in Leicester. It seems he was thinking of certain textile factories operating like sweatshops:
Monday, July 6:
The Vaccine Taskforce have consistently argued that we only need to back three [vaccine] brands. My view is that, to hedge our bets, we need more. Any one of the vaccines could fail in clinical trials.
Fortunately, Rishi and Steve Barclay at the Treasury are totally onside.
Wednesday, July 8:
Rishi’s announced a new Eat Out To Help Out initiative. I did my best to sound supportive, but in truth I’m worried that it might backfire and lead to a spike in cases.
In my box tonight was one particularly startling note relating to the way Covid has been getting into care homes. The main takeaway is that the virus is primarily being brought in by staff, not by elderly people who’ve been discharged from hospital.
This explains a lot, including why the rise in care home deaths came so much later than would have been the case if hospital discharges were the primary cause. We must ban staff movement between care homes, fast.
On Friday, July 17, news emerged that deaths from natural causes were being classified as coronavirus deaths because of a previous positive test. A retired journalist had the story:
He pointed out that Public Health England (PHE) never announced how they were tabulating deaths. Scotland, of course, tabulated theirs differently:
The question remains: how many ‘Covid’ deaths were true Covid deaths?
Saturday, July 25:
Anyone coming back from Spain from midnight tonight will have to self-quarantine for 14 days. This is very bad news for a lot of British holidaymakers.
Department for Transport officials kept pushing for 24 hours’ notice for the Spain decision, which I thought was curious – Grant Shapps is normally an ‘action this day’ Minister – until I discovered that Grant and his family had just flown there on holiday. The officials were trying, perhaps too hard, to protect their Minister.
In Cobra meetings, Nicola Sturgeon’s political games have become incredibly debilitating and significantly limit scope for open discussion. She sits like a statue, lips pursed like the top of a drawstring bag, only jolting into life when there’s an opportunity to say something to further the separatist cause.
The minute someone presses ‘End Meeting’, you can almost hear her running for a lectern so she can rush out an announcement before we make ours. We now chew over big decisions elsewhere and relegate formal meetings to rubber-stamping exercises.
Monday, July 27:
Downing Street is in a semi-panic about a second wave.
Tuesday, July 28:
Sturgeon is on manoeuvres again, trying to persuade us all to sign up to her impossible and anti- scientific zero-Covid plan.
Sure, we’d all love zero Covid, but that’s about as realistic as a bagpipe-playing unicorn.
She just wants to look and sound tough, then blame us when her policies don’t work.
I can hardly bear to watch her on TV any more.
Wednesday, July 29:
Testing is a continuing concern. We still haven’t sorted procurement for what Boris calls ‘Operation Moonshot’. The idea is to carry out literally millions of Covid tests a day to keep the economy going.
Officials say we mustn’t eliminate staff movement across care homes because it might lead to a shortage of staff. Yet research shows the risk of outbreaks in care homes doubles if carers are coming and going.
On Thursday, July 30, Bradford was experiencing a high rate of coronavirus. Hancock put restrictions in place.
This was Bradford Council’s message:
Hancock’s restrictions prohibited people meeting up at each other’s homes:
SkyNews had a report on the story:
Fortunately, for them, it might have felt like an eternity but it was temporary.
What wasn’t temporary was his announcement earlier that day that GP appointments would have to take place remotely. This is still in place today, causing untold distress to millions of Britons.
The Guardian reported:
All GP appointments should be done remotely by default unless a patient needs to be seen in person, Matt Hancock has said, prompting doctors to warn of the risk of abandoning face-to-face consultations.
In a speech setting out lessons for the NHS and care sector from the coronavirus pandemic, the health secretary claimed that while some errors were made, “so many things went right” in the response to Covid-19, and new ways of working should continue.
He said it was patronising to claim that older patients were not able to handle technology.
The plan for web-based GP appointments is set to become formal policy, and follows guidance already sent to GPs on having more online consultations.
But the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) hit back, saying it would oppose a predominantly online system on the grounds that both doctors and patients benefited from proper contact.
They don’t seem to think so now, do they?
The article continues:
Addressing the Royal College of Physicians in London, Hancock noted the huge increase in online consultations as much of the NHS closed its doors to focus on the crisis. In the four weeks to mid-April, 71% of routine GP appointments were done remotely against 25% in the same period a year before.
Outlining what he said were the ways the pandemic had demonstrated the need for greater uses of technology in healthcare, Hancock said that before the coronavirus, “there was a view advanced by some which held that anyone over the age of 25 simply could not cope with anything other than a face-to-face appointment”.
He said: “Of course there always has to be a system for people who can’t log on. But we shouldn’t patronise older people by saying they don’t do tech.”
The rise in online consultations had been welcome, he argued, especially in rural areas. “So from now on, all consultations should be tele-consultations unless there’s a compelling clinical reason not to,” Hancock said.
“Of course, if there’s an emergency, the NHS will be ready and waiting to see you in person – just as it always has been. But if they are able to, patients should get in contact first – via the web or by calling in advance.”
Sure, Matt.
What a disaster that policy has proven to be.
The month seemed to end on a positive note with regard to agency staff working in multiple care homes.
Good news on banning staff movement in care homes. After I blew my top, officials got the message.
August
By August, even though England was open and people were socialising again, rules were still in place. They caused a lot of confusion, including in Government. Only Boris had mastered them.
Monday, August 3:
To ram home his point about how complicated the Covid rules have got, Boris went round the [Cabinet] table asking everyone to set them out simply. We had endless different answers, and he got them all right.
‘I hope colleagues feel I have justified my general reputation for mastery of detail by being RIGHT this morning about the rules. It’s two households inside and six outside,’ he said triumphantly.
Boris was eager for people to get back to work. He saw self-administered tests — lateral flow tests — as the answer.
Friday, August 7:
Boris is having a sugar rush about DIY Covid testing, which he believes could lead us to what’s he’s dubbed – in emphatic capital letters – ‘COVID FREEDOM DAY’. I have no idea who he’s been talking to, but he’s very fired up.
He thinks rapid home tests are the way to ‘get Whitehall and the whole British army of bludgers and skivers’ back to the office and ‘douse all remaining embers of the disease’. Today, I’m on a short break in Hay-on-Wye. When we got to the pub, there was great excitement. I’m not used to people recognising me, so the universal recognition is a bit of a shock. Something I’ll have to get used to, I suppose.
The following year, everyone would know who he was — and not just in the UK. How happy I am that The Sun released that photo of him and his girlfriend. It went viral, worldwide.
Hancock announced the end of Public Health England, which, strangely enough, still seems to be around.
Tuesday, August 18:
[Hancock has announced plans to abolish Public Health England.] On reflection, I should have been more brutal earlier. It wasn’t fit for purpose, and I should have cleared out senior figures who blocked the expansion of testing, basically because they didn’t want the private sector involved.
In response, Angela Rayner [deputy Labour leader] has been tweeting the usual tripe about Tories wanting to privatise the NHS by stealth. Does anyone seriously listen to this c**p any more?
The truth is, we wouldn’t stand a chance of winning this fight against Covid if it wasn’t for support from business. From manufacturing tests to developing the vaccine, the private sector – alongside the NHS and academia – has been critical to the fight.
Friday, August 21:
Border enforcement is a mess. Everyone who flies in to the UK has to fill out a passenger locator form, which they’re supposed to hand to officials on arrival at the airport, but half the time the documents go straight in the bin.
We can blame compulsory masks for secondary school pupils on Nicola Sturgeon. The UK government fears the woman.
Tuesday, August 25:
Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms. In one of her most egregious attempts at oneupmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools.
Cue much tortured debate between myself, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and No 10 about how to respond.
Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is.
Amazing — and not in a good way.
Boris was worried about the British economy, and rightly so.
Wednesday, August 26:
I was minding my own business, when suddenly, ping! Ping! Boris sprang into life. It was 6.29am. He veered off the reservation, suddenly going off on one about how the virus isn’t really killing many people any more so ‘how can we possibly justify the continuing paralysis?’
He noted that an 80-year-old now has a six per cent chance of dying, which he didn’t think was enough to justify what we’re doing.
‘If I were an 80-year-old and I was told that the choice was between destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a 94 per cent chance of surviving, I know what I would prefer,’ he argued.
This exchange, which continued on WhatsApp pretty much all morning, was more than a little stressful, given that it represented a fundamental challenge to our entire pandemic response.
I’m not quite sure what he expected – that the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Adviser, Cummings and I would all suddenly throw our hands up and say: ‘You know what, you’re right, this whole thing has been a huge mistake. Let’s ditch everything we’re doing and pretend none of it ever happened’?
Fortunately, after a few hours he ran out of both statistics and steam. All the same, I sense a very definite shift in attitude. Something has unsettled him. Who has he been on holiday with?
By the next day, Boris had gone back to normal.
Thursday, August 27:
Overnight, Boris’s creeping suspicion that everything we’re doing has been a catastrophic over-reaction has evaporated as quickly as it appeared, to be replaced by annoyance at the discovery that there is a supply/demand gap for testing.
In fact, we are a victim of our own success. Our advertising campaign encouraging more people to come forward for tests has been a bit too effective, and now we’re overwhelmed.
Saturday, August 29:
Boris has started going on about ‘freedom passes’. I think he envisages some sort of app that would allow anyone who can prove they’re negative to get back to normal. I can see the appeal, but I can also see the likely furore over anything resembling ‘Papers, please’.
Covid cases are rocketing in France. ‘We need to draw lessons pronto,’ Boris said, asking if the French have tried local lockdowns or whether it is ‘a case of the whole frog getting slowly boiled?’
September 2020
Wednesday, September 2:
Test and Trace is now identifying more than half of new cases. ‘It’s like the system actually works!’ I messaged Dido Harding [head of Test and Trace] excitedly. ‘Who would have guessed!!’ she replied.
Hancock talked about a vaccine in a coronavirus briefing.
Tuesday, September 8:
I got a blast from No 10 about talking up the vaccine yesterday. Other than Boris, nobody there has ever really believed we can make it happen. In reality, their scepticism suits me, because it means they’re not meddling. The last thing I need is Cummings interfering or the project going through the Cabinet Office mincer.
Restriction tiers across England were looming. An example would be the aforementioned restrictions in Leicester and the north of England where coronavirus was prevalent.
Tuesday, September 15:
The PM is still dithering over restriction tiers, a classic Boris battle between head and heart.
Thursday, September 17:
Cases are growing. Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] thinks we need a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’. Boris seemed confused, doing that thing he does, emphatically verbalising the arguments for and against out loud – alarming everyone as they try to work out where he’s going to land.
Friday, September 18:
We are now at 6,000 new Covid infections a day in England alone, nearly double the figure last week.
By 10pm, No 10 had done a complete about-turn. They now want tougher local lockdowns and more warnings about what happens if people don’t follow the rules. Apparently the PM wants to explain that we have to balance Covid with other health and economic factors.
Well, no s***. What’s really infuriating is that the people who want action to control the virus didn’t insist on me being there [at meetings] to press the point.
Monday, September 21:
Boris is torn. Everyone’s getting heavy with him, from the Prof to Sage, who say there will be ‘catastrophic consequences’ if we don’t act now. They’ve proposed a two-week circuit-breaker.
Friday, September 25:
An alarming note from the modelling people who advise Sage. They say the epidemic is ‘close to breaching the agreed reasonable worst-case scenario’. Meanwhile, public finances are a horror show – from April to August, the figure borrowed was £173.7 billion.
Rishi has clearly been using these figures to freak out the PM. But the only sustainable way to get the economy back on track is to defeat the virus, not pretend it’s gone away.
Saturday, September 26:
We’ve spent millions promoting the [NHS Covid] app, including buying wraparound ads in loads of publications. Just as I was allowing myself a moment of satisfaction at a job well done – or at least not ballsed up – there came news of fresh horror. A major glitch has emerged: the app can’t take data from NHS Covid tests.
I sat very still, trying to absorb the full implications of the fact that we’ve just spent tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on an NHS app that… doesn’t link to the NHS. Which genius thought it would not need to do this, first and foremost? Which other genius signed it off on this basis?
Given the multiple overlapping responsibilities of the various quangos involved, Whitehall’s institutional buck-passing and the involvement of two mega tech companies (Google and Apple), we just didn’t know.
What I did know was the buck stopped with me, and it was probably time to adopt the brace position. I prayed that word of this hideous blunder would not reach Cummings, but that was of course too much to hope. Naturally he went nuts when he found out, and I can’t say I blame him.
I find this sort of screw-up personally mortifying. Should I have asked such a basic and obvious question? I took it for granted that we would link our own app up to our own tests. Never assume!
To be continued tomorrow.
The first part of my series on former Health Secretary Matt Hancock can be found here.
It summarises where he is today, having finished third in a British reality show in Australia for a cool £400,000 and deciding not to run again as MP for West Suffolk.
It details the first months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, through to the end of April as the news covered it.
To offer balance, today’s post covers the same period in Hancock’s own words. He has just published his Pandemic Diaries, which he co-authored with former Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott.
Isabel Oakeshott’s view
Not being able to imagine who on earth would want to collaborate on a book with our historically authoritarian Health Secretary who left his wife in June 2021 for his adviser/girlfriend, I was interested to read Oakeshott’s justification in The Spectator, posted on December 7, 2022.
Excerpts from ‘The truth about Matt Hancock’ follow, emphases mine:
Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common. For starters I’m terrified of spiders and hopelessly squeamish. I physically retched as I watched him eating unmentionables in the Australian jungle. Far more importantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic …
This country paid a catastrophic price for what I see as a reckless overreaction to a disease that was only life-threatening to a small number of people who could have been protected without imprisoning the entire population. As each day passes, more evidence emerges that shutting down society for prolonged periods to ‘stop the spread’ and ‘protect the NHS’ was a monumental disaster.
Hancock, obviously, disagrees. The Rt Hon Member for West Suffolk is not just unrepentant: he still wholeheartedly believes that as health secretary during the pandemic, he made all the right calls. He is utterly scathing of anyone who argues that repeated lockdowns were avoidable; does not have the slightest doubt over any aspect of the government’s vaccine policy; and thinks anyone who believes any other approach to the pandemic was either realistic or desirable is an idiot.
How then could I have worked with him on his book about the pandemic? Some of my lockdown confidantes suggested it was a betrayal and that he should be punished, perhaps viciously so.
… I wanted to get to the truth. What better way to find out what really happened – who said what to whom; the driving force and thinking behind key policies and decisions; who (if anyone) dissented; and how they were crushed – than to align myself with the key player? I might not get the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I’d certainly get a good dollop of it, and a keen sense of anything murky requiring further investigation.
In the event, Hancock shared far more than I could ever have imagined. I have viewed thousands and thousands of sensitive government communications relating to the pandemic, a fascinating and very illuminating exercise. I was not paid a penny for this work, but the time I spent on the project – almost a year – was richly rewarding in other ways. Published this week, co-authored by me, Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries are the first insider account from the heart of government of the most seismic political, economic and public health crisis of our times.
I am not so naive as to imagine that he told me everything. However, since he still does not believe he did anything wrong, he was surprisingly inclined to disclosure. In an indication of how far he was prepared to go, the Cabinet Office requested almost 300 deletions and amendments to our original manuscript. Under pressure from me and out of his own desire that the book should be both entertaining and revelatory, to his credit, Hancock fought hard to retain as much controversial material as he could. The resulting work is twice as long as I originally intended, and half the length he wanted it to be.
Pandemic Diaries: January to April 2020
The Mail has been serialising Pandemic Diaries over the past week.
Excerpts from the first exclusive extract follow, beginning on New Year’s Day 2020.
Wednesday, January 1:
Standing in my kitchen in Suffolk after a quiet New Year’s Eve, I scanned my newspaper for clues as to what might be lurking around the corner. The only thing on my patch was a news-in-brief story about a mystery pneumonia outbreak in China.
There were enough people in hospital for Beijing to have put out an alert. It reminded me a bit of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) back in 2003, which killed hundreds, mainly in China and Hong Kong. I asked my private office to put together a briefing and made a mental note to raise it when I got back.
Sunday, January 5:
There are now 59 cases in China; seven of these patients are seriously ill with breathing problems.
Tuesday, January 7, when Parliament had returned from Christmas recess:
I found the PM [Boris] in the voting lobby looking like he’d had a good Christmas and revelling in all the congratulatory back slaps from colleagues. We walked through the lobby together, and I told him about the new disease.
‘You keep an eye on it,’ he said breezily. ‘It will probably go away like all the others.’
In more trivial news, a picture of my Union Jack socks has somehow gone viral after I was pictured on my way into Cabinet yesterday. My old university friend and communications specialist Gina Coladangelo was not particularly impressed. She thinks they’re a bit Ukip.
Saturday, January 11:
First death from the virus in China — at least, the first one they’ve told us about.
Friday, January 17:
When I got into the department, Chris Whitty — whom I appointed Chief Medical Officer last year, and who is known informally as the Prof — asked for a word. Calmly, in his ultra-reasonable way, he explained that he thinks the virus has a 50:50 chance of escaping China. If it gets out of China in a big way, he says a very large number of people will die.
At this point, Boris was preparing for our official exit from the European Union at the end of January. Everyone’s attention, not surprisingly, was on Brexit. Hancock’s push for a Cabinet Office Briefing — COBRA — went unheeded.
Wednesday, January 22:
I found out tonight that Sir Mark Sedwill, Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, is blocking my push for a meeting of COBRA. Infuriating!
Thursday, January 23:
No 10 has grudgingly agreed to let me make a statement to the Commons about the virus. No 10 are still saying calling COBRA would be ‘alarmist’. What utter rubbish.
Friday, January 24:
Dominic Cummings [the PM’s chief adviser] thinks Covid is a distraction from our official withdrawal from the EU next week. That’s all he wants Boris talking about.
On Saturday, January 25, Hancock worried about evacuating Britons from Wuhan. He contacted then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who agreed to put a plan into place. On Sunday, Hancock was frustrated to find that civil servants were drawing up advice on whether, not how, to evacuate UK citizens there.
Monday, January 27:
Coronavirus is now the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I go to bed.
The next day, Tuesday, a meeting of 30 people took place to discuss the virus, including SAGE members Chris Whitty and Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, who would be regulars on our television screens in the months to come. This is where the alarmism started.
Tuesday, January 28 (see photo):
In his characteristically understated way, sitting at the back peeling a tangerine, Chris Whitty quietly informed everyone that in the reasonable worst-case scenario, as many as 820,000 people in the UK may die. The transmission is so high that almost everyone would catch it.
The whole room froze. We are looking at a human catastrophe on a scale not seen here for a century.
I asked what we needed to do to accelerate a vaccine. Professor [Jonathan] Van-Tam said developing a vaccine normally takes five to ten years, but there’s a team in Oxford working on an Ebola project that can easily be switched to the new disease.
‘I want it by Christmas,’ I said.
On Wednesday, Boris’s PMQs went as usual, with no mention of the virus. Hancock was frustrated.
Wednesday, January 29:
I called the head of the World Health Organisation to try to persuade him — for the second time — to declare a public health international emergency. But China runs various projects in his private office, so he is scared stiff of upsetting them.
Thursday, January 30:
The Wuhan Brits are on their way back. I’ve had a showdown with officials and lawyers over what to do with the evacuees when they land at RAF Brize Norton.
PHE [Public Health England] thinks they should be greeted with a smile and a leaflet and asked nicely to go home and stay there for a couple of weeks. I said they should go straight into quarantine. PHE started hand-wringing about human rights. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s get them to sign a contract before they board. In return for the flight, they agree to go into quarantine. No contract, no flight.’ I was told the contract wouldn’t be legally enforceable and was too draconian. ‘Do it anyway,’ I instructed.
The World Health Organisation have finally declared the virus a public health emergency. The risk level in the UK has now gone from low to moderate.
PHE’s audit of PPE [personal protective equipment] came back and did not lighten my mood. There’s no clear record of what’s in the stockpile, and some kit is past its ‘best before’ date. I’ve instructed officials to work out what we need fast, and buy in huge quantities.
Friday, January 31:
The Wuhan flight touched down at Brize Norton. The RAF crew and all our officials were in full hazmat suits, but the poor coach drivers taking them into quarantine were in their normal work clothes. Who on earth would give protection to air crew but not bus crew?
The UK left the EU on schedule. I remember the parliamentary contributions from Conservative MPs about the wonderful plans they had for the nation. It was a glorious time to be alive.
Meanwhile, Downing Street’s attention would turn to the pandemic in February.
Hancock tries to paint himself as a supporter of personal liberty in this next diary entry.
Tuesday, February 4:
As a [classical] liberal, I’ve always believed people make the best decisions for themselves. Now we are contemplating actions that could bankrupt millions of businesses and interfere in literally everyone’s lives. It is a very, very strange feeling; not me at all.
Hancock says that Boris, rightly, was still unconcerned.
Tuesday, February 11:
Driving home down the Harrow Road [in London], I looked at the crowds spilling out of the pub on the corner and tried to imagine what it will be like if we have to shut these places. I felt like I inhabited another world, that no one outside had yet seen into.
Hancock finally got his COBRA meeting.
Wednesday, February 12:
Back in the COBRA room today for a civil service exercise to rehearse what we’ll do if the virus runs out of control. We role-played how we would do our jobs in two months’ time if the very worst-case scenario has happened and hundreds of thousands are dying.
Where in Hyde Park would the burial pits be? Who would dig them? Have we got enough body bags?
Worst of all was agreeing a protocol to instruct doctors which lives to save. Do we treat the young, because they have more years to live, or the old, because they are more vulnerable? Horrific decisions.
Public Health England (PHE) had bad news for Hancock.
Tuesday, February 18:
PHE says our current approach of tracing all contacts of anyone who’s infected is unsustainable. Apparently they can only cope with five new cases a week. This is infuriating since only a few weeks ago they told me they had the best system in the world.
I had no idea that China was buying testing services from Britain’s Randox. Hmm.
Thursday, February 27:
PHE has outright refused a request from Randox, the UK’s biggest testing company, for coronavirus samples. Certain senior public health officials are absolutely allergic to anything involving the private sector. Evidently they’d rather risk lives than set aside these ideological objections.
No such sniffiness from the Chinese, who are snapping up Randox’s services.
At the beginning of March, public health posters and announcements about coronavirus began appearing.
Sunday, March 1:
We’re telling everyone to wash their hands more frequently and encouraging parents to get their kids to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice to make sure they do it for long enough. What I really wanted people to sing was the national anthem.
Sadly, I was overruled, as the collective view seems to be that happy birthday is ‘less divisive’. Since when is the national anthem controversial? Sigh.
Thursday, March 5:
First two UK deaths — a horrible landmark.
Saturday, March 7:
There’s a crisis looming with ventilators. We have nowhere near enough. If the worst comes to the worst, we may need to put out advice on how to care for a critically-ill relative at home, a terrifying prospect for most people.
I took a few hours off today and took the kids to Planet Laser in Bury St Edmunds [in his constituency]. It involves charging around in the dark in a ‘battle suit’ firing lasers at other players. I was looking forward to forgetting about coronavirus for an hour or so, but no such luck: it turned out that one of the games is called Infection.
Every time a player’s laser hit one of the other players, they would get ‘infected’ with a disease. In between attempts to dodge the fictional virus, I kept having to dart out to respond to urgent messages about the real one.
By March 8, the UK began experiencing a shortage of bathroom tissue. People were bulk buying. Rice was another product in short supply. Hancock says that he and his wife bought a huge sack of rice.
Another thing in short supply were hospital beds.
Monday, March 9:
In my box of official papers this evening was a scientific briefing suggesting the NHS could have a deficit of 150,000 beds and 9,000 ICU spaces.
Tuesday, March 10:
I’ve instructed PHE to produce plans for how they will get testing up from 1,000 tests a week to 10,000. I don’t care who does these tests — just that they’re fast and accurate.
Thursday, March 12:
While the Prime Minister was standing before the nation declaring we’re doing everything possible to save lives, PHE have advised to stop all contact tracing. They’ve basically given up, having become overwhelmed by the number of cases. Infuriating!
March 12, 2020 was the day of the last lunch my better half and I had with friends in Mayfair before lockdown. None of us would have believed that we would not see each other again until August 11, 2021, by which time indoor mask restrictions had been lifted.
Friday, March 13:
A call with my fellow G7 Health Ministers. Everyone sounded terrified.
Also from that day:
Simon Stevens [NHS England chief executive] says frail elderly patients who don’t need urgent treatment need to be discharged from hospital, either to their home or to care homes. He’s spoken to the PM about it and is determined to make it happen.
Saturday, March 14:
In just three days, the numbers have doubled. At 10am I went to Downing Street to talk to the PM and others. We wrestled with all the issues. What measures? How long? Would people comply? Are we doing enough to make sure the NHS can cope?
We were all struggling to get our heads round the enormity of what we were discussing. Boris set out the case for and against each option. After everyone had had their say, we collectively made the decision: to close large swathes of society.
Monday, March 16:
Cummings, [communications director] Lee Cain, Whitty and I went into Boris’s study garden and finessed the message he was going to give in a televised press conference. Then, at 5pm, it was time. Looking as grave as he ever does, Boris told the elderly and vulnerable they are going to have to stay at home for 12 weeks.
That day, Hancock issued his first guidelines to Parliament and the public:
Tuesday, March 17:
I’ve been told we have a billion items of PPE in a warehouse in the North-West. ‘Hooray!’ I thought. Just one problem — we can’t get it out. It turns out that it’s in a huge storage unit with only one door. Ergo, only one lorry can pull up at a time. What a classic government fail.
It was my son’s 12th birthday today, almost all of which I missed. My family is already paying a heavy price for this crisis.
Also from that day:
A bonkers proposal from the Ministry of Justice to let prisoners out, as they’d be easier to manage if they’re not in prison. Yes really: they actually thought this might be a goer. I was emphasising [my opposition] so hard that all of a sudden my chair could take the strain no longer and ripped, tipping me unceremoniously on to the floor.
Hancock advised that the public could pose any questions on his Instagram account:
A few days before, Hancock appealed to retired NHS practitioners to return to the health service to help in the pandemic effort. On Saturday, March 21, he said that 4,000 nurses and 500 doctors were returning:
Good Morning Britain‘s Piers Morgan quickly got into panic mode:
Sunday, March 22:
Crunch meeting in Downing Street, at which the Prime Minister weighed up all the options. He’s famous for this, so it’s impossible to know in the middle of the meeting where he’s going to end up. It’s his way of making big decisions. Today he agreed to a formal lockdown as soon as possible.
Monday, March 23:
At 8.30pm, the Prime Minister gave his address to the nation. ‘From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction: you must stay at home . . .’
In my own household, I found an old computer in the attic and have set it up for our youngest, though I’m not sure how online school is going to work for a six-year-old. With me largely absent, it’s tough on the family.
Hancock led the coronavirus briefing for the first time on Tuesday, March 24. He described himself as being ‘unusually nervous’.
Tuesday, March 24:
Driving down Park Lane there wasn’t a single other car on the road — not one. I sat in the back of the car feeling almost sick. All I could think was: What have we done?
The nausea wouldn’t last long, however. Hancock would soon grow into his newly found power.
He had many messages that day:
He announced a war footing for the British public:
The first Nightingale hospital — relatively unused — was opened.
Hancock ordered NHS and care home staff to report to work:
He issued contradictory advice about working between addressing the House of Commons and the coronavirus briefing later that day:
London’s mayor Sadiq Khan said that too many Tube workers were off sick to run a full service. This left the trains that were running packed to the gills:
Hancock said that lockdown was not guidance and that police would enforce it:
Meanwhile, the airports were open to all arrivals:
On Wednesday, March 25, Hancock expressed his gratitude to the 405,000 Britons who were volunteering in the pandemic effort:
Friday, March 27:
A nurse called first thing this morning to say I’ve got Covid. I called [the PM’s press secretary] Jack Doyle to break the news. ‘Erm, that’s interesting, as we’re just about to announce that the PM has tested positive, too,’ he replied. To cap it all, the Prof [Chris Whitty] also has symptoms.
He later announced his positive diagnosis:
Sunday, March 29:
My throat hurts so much that I can’t swallow and I can’t eat or drink. [My wife] Martha has also got it, along with our daughter and our live-in au pair.
Meanwhile there are still dire supply issues with PPE. The BMA [British Medical Association] is going nuts. It’s not as if I think it’s acceptable: it’s not! There’s just no quick fix. When the whole world is after it, it simply isn’t possible to get as much as we need as fast as it’s required.
Monday, March 30:
The government-owned company that gets PPE supplies to hospitals across the NHS has effectively collapsed. Total disaster.
I’m absolutely furious that the people who are meant to be experts in logistics have been unable to cope because there are too many actual logistics. WTF? We’ve been buying more from China, but the immediate problem is still lorry access to our storage facility in the North-West, where there’s only one door. Funnily enough, nobody has been able to magic up any extra entrances, so we’re still stuck with single lorryloads at a time.
On Thursday, April 2, Hancock announced his audacious and controversial plan of getting 100,000 coronavirus tests done by May 1, something for which he was derided by the media at the daily coronavirus briefings.
Also from that day:
Negative tests won’t be required prior to transfers/admissions into care homes. The tragic but honest truth is we don’t have enough testing capacity to check anyway. It’s an utter nightmare, but it’s the reality.
Under the circumstances, we must make sure that anyone going from a hospital into a care home is kept away from other residents. I hope this message filters through and is followed.
It’s been a choice between very difficult options. If we keep people in hospital, the NHS will be overrun. If only we had more tests.
Friday, April 3:
A 13-year-old boy who died from Covid was buried without any mourners yesterday. His parents weren’t even at the graveside because they were self-isolating. I felt almost physically sick reading it as my own boy, just a year younger, slept peacefully in the room next door.
I told Boris and he was shocked and upset. He tries not to let on, but he is actually a very emotional man. He was coughing through the call. He’s very worried about looking weak: ‘A general’s job is to show strength, not weakness,’ he told me ruefully.
Also from that day:
Officials are still insisting that Justice Secretary Rob Buckland wants to release thousands of non-violent prisoners to take the pressure off the system. I keep writing ‘NO’ in large letters on submissions asking me to sign this off. It’s obvious the public won’t wear it, yet the idea keeps going back and forth on paper.
After about the third iteration I called Rob Buckland, who to my astonishment told me he’d been advised that I was the one who wanted to release them.
Unfortunately, this still wasn’t the end of the matter. Clearly someone in Whitehall still thought it was a good idea and kept pushing it, to the point that the PM asked to talk to us both. I made my views crystal clear.
‘We cannot lock up literally everyone in the country except prisoners, who we instead release!’ I spluttered.
Saturday, April 4:
President Trump has randomly and dangerously declared that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for Covid, despite a total absence of the evidence. What an awful, awful man.
The next day, the Queen gave a brief message of support to her subjects, ending with ‘We’ll meet again’, echoing Dame Vera Lynn’s famous song from the Second World War.
Shortly afterwards, the nation received alarming news.
Sunday, April 5:
I was just about to go to bed when my phone rang for the umpteenth time. It was [Cabinet Secretary] Mark Sedwill, who informed me that the Prime Minister was on his way to St Thomas’s Hospital ‘as a precautionary step’. Boris is still furiously texting everyone.
Everyone knows that a Prime Minister isn’t admitted to hospital unless it’s something very serious. And so it turned out to be.
Monday, April 6:
Boris has been taken into intensive care. Everyone is stunned. I’m told there’s a 50:50 chance he’ll end up on a ventilator; and if that happens, we know there’s a 50:50 chance he will die. The minute the news came out, pharma companies started calling my private office with offers of experimental drugs.
On Tuesday, Hancock surmised Boris was in intensive care because coronavirus affects the obese.
Wednesday, April 8:
Boris spent a second night in intensive care. I worry about losing a close colleague and friend. When you spend time with Boris, it’s impossible not to like him.
He’s endlessly funny and engaging and thinks differently and more laterally than anyone I know. This can bring its challenges when straight-line thinking is required, but for grasping the big picture there’s no one like him.
Nobody speaks of it, but there is a ‘worst-case scenario’ plan for if Boris doesn’t pull through. We couldn’t possibly have a normal Conservative Party leadership election, so the Cabinet would have to take a quick decision, advise the Queen and rally round.
Boris left intensive care on April 9. He left hospital at the weekend. He then went to Chequers to recuperate, accompanied by his then-partner Carrie Symonds, who was in the final weeks of her pregnancy with their son Wilf.
Care homes were Hancock’s focus for the rest of the month — and the summer.
Wednesday, April 15:
From today, everyone going from hospital into social care will be tested and then isolated while the result comes through.
Saturday, April 18:
Care homes haven’t yet grasped the fact that we’re only going to get out of this if we test, test, test. According to figures I received today, the average care home has carried out 0.5 tests, which is exasperating, given how hard we’re working to increase capacity.
Also from that day, another tempest brewed over PPE supplies, which is still a hot topic in Parliament, even today:
Hundreds of businesses are approaching the department offering to manufacture this or that. Half the time nobody returns their calls, even with big companies such as Primark.
The problem is weeding out time-wasters and chancers – of which there are many – without missing opportunities. One company with a good product got so p***ed off they sold everything to the Scottish NHS.
Even the Labour Party is writing in with suggested names of companies and individuals who could help – apparently without doing any due diligence on the offers.
Hancock sensed that not everyone in Downing Street or the Cabinet wanted him to succeed.
Monday, April 20:
Crunch week for hitting my testing target of 100,000 tests done by May 1. There’s an uncomfortable amount of speculation about my career depending on it. [Dominic] Cummings is itching for me to fail.
Friday, April 24:
Downing Street called my office saying I needed to schedule a quick call with the PM. I was looking forward to it, until I switched on Zoom to find the PM at Chequers flanked by Cummings and about a dozen other advisers. Rishi [Sunak] was there, looking sheepish. I realised instantly what was going on: an attempted ambush.
Boris opened with some gentle warm-ups, then Cummings started the shelling, subjecting me to a barrage of questions about my department’s response: on PPE, testing, NHS capacity, ventilators. Every so often, one of the others would pile in. Most questions seemed to be based on inaccurate media reports.
It was utterly exhausting, but I’ve lived this for months now, 18 hours a day, pretty much every day, so I am on top of every detail.
When they finally ran out of ammunition, I pressed ‘Leave Meeting’, sat back in my chair, checked my body for shrapnel wounds and saw that I was broadly intact. Next?
To be continued tomorrow.
This week’s news that former Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock would be standing down as MP for West Suffolk at the next election was a joyful tiding, indeed.
Hancock is currently an Independent MP. The Conservative whip was withdrawn on November 1, 2002, when he accepted the invitation to appear on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, which takes place in the Australian jungle. Amazingly, he came third, getting further than Boy George did.
This week saw more Hancock news with the publication of his Pandemic Diaries, co-authored with former Times journalist, Isabel Oakeshott.
This series charts the rise and fall of the former Conservative MP, a principal protagonist in the coronavirus drama of 2020 and the first half of 2021.
Two Oxford medics give their verdict
On December 8, 2022, The Spectator featured an article from Drs Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson from the University of Oxford: ‘The UK isn’t learning the right lessons from lockdown’.
Both were sceptics during the pandemic, the type of medics Matt Hancock eschewed, as we will find out later on from the Pandemic Diaries.
Excerpts from Heneghan and Jefferson’s article follow, emphases mine:
This month, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care published a Technical Report on the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK.
The report is a long 11-chapter document describing the UK’s response and pointing out suggestions for dealing with future pandemics.
The report is described as ‘independent’, but the authors are public health civil servants and a handful of academics. Given that the authors were instrumental to a greater and lesser degree in implementing the catastrophes of lockdowns, this report is as independent as President Xi marking his own homework in China.
It is hard to reconcile some of the report’s content with what we have written about in the past. For example, there is no mention of the misuse of PCR tests or of Britain’s failure to follow the example of other countries, whose contact tracing systems were overwhelmed in days.
There is also no apology for the evidence-free mass testing programme, the segregation of healthy people, and the lack of identification of truly infectious cases.
I remember the early weeks of the pandemic, which entered totalitarian territory on Monday, March 23, 2020, with Boris’s five-minute announcement on lockdown.
My far better half and I wondered then about the absurdity of contract tracing. Fortunately, neither of us has a smartphone, nor did we participate in any testing regime ever. We simply don’t see that many people.
Heneghan and Jefferson’s article states:
It would have been better if the report admitted that contact tracing is hugely challenging, that it would never have achieved its intended outcomes and was, therefore, a waste of £37 billion. This is something health officials in Lombardy, Italy had realised by the beginning of March 2020. The UK Parliament has also pointed out that the contract tracing programme had an ‘unimaginable’ cost.
Yet, Matt Hancock paraded it as being a fail-safe method of finding out about loads of infectious people.
Then there were the hospitalisations. Here is a little-known fact worth repeating again and again:
up to 40 per cent of ‘hospital cases’ were infections acquired in hospitals … suggesting that whatever ‘protection’ measures hospitals were taking did not work.
After that came the school closures, even when Government officials said that children were at low risk from coronavirus themselves but could still transmit it to older relatives. Hmm:
When it comes to the low risk to school children and teachers, the report portrays this as a tension between missing education and stopping transmission …
But school-age children had the lowest Covid risk, and we are now reaping the effects of this immunological segregation, with a whirlwind of influenza-like illnesses sweeping across the country. The costs to children socialising and the impact on their schooling are mere details in the report.
Heneghan and Jefferson point out that the report makes scant mention of the 7.2 million people on NHS waiting lists and the rise in excess deaths because of lockdown. Furthermore:
Our requests for the cause of the current excess in deaths have gone unanswered.
The footnotes and references in the report appalled them:
… the type of evidence cited in the report’s footnotes and references is remarkable. It mainly relies on models, i.e. opinions formulated by those with a long history of getting it wrong or citing selective pieces of work.
They say that there should be no excuses for the lack of planning for the pandemic:
There is no mention of the need for proper planning to plug known gaps in the evidence. For example, suppose you need to know whether masks or other physical interventions work in the community, you prepare protocols for trials designed to find this out in a short time. In that case, you get prior ethical approval and fire the starter pistol when the WHO declares a pandemic or earlier.
There is plenty of precedent for this kind of preparation. That is what happened in 2009 with mock-up influenza pre-pandemic vaccines. So there can be no excuses here, just a disregard for crucial gaps in the evidence and a reluctance to address them. It is even easier in the case of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) as there are no regulators breathing down your neck.
As for crucial NPIs, such as mask wearing and lockdown, the report says:
It may never be possible fully to disentangle some of the effects of individual NPIs in this pandemic, as many were used together….
Observational studies on NPIs were often complicated by several potential confounders.
The medics conclude that nothing will change:
Due to the sheer number of interventions tried at any one time, we may never know what works, particularly if we also rely on low-quality observational studies – as we have done – to inform policy.
But none of this matters: it’ll be more of the same next time.
Hancock champions Klaus Schwab
Matt Hancock entered Parliament in May 2010, when David Cameron became Prime Minister, ending 13 years of Labour government.
Hancock began his ministerial rise to in 2013 as a junior minister in what was then the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was the UK’s Anti-Corruption Champion from 2014 and 2015. He served as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General between 2015 and 2016.
When Theresa May became Prime Minister, Hancock became Minister of State for Digital and Culture, now the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
In that capacity, he delivered a speech praising Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. He delivered the speech at the House of Commons to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) at the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s (4IR’s) autumn reception on October 16, 2017. Hancock introduced Klaus to the APPG.
The transcript is still available to read in full:
… the nature of the new technologies is that the changes we are experiencing today, are probably the slowest changes we will see over the rest of our lifetimes. If you don’t much like change, I’m afraid I don’t have so much good news.
Our task, in this building and around the world, is to make this technology, this change, work for humanity. And I’m profoundly confident we can. Because this technology is made by man, so it can be hewn to build a better future for mankind.
And I’m delighted to speak alongside so many impressive colleagues who really understand this, and alongside Professor Klaus Schwab who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the 4th Industrial Revolution. Your work, bringing together as you do all the best minds on the planet, has informed what we are doing, and I’m delighted to work with you.
For the 1st Industrial Revolution, the UK could claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – propelled by development of the steam engine, it reached its pinnacle in the mid-19th Century. But the UK has not had the monopoly on waves of industrialisation.
Now, in the fourth revolution, we are determined to use our strengths to play a leading part. By its nature the fourth industrial revolution is more collaborative than the first. And we will play our part …
… our Digital Strategy, embedded within the wider Industrial Strategy, sets out the seven pillars on which we can build our success. And inside that fits our 5G strategy, like a set of Russian Dolls.
Our Strategy covers infrastructure, skills, rules and ethics of big data use, cyber security, supporting the tech sector, the digitisation of industry, and digitisation of government. All these are important.
… today I am delighted to announce that we are launching the first £25m competition for 5G testbeds and trials projects. We already lead on the highly technical development of 5G standards through the international work of the University of Surrey and others.
Now we are looking for innovative projects to test the roll out of 5G to develop the UK’s growing 5G ecosystem. We want projects that explore the real-world potential for 5G …
It will also support projects which explore ways of using 5G technology to address challenges in particular sectors, such as those faced in health and social care …
Earlier this year, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ was not a very well-known term – at least before it became a central topic at the World Economic Forum. It recently made its way into an item on BBC Breakfast television – this shows we’ve probably started to reach critical mass.
It’s a pleasure now to introduce the man who made the fourth industrial revolution a household phrase: Professor Klaus Schwab.
Hancock became Secretary of State for Health and Social Care under Theresa May in July 2018, when she promoted Jeremy Hunt, his predecessor, to Foreign Secretary. Hancock remained in post throughout the pandemic until he was caught on camera in a heavy embrace with his then-adviser, now girlfriend, in 2021, when social distancing restrictions were still in place.
Hancock returned to the Conservative backbenches on June 26, 2021, after The Sun published the photos. Hancock and his girlfriend immediately separated from their spouses and are still an item.
The run-up to the pandemic
Even before the pandemic, Hancock was opposed to people who questioned vaccines.
On Sunday, September 29, 2019, The Guardian reported that he wanted compulsory vaccinations for schoolchildren:
The government is “looking very seriously” at making vaccinations compulsory for state school pupils and has taken advice on how such a law could work, the health secretary has said.
Matt Hancock, a vehement critic of anti-vaccination campaigners, has previously suggested such a plan. Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative party conference, he said he was “very worried” by falling vaccination rates, indicating the government could act soon.
“I’ve said before that we should be open-minded, and frankly, what I’d say is that when the state provides services to people then it’s a two-way street – you’ve got to take your responsibilities, too,” Hancock told the Q&A session hosted by the Huffington Post.
“So I think there’s a very strong argument for having compulsory vaccinations for children when they go to school, because otherwise they’re putting other children at risk.
“Then I’d want to make it very easy if the children do arrive at school not vaccinated, simply to get vaccinated, and make it the norm. But I think there’s a very strong argument for movement to compulsory vaccination, and I think the public would back us.”
He took aim at social media for spreading what he called ‘anti-vaccine messages’:
“It’s unbelievable, I think, that Britain has lost its measles-free status, and it should be a real wake-up call. I think that the social media companies have got a lot to answer for, because they allow the spread of anti-vaccine messages.
“I will do whatever I can – the science is absolutely clear and settled on the importance of vaccination. And the worst thing is that if you don’t vaccinate your child, and you can, then the person you’re putting at risk is not only your child but it’s also the child who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons.”
He had already started thinking about compulsory vaccines in May that year:
Hancock first raised the idea of compulsory vaccinations in May, saying he did not wish to do it but might be forced to act if no other solutions to improve take-up rates could be found.
He said: “Those who have promoted the anti-vaccination myth are morally reprehensible, deeply irresponsible and have blood on their hands.”
Confidence in the MMR vaccination seems to have dropped at least partly in response to social media misinformation and scare stories. The discredited claims of Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 theorised that the jab was linked to autism, are widely circulated.
Wakefield was struck off the medical register in 2010 after suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
He also seemed to be interested in social care at that time. On June 10, 2019, Care Home Professional reported:
Matt Hancock has pledged a £3.5bn cash injection to prop up the social care system as he kick-starts his campaign to become the UK’s next prime minister.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care said he would seek the extra funds in the next Spending Review …
The Health and Social Care Secretary described the current social care system as “unsustainable” and said there’s a “whole number of injustices” affecting society’s most vulnerable people.
“One of the biggest injustices is that for people who worked hard all their lives and have put money aside – the system penalises them and won’t fund their care without them having to sell the house, whereas people who haven’t put money aside get their care supported. I think this is very unfair,” he added …
He wanted to see individuals funding their own social care by contributing to a personal fund:
He stressed that the payments could be made over many years of a working life.
The scheme, which would be made voluntary, would require all workers over 40 to contribute 2.5% of their wages.
“I’d like to see people encouraged to take it out when they get their first mortgage – that being the point where many people buy life insurance,” the minister said.
The insurance scheme would do away with previous Conservative proposals to put a lifetime cap on care costs.
Cometh coronavirus, cometh the man — or not
We were only a fortnight into lockdown in the Spring of 2020, and already we could see Matt Hancock’s true character.
The televised Coronavirus Updates appeared almost daily on the BBC, and he was in most of them.
On April 12 that year, The Mail on Sunday‘s Peter Hitchens wrote ‘Matt Hancock is trying to run the UK like my 1950s prep school’:
Until I started travelling in the Communist world, my main experience of living under tyranny was my time at a boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, 60 years ago.
The headmaster, an enormous, booming man, had many fine qualities. But he was given to dreadful rages, which tended to strike late on Saturday afternoons.
He would throb with fury because some of the more loutish boys had left their games clothes on the changing room floor.
For some reason, he viewed this as a terrible crime closely related to murder. So he would summon us into the assembly hall, and harangue us as darkness fell outside.
The more we stood mulishly in front of him, saying nothing and with our eyes downcast, the angrier he became …
Collective punishments – a ban on eating toast, or the cancellation of a promised film show – would follow, along with more shouting and angry notices in red ink, threatening worse to come.
Most of us were guiltless of wrongdoing. But we were small, and he was huge. The staff seemed more scared of him than we were.
We were on a windswept hilltop miles from anywhere. We had no escape …
Hancock wanted to ban outdoor exercise because it was violating social distancing rules, hastily put into place:
I had thought such childish things were long over in my life. But a week ago I found that I was, once again, living at the mercy of an equally petulant would-be despot.
Matthew Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, went on national TV to threaten to ban outdoor exercise if people continued to break ‘social distancing’ rules.
From a Government that claims to be preserving life and health, this threat was literally mad.
Banning exercise for any length of time will lead to the deaths and illness of many thousands of currently healthy, older people who know that such exercise is vital to their physical and mental wellbeing.
Such exercise can easily be taken while maintaining the required distance from others.
The threat was a dictatorial one, of collective punishment of all for the wrongdoing of others.
This is illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. A foreign occupier would not be allowed to do it.
Sunbathing and sitting on park benches also irked Hancock while the police were enjoying their newly-found powers over the public:
Mr Hancock also said it was ‘quite extraordinary’ that some people had spent the weekend sunbathing in public places despite it being against Government guidance.
Getting into his stride, he urged people not to sit down even for a minute on a park bench, saying those who disobeyed the rules were putting their own and others’ lives at risk.
What is this nonsense? The words of Ministers and the words and actions of the police show a pointlessly bossy side to these measures – the attempted ban on Easter egg purchases, the sunbathing squad, alleged arrests of people for just buying wine and crisps, the lumpish threat by a police chief to search the baskets of shoppers.
Provided the people doing these things do not break the distancing rules, why are they wrong?
Sunbathing, for instance, probably reduces the risk of infection, and if people keep a proper distance apart, what on earth is wrong with it? Why shouldn’t someone sit on a park bench?
Mr Hancock said: ‘I say this to the small minority of people who are breaking the rules or pushing the boundaries: you are risking your own life and the lives of others and you’re making it harder for us all.’
Hitchens, who spent years working in Communist countries, hit the nail on the head:
I sense something more going on here.
The Government are trying to get us to accept a far higher level of state intrusion in our lives than we have ever endured.
They are treating us as if we were unruly children. This is despite what I regard as a quite extraordinary willingness among the great majority to do as we are asked.
It has gone to their heads. They need to calm down, for the sake of all of us.
We are not children, this is not some 1950s prep school ruled by the swish of the cane, and Mr Hancock is not our headmaster.
Hitchens rightly questioned the number of deaths at that point, which were nothing unusual, coronavirus or not:
A week ago, at the daily official briefing, Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, confirmed my point that many deaths with Covid are not necessarily from Covid. She said: ‘These are Covid-associated deaths, they are all sad events, they would not all be a death as a result of Covid.’
What nobody says is how many are as a result of the virus.
Then, if you look at the Office for National Statistics weekly death charts, for week 13 of each year (the week which this year ended on March 27), you find some interesting things.
The total of deaths for that week in 2020 is higher than the five-year average for that time of year, which is 10,130. In fact, it is up to 11,141.
This is 1,011 more deaths than normal per week, 144 more deaths than normal per day, regrettable but not gigantic. Do these figures justify the scale of our reaction?
If you add up the total deaths for the first quarter of the year from respiratory diseases, the figure so far for 2020 (22,877) is less than those for 2013 (25,495), 2015 (28,969), 2017 (25,800), 2018 (29,898) and 2019 (23,336).
Again, is this event as exceptional as we are being told? If not, why the shutdown?
Obtaining PPE was a huge problem, and not only for the UK. France, along with other Western countries, was also scrambling to secure PPE. I know from having read Marianne, a French newsweekly.
PPE popped up regularly in parliamentary debates. Labour asked repeatedly what the Government was doing and to get on with the job.
However, people who knew what was going on in the NHS said that things weren’t as bad as the Opposition benches made them out to be.
Sir Keir Starmer had only been Labour leader — succeeding Jeremy Corbyn — for a week or so in April. He was offended that Hancock told the NHS not to waste precious supplies:
However, those with connections inside the NHS said that a hoarding mentality was present and that there was an adequate provision of PPE:
On April 9, Hancock announced a testing lab in Milton Keynes, the Lighthouse Lab, a.k.a. the National Biosample Centre:
Meanwhile, many of us wanted an update on herd immunity.
On April 8, Guido Fawkes reported, complete with audio (emphases his):
As new modelling released by University College London (UCL) predicts the UK will pass the threshold for herd immunity by Monday (with 73.4% of the population protected either by vaccination or previous infection), Matt Hancock was quick to pour cold water on the findings during an interview with LBC‘s Nick Ferrari. Speaking this morning, Hancock said:
I was told by some scientists that we were going to have herd immunity in May, and then in June, and then after that […] what I prefer to do is watch the data. And so we’ve set out the road map, the road map is really clear, it is our route back to normal, we’re on track to meet the road map, and that’s our goal.
Pressed on why the government seemed keen to accept the pessimistic assumptions within the Imperial College data, yet sceptical of UCL’s new study, Hancock – rather predictably – said:
I think we have taken the right course in plotting our way to freedom, and doing it carefully, because we want it to be irreversible. We have seen what happens when this virus gets going […] and we want to get out of this safely and irreversibly.
The ‘data not dates’ refrain feels less plausible with every passing day…
One Twitter user sounded the alarm:
When University College London, a respected establishment put out work saying we’ll hit herd immunity by Monday and Matt Hancock immediately dismisses it You know darker forces are at work here. He’s a member of Parliament that doesn’t work for the people, he works for Gates.
On April 23, exactly two months into lockdown, Hancock was enjoying his power over the British people. Meanwhile, some of us were beginning to worry about the economic downside of keeping everyone at home.
The Mail reported that there was no end in sight:
Matt Hancock tonight insisted the coronavirus lockdown must stay until there is no risk of a second peak – as scientists warned the outbreak might not be fading.
The Health Secretary vowed not to compromise the national effort against the disease as Professor Jonathan Van-Tam told the daily Downing Street briefing that while hospital occupancy rates had dipped in in London the picture in other parts of the UK was ‘more of a plateau’.
The figures – along with another 828 deaths being declared in the UK – add weight to the arguments of those who want to err on the side of caution despite the devastation being wreaked on the economy.
At this point, Boris Johnson had been released from St Thomas’s Hospital from his near-death bout with the virus and was recuperating at Chequers. His wife Carrie, about to give birth to their first child, was with him.
Rifts were appearing as to how long lockdown should last:
Divisions have emerged between Cabinet ‘doves’ such as Mr Hancock and ‘hawks’ who believe the NHS has capacity and would prefer to loosen the draconian social distancing measures earlier.
The PM has intervened from his recuperation at Chequers to snuff out speculation about an imminent easing, with Downing Street making clear his priority is avoiding a ‘second peak’ in the outbreak.
There are reports Mr Johnson’s inner circle has stopped using the phrase ‘exit strategy’ and instead wants to signal a ‘next phase’ of lockdown, with varying levels of restrictions set to continue for the rest of the year until the virus gets ‘close to eradication’ or a vaccine is found. Australia has successfully suppressed cases to very low numbers.
Scientists have been telling ministers behind the scenes that control of the outbreak is still so uncertain that even slight changes to the curbs on normal life could result in a disastrous flare-up.
Mr Hancock said tonight: ‘We have been clear that we will not risk lives by relaxing the social distancing rules before our five tests have been met.
‘First, that the NHS can continue to cope, second, that the operational challenges can be met, third, that the daily death rate falls sustainably and consistently, fourth, that the rate of infection is decreasing, and most importantly, that there is no risk of a second peak.’
The Mail included a photo montage of Cabinet members and this caption of where they stood on the issue:
How members of the cabinet are currently split over the ending of the lockdown. Mr Johnson (top left) and Matt Hancock (bottom left) are classed as ‘doves’; Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak (right, top-to-bottom) as ‘hawks’; and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab (top centre) is among those in the middle, with Gavin Williamson (centre) and Alok Sharma (centre bottom)
Senior Conservative MPs wanted an end to lockdown:
There is no prospect of lockdown measures being eased before the current period comes to an end on May 11.
However, some senior Tories have been pushing plans for an easing soon afterwards, pointing out that the NHS is still below surge capacity and could ‘run hot’ to limit the economic meltdown.
SAGE clearly wanted lockdown to continue:
Government scientists have been warning that the situation is currently so finely balanced that even marginal loosenings could have disastrous effects.
One Cabinet source told the Guardian the government’s advisers on Sage had suggested any easing would push up the rate of transmission – known as R.
The source said: ‘The scientists are very clear. There’s no loosening of measures we can do that won’t bring the R back over 1 …
‘We did have an R of about 3. And we’ve driven that down. But even a small increase in transmission could put you above 1.’
The WHO were adamant that the Western world should remain locked down, even though some of those countries were already easing restrictions:
Dr Takeshi Kasai, the WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, said: ‘This is not the time to be lax. Instead, we need to ready ourselves for a new way of living for the foreseeable future.’
He said governments must remain vigilant to stop the spread of the virus and the lifting of lockdowns and other social distancing measures must be done gradually and strike the right balance between keeping people healthy and allowing economies to function.
Despite concerns from health officials, some US states have announced aggressive reopening plans, while Boeing and at least one other American heavy-equipment manufacturer resumed production.
Elsewhere around the world, step-by-step reopenings are under way in Europe, where the crisis has begun to ebb in places such as Italy, Spain and Germany.
By the last week in April, questions were mounting.
On April 23, The Telegraph‘s Christopher Hope wondered why Hancock didn’t take any questions from the media after that day’s coronavirus briefing:
The next day, Hancock praised Muslims for their ‘sacrifice’ in not meeting daily for prayers during Ramadan, but had nothing to say to Christians who could not attend church on the holiest feast of the year, Easter, which remembers Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Houses of worship were closed:
Hancock began wearing a prominent CARE lapel badge on television. By this time, he had pledged that a ‘protective ring’ had been placed around care homes, something he later denied saying.
People found the CARE badge risible.
James Kirkup, writing for The Spectator, defended the move:
Matt Hancock’s badge for carers is a perfectly good idea. The mockery of it is in many cases shallow, ill-informed, revealing and hypocritical.
You don’t need me to describe the badge or the mockery. Anyone with an internet connection and a glancing familiarity with what passes for ‘news’ these days is aware that the Health – and Social Care – Secretary announced that the Government is now backing a scheme that encourages social care staff to wear a green badge saying CARE.
Part of the aim is to give care workers the same sort of recognition, esteem and access to services – reserved shopping hours, for instance – as NHS workers.
This is reasonable, necessary and overdue. Part of the UK’s social crisis lies in the social care workforce, which is too small and too transient. There are around 125,000 vacancies in social care at any moment, roughly eight per cent of the workforce. Turnover is around 30 per cent, double the average across the UK labour market.
Kings College London surveyed care workers and found that some said that teachers warned their children to do better in school, otherwise they’d end up working in care homes:
In a survey of care workers, the Kings’ team found that it wasn’t just society as a whole that looked down on care. It was care workers themselves. One of the most common phrases used by interviewees was ‘I’m only a care worker’. Many reported that their children had been told if they don’t work hard they would end up working in care. ‘The lack of esteem has been internalised,’ prof Manthorpe said. Our collective disregard for social care has left carers feeling worthless and keen to leave the sector, sometimes for jobs with equally poor wages.
The following year, after Hancock had urged all care workers to be vaccinated, a number of those who refused to do so were either fired or left for hospitality jobs.
John Pilger, writing for The Guardian, rightly predicted that a storm was brewing over PPE contracts and wasted money on testing:
A debate in Parliament took place just recently on the topic. Labour are still furious.
The prediction that came true
Former Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, now Lord Hannan, predicted exactly what would happen as early as April 5. He was incredibly accurate.
The Express reported:
Economist Mr Hannan warned businesses would “topple like dominoes” if the lockdown remained in force until May, while pointing the finger at Public Health England for the failure to undertake a widespread programme of testing. The ardent Brexiteer, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, said the cost of the restrictions was hard to measure “but no less painful for that”. He explained: “One of my university contemporaries, who has a history of mental health problems, has struggled terribly with confinement.
“A neighbour is facing the grimmest of hat-tricks: her business ruined, her house-move frozen and her cancer operation postponed.
“The village osteopath, who went from 300 patients a week to zero when the bans came in, has been forced into insolvency.
“Nationally, a million more people have been pushed on to benefits.”
Mr Hannan also scoffed at the assertion stringent measures were required to minimise the number of people dying.
He said: “I am astonished by how many commentators duck these consequences by airily asserting that ‘lives matter more than the economy’.
“What do they imagine the economy is, if not the means by which people secure their welfare?
“The economy is not some numinous entity that exists outside human activity; it is the name we give to transactions among people aimed at maximising their wealth, health and happiness.”
If businesses – excluding those deemed likely to accelerate infections, such as nightclubs – were permitted to reopen next week, “we might yet escape the worst”, he asserted.
However, he added: “If the prohibitions remain in force into May, businesses will topple like dominoes, and a decade of depression will ensue.”
And so it came to pass.
To be continued next week.
In 2020, millions of Britons stood outside their houses at 8 p.m. on Thursday nights, prompted by television adverts, to applaud the NHS.
Here’s then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock on the first Thursday of the embarrassing two-minute applause sessions on March 26, 2020:
Two years later, on April 27, 2022, The Spectator‘s Tim Knox reported that public opinion of the nation’s best loved institution has fallen to a 25-year low (emphases mine):
While MPs compete to shout the loudest in their support of the UK’s health services (‘save our NHS!’), the British public has fallen out of love with it. More people are now dissatisfied with the NHS than are happy with it. This is true across all ages, income groups, sexes and voters of different political parties. Support for the NHS is now at the lowest level for a quarter of a century.
The public is right, the NHS is just not that good. Compare it, as I have done in a new report published today, with the health systems of 19 similarly well-off countries and it is hard to come to any other conclusion. UK life expectancy is down at 17 out of these 19 comparable nations. Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality. The only thing we top the charts on is helping diabetics avoid amputation. Sadly, despite the great efforts of NHS staff, our health system does not match the success rates of other nations: we come bottom of the league tables four times – more than any other country – and are in the bottom three for eight out of the 16 measures.
Tim Knox advocates for an insurance model. No, thanks. It is apparent that Knox has never lived under an insurance model. I have. Premiums and inefficiencies would only rise in the years to come.
Here’s a better idea for the NHS: root and branch reform.
The problem is that most NHS workers are unionised, so they can go on strike. Another is that they are trained to be part of an inefficient health delivery system, which would have been much better had it stuck to the basics as it did when it was founded, e.g. emergency care, broken limbs, heart problems and cancer treatment.
This tweet comes from a former NHS nurse who has since become a barrister. Her tweet from April 11, 2020, which disapproved of the applause during the pandemic, attracted many insightful replies:
The same day that Tim Knox’s article appeared — April 27, 2022 — The Spectator‘s Isabel Hardman wrote about the High Court ruling on what happened in care homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
Before going into that, Hardman raises a good point about the NHS and why the new levy on National Insurance will not help care homes. No, it won’t initially. My understanding from parliamentary debates is that the first two years’ of proceeds from the levy will be going to the NHS instead:
The phrase ‘protect the NHS’ was a powerful one in the public health messaging in the pandemic. It was also a description of where the focus lay in government. The health service was the priority, not the care homes these patients went into. There are lots of reasons for this, but one is clearly a political calculation that the NHS matters to the public in a way care of the elderly does not. That is why successive governments have been able to shirk proper social care reform. That includes this government, by the way, as its levy does nothing to improve the quantity or quality of care …
It is debatable that the NHS itself was really protected throughout the pandemic.
So, our lockdowns were all for nought.
Last month’s High Court ruling implicated former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and the erstwhile Public Health England, so it is rather useless in order for any action to be taken against either. Why did it take two years for this ruling to be made?
That said, it could come in handy for any public inquiry into how the UK Government managed the pandemic.
Hancock denies that he said that the Government was putting ‘a protective ring’ around care homes, but I watched or listened to every one of the coronavirus briefings as well as his statements in Parliament. He did use those very words, time and time again.
This is what Hardman had to say about the High Court case regarding care homes during the pandemic in 2020:
The High Court’s ruling today that the government broke the law on the discharge of patients to care homes in the early days of the pandemic further undermines the claim by the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock that ministers had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around the sector.
The case was brought by two relatives, Cathy Gardner and Fay Harris, of care home residents who died after testing positive for Covid. Their argument was that six policies in place at the start of the pandemic represented ‘one of the most egregious and devastating policy failures in the modern era‘. The fathers of Gardner and Harris were among the 20,000 people in care homes who died after testing positive between March and June 2020. The pair argued that one of the worst failures was the mass discharge of 25,000 patients from hospital to care homes without Covid testing or proper isolation arrangements in place, meaning the virus rampaged among vulnerable and frail populations. They also cited poor – and initially non-existent – advice on PPE which made it even harder to protect the residents of the homes.
The discharge policy is something politicians and NHS figures have been squabbling over for some time, despite Hancock’s ‘protective ring’ line. Was it conceived in Whitehall or in the NHS itself? The rationale behind it was that it would free up beds in hospitals ahead of the anticipated wave of Covid patients. But because some of those being discharged from hospital had Covid themselves, this led to a wave within care homes: a deadly one.
The UK was far from the only country that experienced problems in hospitals and care homes during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Even Swedish officials were sorry for what happened in their care homes at that time.
Something must be done, not only about the NHS but also care homes, the Cinderella of health care.
However, who in Government will take on the nation’s favourite institution? No one.
The cost of coronavirus in England has been immense.
There is no end in sight for some restrictions and, as I wrote earlier in the week, there will be no Freedom Day on July 19, except for theatres and nightclubs.
London
On July 15, The Telegraph‘s Tanya Gold wrote about London’s ongoing ghost town appearance (emphases mine):
It is too early to say that London is dying, but something is wrong with the city and Covid has accelerated it. Certainly, there is a sense that things are slipping out of control …
I was in central London last week, and it felt ever more ominous. Perhaps it was the weather – again, the rain was monstrous. Or perhaps it was the silence: the department stores in Oxford Street were glassy and empty …
What will happen if offices shutter forever, and most people work from home? This will work for the affluent with spare rooms for offices, and gardens; or they might just leave for Amersham and its Britain in Bloom awards stacked on posts. For those renting in inner cities, it won’t; employers will pass a business expense onto an employee, one whose home is already small.
Will central London’s beautiful buildings become flats? John Lewis [a nationwide department store chain] is moving into housing. Will anyone want to live in them if the city declines?
Restaurants
On the topic of London, Mark Hix, one of Britain’s best chefs, has had to close his two restaurants in the capital.
He has moved back to Dorset and opened a restaurant there.
Hix Soho in Brewer Street is now a taqueria and Tramshed, his old 150-cover restaurant in Shoreditch (East London), will become a furniture showroom.
He wrote about the two establishments for The Telegraph.
The owners of the El Pastor taqueria invited him to visit, which he did:
My strongest feeling was not one of regret, or even missing the time when this place was my flagship, but rather of pleasure at seeing it busy and buzzy again. It has a new lease of life. And therefore I wished them well, especially with the landlord, the same greedy one who had doubled the rent when I was the tenant and began the collapse of my London chain of restaurants because we just couldn’t make any money at the rate he was charging.
We have all learnt some important life lessons these past 16 months of Covid. Perhaps the landlord has too in the new business climate it has produced. Most of all, though, what that walk down memory lane did was give me courage.
As for the Tramshed:
I’ve got a date in my diary to go back to the kitchen at the Tramshed, my old 150-cover restaurant in Shoreditch. It is going to be less return in triumph and more fond farewell, for my presence there is, as the theatre posters put it, ‘for one night only’. The guys who have been running it since my business went into administration are moving out and are staging one last hurrah with my help.
Lockdown has killed the place off and it is going to be converted into a furniture showroom of some description. When I took it on in 2012, this handsome building had been used for chemical storage, so I suppose it is a case of back to the future. Which rather neatly sums up my life story since I handed back the keys in March of last year after breaking the news to the staff there that they had lost their jobs.
He foresees a difficult return for hospitality:
I’ve come back to Dorset, where it all started, and am now building a new future. All being well, on Monday we will be taking one more step towards that with the lifting of all Government restrictions on how we trade, but the hard work of repairing the damage done by Covid has only just begun. The road back to prosperity for the whole hospitality industry remains a long one.
As I write, Hix is taking a brief fishing break in Iceland, a country on the Green list.
However, a question remains over whether he and other restaurant owners will be able to trade freely on Monday with the lifting of restrictions.
Hospitality chiefs are still trying to interpret what Boris Johnson said on Monday, which sounded to me like a U-turn on what he said on July 5. The Times says that masks and outdoor service are still recommended, as is checking customers in with contact details. That is what is in place today.
Furthermore, coronavirus passports, which the Government had previously denied would be recommended, are, in fact, on the table.
On Wednesday, July 14, The Telegraph reported:
Ministers on Wednesday published delayed sectoral advice for businesses on how to operate when the country moves to step four of the Prime Minister’s roadmap out of lockdown next Monday …
The Government was accused of widening the net of companies encouraged to use domestic coronavirus passports, after Boris Johnson initially signalled on Monday that they would be recommended for nightclubs and venues with “large crowds”.
The Prime Minister said relevant firms should show “social responsibility” and “make use” of the NHS Covid pass app, which shows proof of double vaccination, a recent negative test or natural immunity, as “a means of entry”.
The updated guidance sparked a backlash among Conservative MP and hospitality chiefs, after advice specifically for restaurants, pubs, bars, nightclubs and takeaway services encouraged the use of Covid passports.
It stated: “Consider the use of the NHS Covid pass to reduce the risk of transmission at your venue or event.”
So far, only Steve Baker MP (Con) has spoken out against this recommendation:
I am simply astonished that after everything the Prime Minister and Michael Gove said in the past about ID cards that they are advancing this fast down this really quite appalling path.
Kate Nicholls, the head of the industry body UK Hospitality, expressed her disappointment and said:
the guidance for pubs and restaurants was “disappointing” in the wake of a select committee of MPs and a Cabinet Office consultation “acknowledging that this was a very difficult thing to implement in a domestic hospitality setting”.
She said ministers needed to provide a “whole suite of guidance” to explain how Covid passports should work in the sector “for us to decide whether we are willing to adopt this on a voluntary basis”.
Predicting few businesses would adopt the measure by Monday, from which date the guidance is meant to apply, she said: “I don’t think anybody would be able to introduce this on a voluntary basis from Monday until we have clarification.”
Ms Nicholls added that “more work is needed by the Government” and warned that there were “real concerns” around equalities legislation, and “practical issues” around the type of testing that qualifies and how businesses should handle customers’ personal health data.
This is an unfortunate development.
Transport
Still on the subject of London, the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan (Lab), a strong opponent of his predecessor Boris Johnson, intends to continue with mask mandates on Transport for London (TfL) vehicles and the Tube as a condition of carriage.
Douglas Murray wrote an editorial for The Telegraph in which he says:
Sadiq Khan, for instance, has tried to look super responsible by insisting that even after the rules for mask-wearing are relaxed masks will be compulsory on public transport in London. Obviously, throughout the pandemic, there have been the rules and there has been what people do. I have seen plenty of people get on the bus with their mask on and then pull it under their chin as soon as they are in their seat. We have become used to the theatre of masks.
But the Mayor of London has ordered Transport for London to enforce mask wearing after July 19, making the prospect of a journey on the London Underground even more enjoyable. Citizens of the capital not only have to pay the highest fares of any commuters in the world for one of the world’s worst services, but must now mask up under threat of the London Transport Police if they do not. What a wonderful way to get the capital moving again.
Agreed. It makes no sense, and Khan has complained for months that TfL’s finances have been dire since lockdown started last year. It’s pure political theatre just to oppose Boris Johnson’s government.
Office work
On July 5, the Government encouraged office workers to go back to their workplaces.
This Monday, they backtracked because they got complaints in the media.
The Times has an article about the travel company Tui, which has told its employees they only need to come into the office one day a month, regardless of what happens on July 19.
Other companies have followed suit. However, in the United States, fully-vaccinated employees are expected to be back at their desks by September:
Other businesses adjusting their working practices include KPMG, the accountancy firm, which has told its 16,000 UK staff they should work in the office for up to four days a fortnight. In the US, by way of contrast, Bank of America yesterday followed Goldman Sachs in telling all fully-vaccinated staff to be back at their desks by September.
The policy director of the Institute of Directors says that the Government’s advice this month has been confusing:
Roger Barker, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “Like everybody else, businesses across the country having been awaiting ‘freedom day’ with bated breath — but we have had a series of mixed messages and patchwork requirements from government that have dampened enthusiasm.
“Return to work or continue to stay at home. Throw away your masks or continue to wear them. The guidance has done little to dispel that confusion.
“Business leaders are understandably confused as to the legal status that this guidance has and are concerned about vulnerability under health and safety legislation, as well as the validity of their insurance.
“Government needs to inspire confidence in businesses and the workforce that we can all return to work safely.”
School
We have little idea of exactly how much school-age children have been suffering over the past year.
One mother and her ex-husband saw how their daughter’s scholastic performance had been declining and put her in an independent school, with financial help from both sets of grandparents.
The mother, Mel Sims, told The Telegraph her story, beginning in the Spring of 2020:
My daughter was in Year 5 when the first lockdown brought her education to an abrupt halt. A bright only child, mature for her age because she spends so much time with adults, she’d been doing very well in the classroom. But then the state primary she attends in our village in Essex closed its doors to all but key worker children. I’m a 49-year-old single mother. My daughter’s father lives in Durham. I had no choice but to become her full-time teacher.
While some of her friends in private or religious schools were receiving a whole day of live Zoom teaching, my daughter’s school was very disappointing. What they did provide was an email every Monday morning, packed with multiple different lessons for parents to print off, somehow quickly get their heads around, then teach to our children as best we could.
My business – a children’s play centre – shut down along with the schools, so I was at home. I found myself teaching my daughter from 9.30am until 4.30pm every day. Other than the weekly email, we received no contact from the school, which, like many, lacks funding and has class sizes of 30-plus. My daughter’s after-school club, where she mixed with older children, was closed. Extracurricular dance classes went on hold and the swimming pool was shut.
Since Covid, my daughter has received very little or no homework as the teachers seem to feel the children already have enough on their plates. I don’t know what happened to her foreign language lessons. My previously high-achieving daughter was starting to fall behind the level she had been at before – not just a little, but dramatically. By the end of each week of lockdown, her maths and English were worse. She’d lost interest in doing better; any desire to excel. It was heartbreaking to see her sliding backwards.
This caused tension between the mother and the school:
Friction began to develop between us and the school, as they resented me trying to push her beyond the slow pace at which her class was moving. Many of the families in our village didn’t even have enough computers for their multiple children. My daughter’s academic success was riding on all the other local parents’ capabilities, and that felt deeply unfair on her.
Schools reopened last autumn then shut down at the end of January 4, 2021 for several weeks. By then, the cumulative negative effect had kicked in:
When the second lockdown arrived, my daughter was in Year 6 [the year before secondary school]. This time, there was at least a school registration every day, which took place over Zoom. But my daughter gained little from it, as everyone on the call was at such different levels both academically and behaviourally. There wasn’t the opportunity for much academic input from the teacher and my daughter quickly grew bored.
Fortunately, the girl had passed her 11-plus exams, which opened up more education opportunities. Her parents decided that she would have to go to an independent day school, but, even pooling their savings together, they could not afford school fees of £5,500 per term. With the help of the girl’s grandparents, they are able to meet the cost of the new school.
Mel Sims concludes:
We’ll all be making big changes. But we’ll do so in order that, if schools do close again, our daughter’s education will not grind to a halt. The new school staff have already assured me that if we go back into lockdown, exactly the same learning will continue over Zoom, full-time and unaided by parents.
I never thought it would come to this. Pre-pandemic, I’d always believed we didn’t need private school; that whatever happened at state school, we could get our daughter through.
School closures have changed all that. Yes, we’re paying a price. But I feel we’ve had to invest in a lockdown-proof education. With so many children off school again even now, as their “bubbles” have burst, it seems we have made the right decision.
Care homes
Recently, Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare, a group which runs 45 private care homes in England and one in Wales, wrote to Sajid Javid, the Secretary of State for the Department for Health and Social Care to ask that mask mandates be relaxed.
On Thursday, July 15, The Telegraph reported that:
some of these measures are now damaging the well-being of care home residents.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is expected to issue updated guidance on care homes, and whether or not masks will be mandatory in them, later this week …
“For many residents, a visit from their family member has provided invaluable improvements to their well-being, but the requirement for these visitors to wear a face mask degrades the level of connection and therefore devalues the positive impacts their visits can have.
“This restrictive policy, along with various others from both the DHSC and PHE [Public Health England], should be reconsidered as we approach this next step in England’s roadmap out of lockdown.”
The letter said the success of the vaccination programme among care home staff and residents meant the majority of homes “are now set to confidently return back to an enhanced degree of normality”.
All 46 Sunrise and Gracewell homes have at least 90 per cent of residents vaccinated and all but one have more than 80 per cent of staff jabbed. This is the threshold that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) says needs to be met in each setting to provide a minimum level of protection against Covid outbreaks.
Helen Whately MP (Con) oversees social care provision. It is unclear as yet whether she will change any requirements for July 19. The Telegraph quoted her as saying:
I’m also really aware that there will be circumstances I’m expecting to continue in health and social care, clearly, where people will need to continue to wear PPE [personal protective equipment], which includes masks.
Conclusion
I find it concerning that the Left, whether in Parliament, SAGE and elsewhere have caused the Government to backtrack on Freedom Day.
As Douglas Murray says in his aforementioned article:
It is inevitable, perhaps, that politicians like Khan want to score some political points. But again what is so strange is that all the points are scored from that side. Putting aside a few MPs on the Tory benches there is no political pressure on us to go the other way. To do so – to advocate the path of greater risk and greater freedom – is still presented as though it is somehow irresponsible or otherwise risky.
But society is risky. Life is risky. The biggest leap towards normal life has already been taken. It is the success of the mass vaccination programme which this country has rolled out so well. But after that we do not need politicians and private companies policing us ever more. We need to take a different leap. Not into greater safety, but into greater freedom. Our allies and competitors are up for that. The question now is whether Britain is. An awful lot rides on the answer.
I couldn’t agree more.
Churchmouse Campanologist 