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Yesterday’s post on The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series focused on top civil servant Simon Case and how Government ministers and advisers brought about the first lockdown in 2020 after pressure from the media.
Today’s post looks at The Telegraph‘s revelations about the then-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock.
He had a deep hunger for absolute control and brooked little opposition.
Grudge against NHS chief Simon Stevens
It is unclear exactly why Hancock bore a grudge against Simon Stevens, who headed the NHS at the time of pandemic and resigned in 2021. Stevens was later elevated to the Lords.
On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘Matt Hancock’s campaign to remove NHS chief revealed’ (emphases mine):
Ministers tried to remove the head of the NHS just five days after the first Covid-19 case was detected in the UK.
The Lockdown Files reveal the animosity shown towards Lord Stevens of Birmingham, the chief executive of NHS England.
Six months into the pandemic, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, declared “removing SS [Simon Stevens] will be a massive improvement”.
On another occasion, Mr Hancock was so visibly angered by the NHS chief that his own advisers warned him: “Simon needs a kick… don’t make yourself look bad in the process”.
The messages between ministers and officials disclose the lack of regard both in Downing Street and the Department of Health for Lord Stevens, despite widespread praise of his stewardship of the NHS for seven years.
The private messages also appear at odds with the Government’s support for the NHS during Covid, while belittling its boss behind the scenes.
Lord Stevens finally retired from the post in July 2021 and was made a life peer in recognition of his services to the NHS.
But the messages reveal that Mr Hancock and Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, were conspiring to get rid of him for at least 18 months before he finally stepped down.
Nine days after Chinese authorities first shared the genetic sequence of Covid-19, Mr Hancock messaged Mr Cummings explaining he was approaching Lord Ara Darzi, an eminent professor of surgery, to “persuade” Lord Stevens to quit.
The article has screenshots of various WhatsApp conversations, excerpted below.
On February 3, 2020, Dominic Cummings was eager for Stevens to leave and messaged Hancock:
We must get on with it now. Announce next week as part of reshuffle frenzy and it will all get lost in that
Cummings was out of luck. It did not happen.
In the early weeks of the pandemic in April 2020, Hancock seemed to be overly exercised by Stevens:
Mr Hancock criticised Lord Stevens in a Downing Street meeting, during which he was so visibly angered that his special adviser Allan Nixon remarked by WhatsApp: “You look like you’re losing grip in front of No 10 by having a go at Simon like that. Simon needs a kick but don’t make yourself look bad in the process.”
Mr Hancock responded: “It’s ok – he needs to know he is massively f——g up. And I’ll tell the room what happened once the video is off.”
Mr Nixon replied: “Ok but be aware from afar it looks like you’re cracking under pressure.”
The article states:
It’s unclear precisely why Lord Stevens irritated Mr Hancock so much, but when he quit, NHS sources said his successor was likely to be someone “less outspoken and less willing to challenge Government”.
Lord Stevens had clashed with successive Tory administrations over NHS funding, and The Lockdown Files also show clashes over tackling the virus and the rolling out of the vaccines.
Dentistry became an issue in May 2020:
Mr Hancock was again furious with Lord Stevens, this time over the NHS chief executive’s issuing of guidance allowing dentists to reopen in June. Mr Johnson complained he had not been aware of the guidance being changed.
Boris WhatsApped Hancock:
I told Simon Stevens he should have warned us and he grovelled
Hancock replied:
I hit the roof with him. Unbelievable. Have you read the letter I’ve sent about the future of the NHS? We need to get cracking…
Their disagreement continued:
The files also contain text messages between Mr Hancock and Lord Stevens, in which they argue over whether the NHS chief executive had permission to make the announcement on dentists reopening, which the Government had wanted held back for its televised press conference.
In August, Hancock sent a message to Cummings about possible new legislation which would give government ministers more control over the NHS. It ended with this:
Removing SS will be a massive improvement — but we still need a Bill to do it properly.
In December 2020, Hancock and Stevens disagreed about the vaccine rollout:
Lord Stevens was angered in December 2020 about a claim being briefed to the media that millions of people were due to receive the jab by Christmas.
On December 13, he WhatsApped Hancock and a group of senior health officials and advisers:
There is no version of reality whereby “several million people will receive the vaccine before Christmas” so whoever briefed that might want to urgently undertake some course correction before that inevitably becomes clear
When Stevens announced his resignation in 2021, public pronouncements differed considerably from private conversations:
Even after Lord Stevens announced that he was stepping down, Mr Hancock continued to be irked by him.
The three health secretaries he had served alongside – Mr Hancock, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid – had jointly signed a letter praising Lord Stevens.
The letter included a statement saying his “tireless efforts to improve patient safety, and secure access to innovative medicines like Orkambi, have had a huge impact on the lives of so many”.
But after he was shown the letter, Mr Hancock – who had by then been forced to resign over an affair in his office – asked for the reference to the drug Orkambi to be removed.
The NHS uses Orkambi in treating cystic fibrosis.
Hancock complained in a message to his Spad (special adviser) Allan Nixon. Nixon asked what he should say to Sajid Javid, Hancock’s successor at Health and Social Care.
Hancock replied:
Because it was really you and me
He did make the move on opening up to more meds, but only did this one with huge arm twisting
How petty.
Hancock chose to save reputation over cutting quarantine
This was The Telegraph‘s front page on Monday, March 6, 2023:
He did not want to cut self-isolation time because it would:
imply we’ve been getting it wrong.
Clearly they had got it wrong.
Doesn’t admitting a mistake show the measure of a person or an organisation, including a government? Personally, I respect that.
It would have been easy enough to rationalise, too. Hancock could have said that medical experts now know more about the virus, which the data from Test and Trace supported.
But no.
Hancock was too weak — and power-hungry — a man to admit a mistake.
Excerpts follow from that day’s lead article, ‘The leaked messages that reveal how Matt Hancock chose saving face over cutting Covid quarantine’, which concerns England:
At points during the pandemic, more than 600,000 people a week who had been in close proximity to a Covid case were told to quarantine for 10 days.
In total, the policy resulted in more than 20 million people – a third of the entire population – being told to self-isolate, regardless of whether they had symptoms.
Now, WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show that a proposal to replace that with five days of testing had been discussed as early as November 2020 – but was not put in place.
The Lockdown Files show that Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, was told by England’s Chief Medical Officer [Chris Whitty] that they could change the policy in “favour of testing for 5 days in lieu of isolation”. At that stage, the self-isolation period was 14 days.
But instead of taking Prof Sir Chris Whitty’s advice, Mr Hancock rejected the idea – fearing that it would “imply we’d been getting it wrong”.
Switching to a five-day testing regime would have transformed the way the country was able to operate during the pandemic.
A month after Sir Chris gave his advice, isolation was reduced to 10 days – a length which continued to wreak havoc on businesses and services.
Having heard every coronavirus briefing, I suspected this all along. It is good to see confirmation of it now.
Things got worse in 2021 with the ‘pingdemic’. You couldn’t make this up:
By the summer of 2021, so many people were sent automated “pings” by the NHS Test and Trace app telling them to stay at home that restaurants and other businesses were forced to close through lack of staff.
The app proved to be so sensitive that neighbours were being pinged through walls, causing large numbers of people to delete the app in frustration. The Government ended up having to exempt some key workers from self-isolating to prevent the NHS and critical food supply chains from collapsing.
Some relief came in August that year:
those who were under the age of 18 years and six months and those who were fully vaccinated no longer had to isolate if they were a close contact.
Self-isolation policies lasted nearly two years:
… it took until Feb 2022 for self-isolation guidance for contacts of positive Covid cases to be scrapped altogether, by which time NHS Test and Trace had cost the taxpayer around £26 billion.
Discriminatory quarantine exemptions proposed
In August 2020, a 14-day quarantine period was in place for Covid case contacts and travellers returning to the UK from abroad:
The policy caused havoc for holidaymakers and split up families for months, with most people unable to take an extra fortnight off work to quarantine on return.
On Aug 5, messages from the then health secretary to the “MH Top Team” WhatsApp group appear primarily concerned with the self-isolation restrictions placed on people returning to the UK from abroad, rather than those on close contacts of people infected with the virus. The group included his aides and officials from his private office.
Mr Hancock asked: “Where are we up to on test & release and also high net worth quarantine exemptions?”
Replying to this point, a senior civil servant said: “On test and release expecting update today – on high net worth BEIS [Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] lead but we’ve asked for it.”
When Mr Hancock returned to the issue two weeks later, this time he asked only about the policy that applied to “high net worth” business people …
At this point Emma Dean, one of his aides, interjected to ask Mr Hancock to “clear” a quote on Leicester, which was only just being released from lockdown because of higher rates of the virus in the area …
Having approved the statement, Mr Hancock returned to the issue at hand – lifting travel restrictions for “high net worth individuals”. The former health secretary appeared surprised to hear that the policy had not been given the green light by the business department …
Ms Dean’s concern that there might be a “comms risk” associated with the policy to release only wealthy business travellers from self-isolation proved to be correct.
When news leaked in November 2020 that the Government planned to exempt City dealmakers, hedge fund managers and company bosses flying to the UK from the 14-day quarantine rule, the public was furious …
… on Nov 17 2020, Mr Hancock did receive some scientific advice in favour of loosening restrictions on self-isolation for people contacted by NHS Test and Trace.
Mr Hancock, however, was worried about how the move would play out with the public.
I wonder. By then, he was clearly enjoying his control over the public.
On a related topic, another Telegraph article, ‘Ministers feared “racist” label if they spoke about Covid spread’, discusses the problem with locking down cities such as Leicester and some in the north of England. To make it look more equitable, nearby areas with low rates of infection were also locked down, which brought complaints from several MPs. The Government also worried about getting their messages across to areas with high minority populations.
Pingdemic ‘crippled’ economy
Also in March 6’s Telegraph was an article by one of their business columnists, Matthew Lynn: ‘Hancock’s overzealous “pingdemic” crippled Britain’s economy — and we’re still paying the price’.
Hancock was not alone in developing policy, however, his was the face we saw most often, whether on television or at the despatch box. He had a huge role to play in the parlous state of the economy during and after the pandemic:
It was, for several months at least, the most dreaded sound in any factory, warehouse, shop or cafe. Ping. The NHS app notifying a colleague they had been in contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19. In a flash, workers would depart, and schedules would have to be hastily re-organised.
For months, businesses were barely able to operate normally, output collapsed, and a culture of absenteeism was created that the UK is still struggling with three years later.
And yet, it now appears the isolation rules were for some time far stricter than they needed to be. The “pingdemic” may have been unnecessary – and so too the damage to businesses that it caused …
In November 2020, during the second lockdown, the Chief Medical Officer advised first that 14 days of isolation was only marginally safer than 10 days, and that even that could be replaced with five days of daily testing. It was rejected by Matt Hancock, the then health secretary.
In fairness, tweaks to the rules were made. In mid-December 2020, the 14-day rule was cut to 10. Then in August 2021, after the ‘pingdemic’ reached its height, the isolation rule was lifted if you were under 18 or fully vaccinated.
However, the important point is this: for a long stretch of 2021 we may not have needed such rigid isolation rules for contacts of those with Covid.
And yet at that time, it was already clear to everyone that isolation was having a devastating impact on the economy. It was hard enough for anyone to operate any kind of a business during the chaos of lockdown, with its bewildering mess of constantly changing rules on what you could and couldn’t sell, to whom, and under what conditions.
To make a bad situation even worse, however, the pingdemic meant any kind of commercial operation was constantly crippled by staff shortages.
Looking back at the news stories from the time, businesses were pleading for something to be done …
… very big companies could shift staff around so that at least their most crucial operations could continue.
Yet small companies didn’t have that option, and with 20 per cent or more of their employees pinged, they often had no choice but to close down completely.
Isolation hit the productive heartlands of the economy – manufacturing, construction and distribution – hardest of all. And the smaller the business, the more it suffered …
First, the UK lost a huge amount of output. The near 10 per cent drop in GDP during the pandemic was the worst in British economic history.
… even if it was only a couple of percentage points that could have been saved, that would have made a huge difference to the final cost of Covid-19.
Next, it created a culture of absenteeism. If you wanted to take a few days off work, there was never an easier time. Simply report that you had been pinged and few questions would ever be asked.
That has carried on, even after the virus has disappeared. The Office for National Statistics reports that days off for sickness are running at the highest level for more than a decade, while a more recent survey by Fruitful Research found a 29 per cent increase in absenteeism since the pandemic ended.
The UK already had a dreadful record on productivity, but the pandemic made it a whole lot worse.
Finally, we have been left with a legacy of debt. Companies had to borrow money or dip into their reserves to cope with closures, while the Government was forced to borrow far more to deal with higher costs on the back of lower tax revenues. It will take generations to pay all that back.
… We could have cut the time much earlier than we did and saved the economy a huge amount of pain.
I couldn’t agree more.
I have been writing about the pandemic for three years now. You can read every entry on my Marxism/Communism page under Coronavirus. With each new post on the subject, I experience the same thoughts and emotions about how much the policies devised to notionally combat this virus caused havoc not only in the UK, but also other Western nations.
I will have more on Matt Hancock tomorrow. Some will wonder how much more there is to write about him. There is still more, so much more.
The Telegraph stopped publishing their Lockdown Files series earlier this month.
However, I still have quite a few bookmarks to get through from the series.
Simon Case: ‘Mr Killjoy’
On March 10, I left off with the top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, rumoured to be considering his career options, more about which below:
Guido Fawkes points out that Case strangely never got a fine (fixed penalty notice) for No. 10 get-togethers during lockdown, even though a Prime Minister (Boris) and a Chancellor (Rishi) did:
On March 7, 2023, The Telegraph reported that, in 2020, Case called himself ‘Mr Killjoy’ (emphases mine below):
Britain’s most senior civil servant said he was “Mr Killjoy” in meetings with “bouncing Boris J” because the former prime minister was too optimistic about the economy during the Covid pandemic.
Simon Case, hired by Mr Johnson from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s office to work on the pandemic, was later promoted to Cabinet Secretary and remains in post serving Rishi Sunak.
WhatsApp messages leaked to The Telegraph and published in The Lockdown Files investigation show him complaining about Mr Johnson in June 2020.
In a morning conversation with Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, Mr Case said a strategy meeting later that day would be “even more all over the shop than usual” …
The Telegraph has screenshots of Case’s WhatsApp exchanges with Hancock. Case wrote:
We got stuck with PM enthusing about how there were great opportunities ahead for the UK economy …
He ended the message with a forehead slap emoji.
Hancock responded:
He’s right. There are. Did you mention there are also some challenges?
Case replied:
Yes — I am becoming Mr Killjoy in meetings with Bouncing Boris J
The article then discusses Case in the present. The Lockdown Files have not done him any favours:
… he has served three prime ministers during his time in office, having occupied the role in September 2020 under Mr Johnson and throughout Liz Truss’s tenure in Downing Street.
In recent days, he is understood to have been privately criticised by senior civil servants, including the permanent secretaries of a number of government departments.
“The general feeling among perm secs is that his leadership has been relatively weak. Lots of perm secs will tell you that attacks on the Civil Service have increased in the last few years,” a senior Whitehall source told The Telegraph.
“His instinct is more to tuck away and get things done through other routes and back channels rather than stick his head above the parapet. All of that feeds into that criticism of Simon where some have described him as being a bit spineless.”
Sources close to Mr Case suggested he was considering resigning and expected him to pursue a new career in academia.
“I think that when he joined the Civil Service in 2006, it was that or academia,” said one friend. “I think that the academic world is something he makes no bones about, that he’s always admired. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did embrace an academic career once he retires.”
Another source said Mr Case would be unlikely to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and take a peerage, adding: “I just don’t see the Lords as something he’d be interested in. I think an academic route would be a much more attractive option.”
Mr Case’s allies in Government were fighting back on Tuesday, insisting he had no intention of resigning and was pushing ahead with plans. The Cabinet Secretary is scheduled to be in York this Friday, meeting civil servants, and in Glasgow next week, with a speech engagement at a Civil Service conference due in July.
A senior Cabinet Office source told The Telegraph: “He is not about to resign this week, next week, or any time soon. He is cracking on with the job.”
It is understood Mr Case had conversations with some of Mr Sunak’s senior advisers in the wake of the revelations in The Lockdown Files and was assured over his position.
On that subject, another Telegraph article appeared that day, ‘Rishi Sunak refuses to say Simon Case should stay in post after WhatsApp backlash’:
Rishi Sunak has refused three times to say he has confidence that Simon Case will remain the Cabinet Secretary until the next election, amid a growing backlash to his pandemic-era WhatsApp messages.
The Prime Minister was on Tuesday night asked to comment on speculation that Britain’s most senior civil servant was preparing to stand down, but initially said only that he “continues to support the government’s agenda,” including on small boat crossings.
It came as Labour sources said Sir Keir Starmer would sack Mr Case if he w[ere] to win the next election and The Telegraph revealed new WhatsApp messages in which he criticised “bouncing Boris” Johnson for being too optimistic about the economy during the pandemic.
The 44-year-old mandarin has been accused of “naivety” after a tranche of messages obtained by this newspaper showed he mocked people forced to quarantine in hotels during the pandemic and described Mr Sunak as “bonkers” …
Asked for a third time about the controversy in a press conference on Tuesday, Mr Sunak said he looked forward to working with Mr Case “for a very long time to come” but declined to say whether he thought he would still be in post by the next election.
Cabinet Secretaries typically remain in post in the period before and after a general election to oversee the transition between administrations, leading to speculation in Whitehall that this is a “natural moment for him to do it” …
A spokesman for Sir Keir denied that he had already decided to sack Mr Case if Labour wins the next election.
In a briefing with reporters and press conference on Tuesday Mr Sunak was asked three times whether he believed Mr Case would remain in post and refused to address the issue directly, claiming he had “hadn’t actually seen any of the messages”.
Cabinet Office sources pointed to the end of his third answer, where he praised Mr Case’s record in government, adding: “I’m very grateful to him for that and I look forward to working with him for a very long time to come, quite frankly.”
The lockdown sex ban
The Lockdown Files also told us how the ban on sex was arrived at during the first lockdown in the Spring of 2020:
Professor Sir Chris Whitty [Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at the time] warned against imposing the lockdown “sex ban” because the public was not “likely to listen” to an order not to see their partners, The Telegraph can disclose.
England’s Chief Medical Officer said the Government should use a “bit of realism” and stop short of an outright ban, instead encouraging couples not living together to avoid contact “if they can”, leaked WhatsApp messages show.
Sir Chris’s warning came on March 24 2020 – the day after Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, gave the first order that the public should “stay at home” and avoid contact with people living in other households.
For couples living separately, it became an effective sex ban because the public was not allowed to meet up in houses that were not their own …
James Slack, then Mr Johnson’s official spokesman, asked Sir Chris and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, whether couples could see each other and warned that the Government could be entering “choppy waters” by separating them.
“Sorry for this, but the biggest Q of the day for our finest political journalists is: can I see my boyfriend or girlfriend if we don’t live in the same household?” he asked a group WhatsApp conversation containing the two men, Downing Street officials, Mr Johnson and Matt Hancock, the then health secretary.
Sir Patrick replied that the “aim is to break contacts between households so the strict answer is that they shouldn’t meet or should bunker down in the same house. But Chris can give the official CMO love advice”.
But Sir Chris said the rules should be relaxed to encourage public compliance.
“I think a bit of realism will be needed,” he said.
“If it’s a regular partner I don’t think people are likely to listen to advice not to see them for 3 weeks or maybe more.
“We could say; if they can avoid seeing one another they should, and if either of them has an older or vulnerable person in the house they must.”
But in a press conference later that day, Dr Jenny Harries, Sir Chris’s deputy, and Mr Hancock said couples should either decide to move in together or remain apart for the duration of lockdown.
“If the two halves of a couple are currently in separate households, ideally they should stay in separate households,” said Dr Harries.
“The alternative might be that, for quite a significant period going forwards, they should test the strength of their relationship and decide whether one wishes to be permanently resident in another household.”
Mr Hancock added: “There you go. Make your choice and stick with it.”
The most high-profile breach of the guidance on couples living separately was by Prof Neil Ferguson, a scientist on the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
He resigned from his post after The Telegraph revealed he had invited his married lover to his home on at least two occasions.
He was reinstated several months later.
The article continues:
The guidance for non-cohabiting couples remained in place for two months, until June 1, when it was strengthened with legislation that meant that anyone breaching them could be prosecuted.
The legal rules banned gatherings of two or more people from different households indoors, although couples were free to meet outside.
The rule became known colloquially as the Government’s “sex ban” …
The ban was lifted for some couples in England on June 13, 11 weeks after it was first imposed, when the Government introduced “support bubbles” to alleviate loneliness and isolation.
The new rules allowed people living alone to “bubble” with another household and stay overnight.
How lockdown became a reality
Never mind the sex ban, ‘The messages that reveal how Britain was plunged into lockdown’ is much more intriguing.
In January 2020, Boris was Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority, and we were in our transition year of fully leaving the EU with remaining negotiations underway. For conservative Britons, the world looked bright.
However, a few weeks before, on December 30, China issued a public health alert after a cluster of patients in Wuhan province had respiratory problems.
Here in the UK:
… ministers and officials were discussing the possibility of the outbreak spreading to Europe and possibly the UK.
As the weeks passed, there was mounting frustration over Downing Street’s reluctance to engage. Number 10 was buoyed by the UK’s recent departure from the EU and did not want Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, making gloomy proclamations about diseases.
On January 23, exactly two months before Boris announced lockdown:
Gina Coladangelo, Mr Hancock’s aide and now his partner … was part of a group chat involving the then health secretary and his special advisers …
She WhatsApped a link to a Daily Mail story about passengers arriving at Heathrow receiving advice to ring the NHS 111 number if they got ill. She asked:
I am assuming PHE [Public Health England] have this already under control…??
Emma Dean, a Spad (special adviser) in the Department of Health replied:
Completely.
That day, a civil servant messaged Hancock’s media Spad Jamie Njoku-Goodwin:
Should I be worried? About this virus
Njoku-Goodwin quipped:
You might want to cancel you [sic] romantic holiday to Wuhan…
On February 8, Coladangelo sent a link to a Sky News story about a Briton being among five people in France with coronavirus. The following day she sent another link about a Briton infected in Mallorca.
Lord Bethell, the then-minister representing the Department of Health and Social Care in the House of Lords, joked:
Mallorca! Damn, there goes the fallback plan.
By the end of the month, Hancock was busy talking with the devolved nations — Wales, Scotland and Northern — about an ‘action plan’.
On February 29, Dominic Cummings tweeted a link to a Mail story about an Israeli vaccine which, according to the paper, was ‘just WEEKS away’. The Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance replied, in part, that it would take:
many months at the very and most optimistic best.
Chris Whitty replied, in part:
For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.
So they already knew the mortality rate was low. Interesting.
Six minutes later, Vallance replied again:
… existing drugs best things to try for this outbreak. Accelerate vaccine testing where we have good candidates for future, and prepare for manufacturing capacity for longer term.
Existing drugs were never allowed. I would like to see the detail behind that.
On March 1, Boris’s adviser James Slack put forward the press briefing format, which he ran by Dominic Cummings.
That evening, Cummings proposed a Singapore-style response to the virus, because:
My impression is media do not expect china [sic] style response nor do they think it possible …
The following day, James Slack asked for advice on whether people should stop shaking hands, as the subject had come up on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that morning.
Cummings, ever in the zeitgeist, responded:
I’ve stopped!
By March 5:
There were also highly sensitive discussions about what to do if the NHS ran out of staff and beds. If push came to shove, could unqualified volunteers help in intensive care units? Could families be shown how to care for their own sick and dying?
Day by day, the disaster moved closer to home. Terrifying scenes in Italy, where hospitals were overwhelmed by gasping Covid victims and distraught doctors were having to turn away the dying patients were fuelling a sense of impending doom in the UK.
Rumours swirled that Parliament might be forced to close for up to five months. A nervous public was beginning to stay away from restaurants, pubs and theatres – the start of a disastrous hiatus for the hospitality industry.
Warning that insurance would rapidly become a problem, Mr Cummings told Mr Hancock that businesses were “starting to scream” about cancellations. The Department of Health hastily registered Covid as a “notifiable disease”, making it easier for companies to claim compensation.
On March 6:
As people began to panic buy, the Government started talking to supermarkets about how to maintain supplies. Officials wondered whether the Government was being seen to do enough.
On March 7, the Government began thinking about a possible ventilator shortage.
On March 8, Hancock messaged Slack about France:
FYI France has just banned gatherings of over 1000 and said no kissing or handshakes. I imagine we will get some questions over why that’s different to our approach
Slack replied:
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.
Oh, if they had only left it there, but they didn’t.
On March 9, discussions took place about prioritising life-saving healthcare.
On March 10, the Cheltenham Festival (horse racing) opened and would last through March 13:
The first split was over mass gatherings. In England, Sage continued to advise against cancelling big sporting events. On March 10-13, the Cheltenham Festival went ahead. The Scottish government took a different view. As the pandemic progressed, an increasingly vocal Nicola Sturgeon was a persistent source of anxiety for Number 10 …
Slack sent out a message. Note that the media appear in it:
For the first time, it feels as if we’re under sustained pressure today over why we aren’t doing more. A split with Scotland would be particularly difficult.
We are also in a bad place on Italy. To the media mind, we’re asking UK nationals to self isolate and saying no one should travel to Italy, but Italians arriving in the U.K. are free to ignore our advice, hop on the Tube and visit tourist hotspots.
On March 11, the then-Digital Culture Media Sports Secretary Nadine Dorries was the first MP to get Covid:
Amid speculation over who else she might have infected, Downing Street was being asked whether Mr Johnson was at risk.
Hancock replied, in part:
PM was not in close contact with Nadine. You have to be within 2m of someone to pass it on, which he tells me he was not. CMO content with this
James Slack asked for an answer on the policy about Italy. Hancock responded:
Because of the level of risk in Italy
Hmm.
Patrick Vallance sent a message, the first part of which reads:
Not correct that the test does not work on people with no symptoms. It does and that’s why we contact trace.
Hmm.
Hancock responded to Vallance’s message, in part:
… Patrick what you’ve said is not right.
The clinical advice I’ve had is that the test is NOT reliable on people without symptoms.
I thought so, even at the time.
He ended with this:
Can the scientists please clear this up urgently
The article continues:
Inside Downing Street and the Department of Health, senior figures were fixated by growing calls from the media for more action. Anxious to retain control of the narrative, they fretted that Mr Johnson was being too cautious about imposing restrictions, and discussed how best to change his mind …
Cummings sent a long message reflecting his frustration. At that point, the Government advised frequent and lengthy handwashing. Cummings wanted social distancing measures, citing the new CDC policy in the United States and imagining what the British media and/or the public would say:
*’WHY WAIT 5 DAYS WHY NOT MOVE NOW AND FLATTEN CURVE EARLIER??’*
Slack replied, excerpted:
Agree with all of this. We’re at a tipping point in the media cycle … The Times and The Telegraph leader columns today point to the growing disquiet …
On March 14, the Cheltenham Festival was over. It was blamed for an uptick in cases. Meanwhile:
All over the world, politicians wrestled with the moral and practical implications of letting the virus run its course, allowing populations to build up “herd immunity”.
It was a source of much heated debate in government, but “letting it rip” was never UK Government policy. Mr Hancock was furious when Sir Patrick publicly suggested otherwise …
The article has screenshots of the many WhatsApp conversations that took place about testing, the media and schools.
On the evening of Monday, March 16:
Mr Johnson addressed the nation and warned that, without drastic action, the virus would spiral out of control.
The next day:
The elderly and vulnerable were told to stay at home for 12 weeks. Schools would remain open – but not for long. Ministers rushed through legislation giving the Government unprecedented new power to take control of essential services and restrict individual freedoms. Some hospitals were already beginning to struggle because of staff absence …
On March 19:
As the nation headed inexorably towards its first-ever national lockdown, some voices, notably those in the Treasury including Liam Booth-Smith, the then chancellor Rishi Sunak’s special adviser, were trying to present the alternative argument …
Booth-Smith asked, quite rightly:
… so how much additional benefit does ‘locking down’ actually get you?
Cummings, a lockdown zealot — even though he would violate the policy himself by driving his wife and young child to County Durham — replied:
All stop using lockdown it’s confusing
We’re trying to stop all non essential social contact. The problem is defining non essential
By Friday, March 20, Rishi’s optimistic budget of March 11 had died a death:
Mr Sunak, who had already announced billions of pounds worth of Covid loans and grants, unveiled his furlough scheme, under which the Government undertook to pay 80 per cent of workers’ salaries.
All pubs and hospitality were ordered to close from midnight that night. Then came the problems with personal protective equipment …
On the evening of Monday, March 23, at 8:00 p.m.:
the UK went into full lockdown with Mr Johnson’s order to “stay at home”. It was the first of three national lockdowns [in England, anyway], the last of which would only be lifted more than 12 months after the first had begun.
WhatsApp auto-delete now active
In the wake of The Lockdown Files, The Telegraph reported that some in government were changing their WhatsApp settings: ‘Ministers activating auto-delete on their WhatsApp messages’:
Cabinet ministers are using technology that automatically deletes WhatsApp messages, raising fears they are circumventing the Government’s transparency rules.
Some frontbench figures have switched on a function offered by the social media service that effectively means messages self-destruct after a short time period, such as a day.
It calls into question whether ministers are fully following guidance that electronic messages about government policy should be stored for possible Freedom of Information requests.
Some political advisers have even switched on the technology in the wake of The Lockdown Files, which revealed some of the 100,000 WhatsApp messages involving Matt Hancock.
Opposition MPs called for the practice to be stopped on Tuesday, questioning why government ministers would choose to automatically delete some messages …
Such discussions are theoretically covered by the Government’s existing transparency rules but they rely on ministers deciding which messages are relevant and storing them.
The Cabinet Office has guidance on the use of private emails which also applies to “other forms of communications and records which deal with departmental business”, such as WhatsApp messages.
The guidance reads: “The responsibility for deciding whether emails should be retained rests with the originator and recipient.
“In general terms, a record need only be retained if it is needed for substantive discussions or decisions in the course of conducting official business.”
How many ministers are using the automatic deletion tool on WhatsApp and for how many interactions is unclear.
Similarly it is not known how often ministers pass on WhatsApp messages about detailed policy discussions to the civil service to be stored.
However, the fact that some ministers are using the automatic deletion mechanism has prompted some MPs to raise concerns that not enough information is being stored …
A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “In the modern age, ministers will use a variety of communication channels for discussions so appropriate arrangements are in place for the management of electronic communications.”
Who else is among those who have set WhatsApp to auto-delete? None other than Simon Case, as The New Statesman reported on March 17. Their scoop comes from Boris’s sister Rachel Johnson:
Props to Rachel Johnson, the journalist and sister of the former prime minister, Boris. She provided great value for money for attendees of the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Conference in London on Wednesday, 15 March.
Chairing a panel discussion on the press, politics and police, Johnson provided her audience of journalists with something of a scoop on Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who has come under pressure over leaked WhatsApp messages that have come to light in the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. (One message showed Case saying it was “hilarious” that holidaymakers were being “locked up” in quarantine hotels.)
“I had to be in contact with Simon Case about something a month or so ago,” said Johnson. “And when I was WhatsApping him, my WhatsApps disappeared because he’s now set his phone so that all his WhatsApps disappear immediately.” She added: “I think they disappear within hours, even. You know, so there’s no record of all the things he’s said to me.”
(Without wishing to overcomplicate this story, the Chatterer would note as well that, in January, Johnson said Case had questions to answer in the row over whether the BBC chairman Richard Sharp played a role in a loan-guarantee arrangement between Boris Johnson and the former PM’s distant cousin Sam Blyth.)
Who’d a thunk it?
More on The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
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.
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.
On Friday, January 4, news emerged that SAGE, the scientific and clinical group advising the Government on coronavirus, will no longer be meeting regularly.
Pictured on the left is Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific officer, and, on the right, Sir Chris Whitty, chief medical officer:
Guido Fawkes’s post says (emphases in the original):
The pandemic is over and, rightly, SAGE is gone. Announced this afternoon, the freedom-hating advisory board will stop meeting regularly, though the government has placated hypochondriacs by promising they stand ready to reform. Like an epidemiological Take That…
SAGE met monthly from January 2020, though increasingly pushed for lockdowns and Covid measures, which when ignored by Boris proved massively surplus to requirement. The government has taken back control once again…
SAGE were the ones responsible for repeated lockdowns, the U-turn on masks and ‘hysterical’, as the Swedes put it, modelling. Here is one example:
Shameful.
The Daily Mail reported (emphases mine):
The scientific advisory group, chaired by Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Chris Whitty, ‘stands ready’ to reconvene if the virus rebounds.
It marks another significant step in the return to normal and suggests even No10’s famously cautious advisers recognise the worst of the pandemic is over.
The influential panel – made up of 90 leading experts and officials – has met at least monthly since January 2020, and multiple times a week during surges.
There had been growing calls for the group to be reviewed amid claims it held too much power over the Government and did not have enough diversity of opinion.
Much of the criticism has been aimed at SAGE’s pessimistic projections, most recently warning of up to 6,000 Omicron deaths per day this winter. It has also been accused of leaking proposals to the media in order to pressure ministers to back stricter measures.
Sir Chris and Sir Patrick will continue to advise ministers on Covid, as will the UK Health Security Agency and Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
It comes a week after Boris Johnson lifted all pandemic laws in England as part of his ‘living with Covid’ strategy, with free testing due to be axed next month.
Conservative MP Steve Baker was generous in his assessment of the freedom-depriving scientific group:
We have seen that experts are only human too.
That said, he added:
As we now pick up the pieces after the collateral damage of lockdowns and restrictions, we see more clearly than ever before that we need competitive, multi-disciplinary expert advice with challenge. Boris ought to implement reforms now.
Indeed.
Even though most of us never heard of SAGE until two years ago, the committee has been around for well over a decade:
SAGE was initially set up to provide ‘coherent, coordinated advice’ on the science surrounding pandemics and other emergencies.
It was a little-known body before the Covid crisis, and had only occasionally been called upon to assist in decision making.
It first met in 2009 for the swine flu pandemic, and then in 2014 to advise on Ebola, in 2016 over Zika and in 2018 over the Salisbury poisoning.
The group met only once in 2019 amid concerns the Toddbrook Reservoir dam in Derbyshire would collapse.
But since the pandemic began it has convened meetings at least once a month, with the first held two weeks after the first cases of the virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.
The group has met more frequently during fresh waves of the virus, convening eight meetings since Omicron emerged in late November.
Other than Whitty and Vallance, we knew most about the SAGE subgroups SPI-M, the modellers, and SPI-B, the behaviourists:
SAGE meetings have a shifting membership drawn from a panel of about 90 scientists and medical experts.
Dozens more sit on sub-groups, including controversial epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, who was kept on as an adviser despite being forced to apologise for breaking lockdown rules during an affair with a married woman.
It is unclear how often the SAGE subcommittees will meet.
My first inclination on seeing this news was that SAGE will now get involved in climate change.
I hope that the Ukraine situation has put paid to that.
I have some highly uncharitable things to say about SAGE.
GB News’s Mark Dolan expressed his dissatisfaction with SAGE much better than I could in this well considered editorial at the weekend. He is right to say that SAGE caused damage to Britain that Vladimir Putin could only have dreamed of:
May we never see their like again. Somehow, sadly, I think we will.
Thanks to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, England is now the freest country in the Western world.
On Monday, February 21, Boris announced the lifting of the remaining coronavirus restrictions. Some of this began yesterday. However, much of the lifting comes into effect on Thursday, February 24, with the remainder finished by April 1.
He gave a statement to Parliament first, which he followed with a televised coronavirus briefing — press conference — at 7 p.m. that evening.
This was the nub of his statement to the House of Commons (emphases mine):
As we have throughout the past two years, we will continue to work closely with the devolved Administrations as they decide how to take forward their own plans. Today’s strategy shows how we will structure our approach in England around four principles. First, we will remove all remaining domestic restrictions in law. From this Thursday, 24 February, we will end the legal requirement to self-isolate following a positive test, and so we will also end self-isolation support payments, although covid provisions for statutory sick pay can still be claimed for a further month. We will end routine contact tracing, and no longer ask fully vaccinated close contacts and those under 18 to test daily for seven days. We will also remove the legal requirement for close contacts who are not fully vaccinated to self-isolate. Until 1 April, we will still advise people who test positive to stay at home, but after that we will encourage people with covid-19 symptoms to exercise personal responsibility, just as we encourage people who may have flu to be considerate to others …
The testing, tracing and isolation budget in 2020-21 exceeded the entire budget of the Home Office; it cost a further £15.7 billion in this financial year, and £2 billion in January alone, at the height of the omicron wave. We must now scale this back.
From today, we are removing the guidance for staff and students in most education and childcare settings to undertake twice-weekly asymptomatic testing. And from 1 April, when winter is over and the virus will spread less easily, we will end free symptomatic and asymptomatic testing for the general public. We will continue to provide free symptomatic tests to the oldest age groups and those most vulnerable to covid. And in line with the practice in many other countries, we are working with retailers to ensure that everyone who wants to can buy a test. From 1 April, we will also no longer recommend the use of voluntary covid-status certification, although the NHS app will continue to allow people to indicate their vaccination status for international travel. The Government will also expire all temporary provisions in the Coronavirus Act 2020. Of the original 40, 20 have already expired and 16 will expire on 24 March. The last four, relating to innovations in public service, will expire six months later, after we have made those improvements permanent via other means.
Secondly, we will continue to protect the most vulnerable with targeted vaccines and treatments. The UK Government have procured enough doses of vaccine to anticipate a wide range of possible Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommendations. Today, we are taking further action to guard against a possible resurgence of the virus, accepting JCVI advice for a new spring booster offered to those aged 75 and over, to older care home residents, and to those over 12 who are immunosuppressed. The UK is also leading the way on antivirals and therapeutics, with our Antivirals Taskforce securing a supply of almost 5 million, which is more per head than any other country in Europe.
Thirdly, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies advises that there is considerable uncertainty about the future path of the pandemic, and there may of course be significant resurgences. SAGE is certain that there will be new variants, and it is very possible that those will be worse than omicron. So we will maintain our resilience to manage and respond to those risks, including our world-leading Office for National Statistics survey, which will allow us to continue tracking the virus in granular detail, with regional and age breakdowns helping us to spot surges as and where they happen. And our laboratory networks will help us understand the evolution of the virus and identify any changes in characteristics.
We will prepare and maintain our capabilities to ramp up testing. We will continue to support other countries in developing their own surveillance capabilities, because a new variant can emerge anywhere. We will meet our commitment to donate 100 million vaccine doses by June, as our part of the agreement at the UK’s G7 summit to provide a billion doses to vaccinate the world over the next year. In all circumstances, our aim will be to manage and respond to future risks through more routine public health interventions, with pharmaceutical interventions as the first line of defence.
Fourthly, we will build on the innovation that has defined the best of our response to the pandemic. The vaccines taskforce will continue to ensure that the UK has access to effective vaccines as they become available, and has already secured contracts with manufacturers trialling bi-valent vaccines, which would provide protection against covid variants. The therapeutics taskforce will continue to support seven national priority clinical trial platforms focused on prevention, novel treatments and treatments for long-covid. We are refreshing our biosecurity strategy to protect the UK against natural zoonosis and accidental laboratory leaks, as well as the potential for biological threats emanating from state and non-state actors.
Building on the five-point plan that I set out at the UN and the agreements reached at the UK’s G7 last year, we are working with our international partners on future pandemic preparedness, including through a new pandemic treaty; an effective early warning system or global pandemic radar; and a mission to make safe and effective diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines available within the first 100 days of a future pandemic threat being identified. We will host a global pandemic preparedness summit next month.
The pandemic treaty concerns me. Will it supersede individual nations’ laws and liberties?
Boris put the focus on common sense and personal responsibility. People took exception to his taking credit for restoring our liberties — ‘they were ours all along’ — but he was the one who took them away on March 23, 2020, at 8 p.m.:
Covid will not suddenly disappear, so those who would wait for a total end to this war before lifting the remaining regulations would be restricting the liberties of the British people for a long time to come. This Government do not believe that that is right or necessary. Restrictions take a heavy toll on our economy, our society, our mental wellbeing and the life chances of our children, and we do not need to pay that cost any longer. We have a population that is protected by the biggest vaccination programme in our history; we have the antivirals, the treatments and the scientific understanding of this virus; and we have the capabilities to respond rapidly to any resurgence or new variant.
It is time that we got our confidence back. We do not need laws to compel people to be considerate to others. We can rely on our sense of responsibility towards one another, providing practical advice in the knowledge that people will follow it to avoid infecting loved ones and others. So let us learn to live with this virus and continue protecting ourselves without restricting our freedoms. In that spirit, I commend this statement to the House.
I watched the Coronavirus Briefing at 7 p.m. and sincerely hope it would be the last one.
Boris was flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Officer, and Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer.
Boris spoke first, then we had Chris ‘Next slide, please’ Whitty’s presentation. I do not understand why Downing Street couldn’t have given him a clicker to advance the slides himself.
Listening to Whitty and Vallance, however, gave me a different impression. I wondered if I was alone:
Then I found a Guido Fawkes post, and one of his readers wrote:
Chris Whitty is literally stood there contradicting everything Johnson just said in Parliament. He is advising wearing face masks and self isolation. Emphasising this a ‘gradual series of steps’.
Vallance emphasising the next variant could be more severe. I can’t believe what I am hearing. It’s quite clear they do not agree at all with the announcement. They still quite clearly want a very slow and gradual lifting of restrictions and mass surveillance testing all the way to summer with rapid lockdown again if we a get any rise in infections.
They need to be removed.
I agree that SAGE needs disbanding or a deep reorganisation. Everyone on it is in lockstep. SAGE needs a variety of voices from the medical establishment, with more libertarians. They exist. They just haven’t been invited. It seems as if SAGE nominates its own members, all like-minded people.
I was most surprised to see Whitty say that the vaccine was good for pregnant women and their babies:
As expected, reporters were clearly unhappy with Boris’s announcement. A few accused him of playing politics in order to keep his job.
Later that evening, Toby Young told Dan Wootton of GB News that journos have comfortable houses and gardens to enjoy. They don’t need to worry about lockdowns or self-isolation:
On Monday, Wootton launched his own lockdown inquiry, which he says will be a recurring topic on his show for some time. He rightly blames the media for stoking fear every minute of the day:
Top oncologist Prof Karol Sikora agreed with Wootton about Project Fear:
Public health official Prof John Ashton and Dr Steve James, the unvaccinated consultant anaesthesiologist, joined Wootton. Having just returned from France, Ashton championed masks and asked what the problem was in wearing them. It doesn’t seem he understands the full picture there:
Dr James said that he is not against vaccines. He supports those who want to take them:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Wootton that ‘lockdown’ should become a ‘dirty word’:
Freedom Day feels a bit like Groundhog Day. We’ve been here before:
Still, let’s hope it is definitive this time.
Thanks go to Boris but, more importantly, to the 101 rebel Conservative MPs who opposed an Omicron lockdown before Christmas. They put the frighteners on Boris — and with good reason.
The UK had another big weekend of news, which, as I said last week, is unusual, given that Christmas is just around the corner.
One of the big scoops was The Spectator‘s revelation as to why every SAGE scenario is based on a worst-case outcome.
Fraser Nelson, the magazine’s editor, had an online exchange with Graham Medley from SAGE, which can be seen in his article, ‘My Twitter conversation with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee’, which is a must-read.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Medley is a professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Last week, LSHTM published another alarming set of figures for the Omicron variant that, naturally, make the case for more lockdowns.
By contrast, JP Morgan came up with a different conclusion after looking at LSHTM’s data:
JP Morgan had a close look at this study and spotted something big: all the way through, LSHTM assumes that the Omicron variant is just as deadly as Delta. ‘But evidence from South Africa suggests that Omicron infections are milder,’ JP Morgan pointed out in a note to clients.
JP Morgan concluded:
Bed occupancy by Covid-19 patients at the end of January would be 33% of the peak seen in January 2021. This would be manageable without further restrictions.
Fraser Nelson says:
So JP Morgan had shown that, if you tweak one assumption (on severity) then – suddenly – no need for lockdown.
Nelson went online to find out why LSHTM didn’t do the same thing:
Medley seems to imply that the Government wants the worst case scenario:
Nelson says:
Note how careful he is to stay vague on whether any of the various scenarios in the Sage document are likely or even plausible. What happened to the original system of presenting a ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ together with a central scenario? And what’s the point of modelling if it doesn’t say how likely any these scenarios are?
From what Prof Medley says, it’s unclear that the most-likely scenario is even being presented to ministers this time around. So how are they supposed to make good decisions? I highly doubt that Sajid Javid is only asking to churn out models that make the case for lockdown. That instruction, if it is being issued, will have come from somewhere else.
He concludes that there is an ethical issue with SAGE’s pronouncements:
Prof. Robert Dingwall, until recently a JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation] expert, has said that Medley’s candour reveals “a fundamental problem of scientific ethics in Sage” – ie, a hardwired negativity bias. “The unquestioning response to the brief is very like that of SPI-B’s behavioural scientists,” he says and suggests that the Covid inquiry looks into all this.
At a time when we have just been given a new set of ‘scenarios’ for a new year lockdown it might be good if someone – if not Prof Medley – would clear up what assumptions lie behind the new 6,000-a-day-dead scenario, and if emerging information from South Africa about Omicron and its virulence have been taken into account. And how probable it is that a double-jabbed and increasingly boosted nation (with 95 per cent antibody coverage) could see this worst-case scenario come to pass.
In my view, this raises serious questions not just about Sage but about the quality of the advice used to make UK lockdown decisions. And the lack of transparency and scrutiny of that advice. The lives of millions of people rests on the quality of decisions, so the calibre of information supplied matters rather a lot – to all of us.
Too right.
I haven’t believed SAGE at all, from the beginning. I am also still angry about how much taxpayers’ money has been pumped in for a pandemic that needed a common sense solution in March 2020, such as, ‘There are a lot of unknowns here. We will provide updates. However, we advise that anyone who feels sick to get a test then isolate at home for 10 days. Keep your distance from those outside your household. Keep your hands clean. Above all: use the same precautions you would in any potentially contagious environment.’
That’s it in a nutshell. Not a lot more needed to be said.
But no.
We plebs couldn’t have that. We cannot be trusted.
Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty implied that we do not know what we are talking about.
This video is from Whitty’s appearance before a parliamentary Select Committee on Thursday, December 16. Dean Russell MP (Conservative) asked him whether the NHS risks prioritising the virus over cancer. While it might not be Dean Russell’s view, this is a prevailing opinion among many members of the public.
Whitty wasted no time in shooting that down, saying that we do not understand ‘health’ and insisting that lockdowns helped to save the NHS, which would have collapsed otherwise. Along with Prof Gordon Wishart, I also beg to differ, but here is the exchange:
People are frustrated:
General practitioners are wrapped up in this, too:
Coronavirus has overtaken their surgeries. It was already nearly impossible to get an online appointment, never mind one in person. As of last week, GPs’ priority from the Government is to dispense boosters:
No, pandemics are not a regular occurrence, but the NHS should be prepared to deal with one.
On Monday, December 20, Boris convened the Cabinet for a two-hour meeting to discuss the possibility of imposing a Christmas lockdown in England. Sir Patrick Vallance presented a doom-and-gloom scenario.
Bear in mind that Boris is skating on thin ice at the moment politically. A lockdown might have caused some of them to resign their Cabinet positions.
In the end, they decided not to go for a lockdown in England, at least over Christmas weekend:
Well, five of them did, at least.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss had to leave early:
Guido Fawkes has more (red emphasis his, the purple one mine):
The Times and Telegraph have the most comprehensive write-ups, reporting Rishi, Steve Barclay and Grant Shapps were those leading the sceptics’ charge. The Times reports Jacob Rees-Mogg had a prolonged argument with Vallance about their modelling, telling Boris to trust the people rather than the scientists. Truss, Kwarteng, Alister Jack, Nadhim Zahawi and Nigel Adams are all also reportedly sceptical about the threat of Omicron…
On the other side of the divide backing restrictions, according to The Telegraph, are (unsurprisingly) Javid and Gove; Nadine Dorries and Chief secretary to the Treasury Simon Clarke. We can only presume the PM also errs towards this group. There’s set to be one more Cabinet before Christmas day that could still decide to recall MPs before New Year.
Katy Balls of The Spectator reports that this is the first time in ages that the Cabinet has been consulted on coronavirus policy:
So what happened in that meeting? ‘Boris did a great job and encouraged a proper discussion and respected other views,’ says one minister. ‘He had quite a lot humility’. Michael Gove was, as usual, leading the arguments for more lockdown. But this was based on Sage forecasts of what might happen which have lost some credibility in the eyes of Cabinet members who were — for the first time in a while — genuinely being consulted.
Boris knows he’s in trouble:
Several members of Johnson’s Cabinet are vocally opposed to new restrictions. They argue that there needs to be clearer data before any restrictions are brought in – with whispers of resignations if Johnson pressed on without this. These members of government hope that more time will offer clarity that could show omicron is milder than previous variants.
Behind the scenes, the Chancellor is understood to have played a key role warning against rushing into decisions that could cost billions. Other ministers keen to see more modelling include Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps (“although it was never quite clear what he was saying,” I’m told.) Other ministers have been pressing on Johnson the idea of limiting any new measures to guidance.
But when Johnson emerged talking about the need to observe the data, and questions about Omicron’s severity, he was using the language of those who opposed lockdown. They argue, in effect, that Sage models cannot be trusted as they are composed of hypotheticals – and that we need to wait for real-world data. The next few days of hospital data, it’s argued, will tell us much about how severe Omicron is and if lockdown is needed. Data is emerging not just from South Africa (where cases now seem to be falling) but Denmark where Omicron has been found to be significantly less likely to put patients in hospital. At least some Sage modellers produced figures on the assumption that Omicron is no less likely to hospitalise or kill: one scenario talks about deaths peaking a day …
Johnson faces a parliamentary party filled with MPs vehemently opposed to any new restrictions and who could question his ability to lead as a result. When the Whips office sent a note around this afternoon telling MPs that the parliamentary away day has been cancelled, one messaged me to say:
‘It’s probably for the best. If we were all in one place for a few days, we could work out a successor’
But there are Tory MPs who believe action is required. One senior Tory concludes:
‘This is a Prime Minister paralysed between science and his backbenchers. It’s depressing.’
The Times reports on Leader of the House Jacob Rees-Mogg’s words of wisdom. He, too, read Fraser Nelson’s article. Good man:
Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the Commons, said the government should trust people to do the right thing rather than introduce further restrictions. He said many people had voluntarily changed their behaviour as the threat posed by Omicron became clear.
The prime minister said Rees-Mogg’s argument was interesting but asked how he would justify his approach at a press conference. He said that as prime minister he had to look after everyone’s health. Rees-Mogg is understood to have responded: “I would stand up and say I respect them for doing the right thing.” The prime minister is said to have suggested that this would not be enough if the NHS were at risk of being overwhelmed.
Rees-Mogg is also understood to have criticised official modelling suggesting that without further action 3,000 Omicron patients a day could need a hospital bed. He asked if Johnson had read an article by Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, questioning the assumptions behind the data.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, is said to have responded directly to Rees-Mogg that the modelling had included scenarios where the Omicron variant was deemed less severe than the Delta variant.
If so, why did Vallance not present those data?
Boris made a brief announcement after the Cabinet meeting, saying that he is still keeping all options open after Christmas:
On Wednesday, December 22, Health minister Gillian Keegan told LBC’s Nick Ferrari not make firm plans for New Year’s parties because of ongoing ‘uncertainty’:
As people have been cancelling dinner reservations and reneging on trips to the pub, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has had to come up with a £1bn compensation plan for the hospitality sector, which amounts to £6000 per business. A nightclub owner says it’s ‘insulting’. I agree with the person replying — just drop any remaining restrictions:
When is this going to end?
Oh, well. At least we’re not in the socialist nations of Scotland or Wales, where things have been far worse and continue so to be.
In the UK, coronavirus vaccine boosters progress apace.
This advert is showing at cinemas around the country. It features Prof Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer:
Scary.
It is reminiscent of 1984:
Someone else posted those images a few days ago.
Here’s another:
On Saturday, December 18, Neil Oliver of GB News interviewed Dr Robert W Malone about the vaccines and the boosters (33-43 minutes in):
Malone discusses his involvement in mRNA vaccine technology from its inception in the late 1980s and development into the 1990s. He now looks at these vaccines from a regulatory perspective.
He, along with a number of other physicians and scientists, e.g. Dr Pierre Kory, does not think that the coronavirus vaccines have been developed in a conventional manner.
Furthermore, he does not think they should be:
1/ given to children;
2/ given to people with normally functioning immune systems;
3/ mandated.
In other words, if he is correct, most of us reading this post should never have had the coronavirus vaccines or boosters.
Malone thinks that those should have been reserved only for the immuno-compromised, but admits that, even with that caveat, he’s having second thoughts about that group as well.
Hmm.
In June, Linked In suspended his account for his views on the vaccines:
In 2022, the UK is likely to get legislation prohibiting ‘hateful anti-vaccine’ (MPs’ words) articles and opinions. A few other countries already have such laws:
Note how the BBC fits in:
Congratulations to Neil Oliver and GB News for giving Dr Malone much needed air time.
It’s been a week full of news, which is unusual right before Christmas. Yet, here we are.
Omicron death
The person who died with Omicron was an unvaccinated man in his 70s:
I, too, would like those questions answered.
The man’s stepson called into Nick Ferrari’s LBC show to say that he was a germophobe. He had everything delivered to his door and never left the house unless he had to post a letter:
Guido Fawkes has more (emphasis in the original):
Speaking to Nick Ferrari, the stepson of the man who died earlier this week claimed that he had been taken in by “conspiracy theories”, and refused to take the vaccine despite being in his early 70s:
He thought it was a conspiracy. He was an intelligent man but it’s all these different things you are getting from online and different media things… He wasn’t vaccinated at all.
According to the latest figures, there are currently 15 people in hospital with Omicron, an increase of 5 since Tuesday…
Chris Whitty’s Omicron projections
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a press conference with Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Officer Prof Patrick Vallance.
Whitty predicted Armageddon with a chart showing unbelievably high projections of Omicron cases.
A good friend of mine said he hoped that chart would come back to bite Whitty in the proverbial. I couldn’t agree more.
However, when Whitty appeared before the Health and Social Care Select Committee on Thursday, December 16, he changed his tune when giving evidence to MPs.
The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):
Britain may be “better off” with omicron than it was with the delta variant, thanks to the booster programme, Prof Chris Whitty has suggested.
Giving evidence at the Health and Social Care Select Committee, the Chief Medical Officer for England said that vaccines appeared to be holding up well against omicron and said boosters may even be preventing transmissibility and infection …
“It is possible that with a boost, we’re better off with omicron than we are with two vaccines with delta for severe disease,” he told MPs.
Prof Whitty said he was expecting omicron to cause an “impressive” rise in cases, which could lead to daily peaks in admission bigger than seen in the January wave, when hospitalisations hit nearly 40,000 a day.
However, he said that cases may begin to fall quickly and that a milder illness may mean people would stay in hospital for a short period, reducing the overall burden on the health service. Fewer people may also need intensive care, he added …
“I think most people think on the positive side, that there will be some preserved immunity, particularly on the non-antibody side, such as T-cells. Therefore it is likely someone who has one or two vaccines already will have some protection and with a booster considerably more protection against hospitalisation and death.
“It does look as if boosters restore some of the ability to actually reduce infection and transmission, at least for a period of time.”
Then he told MPs that he was reluctant to give the public projection numbers, yet he did just that at this week’s press conference:
“I have resisted putting forward projection numbers into the public domain because I don’t think they are reliable and you can’t put enough caveats on them.”
We don’t think they are reliable either, Prof Whitty.
Health and Security Agency’s Omicron projections for England withdrawn
The UK Health and Security Agency also backtracked on their projections because of a change in public behaviour. I wonder:
If only they would lift Plan B …
… because it is really hurting the hospitality sector.
Michel Roux Jr has tweeted about his daughter Emily’s London restaurant Caractère, which is suffering from a rash of sudden cancellations:
Her restaurant is not the only one. Omicron has everyone running scared.
But, what if it ‘cases’ did double every two days and what if we all caught Omicron? Would it confer herd immunity? We’ll know if the following extrapolation is true by Twelfth Night:
The Queen cancels Windsor Castle pre-Christmas lunch
Because of the Omicron scare, our sovereign has cancelled her traditional pre-Christmas family lunch at Windsor Castle. ITV’s Chris Ship reports:
South Africa, however, remains relatively relaxed about Omicron, as the Daily Mail‘s Dan Hodges points out. Note the reply, which shows Chris Whitty contradicting himself yet again. Either boosters help immunity or they don’t. Which is it, Chris?
The elusive NHS GP can be seen — privately
Our NHS GPs have been elusive since last year. If you’re lucky, you can get a telephone or an online appointment. Very few patients are able to see them in person.
However, if one goes private, one can see one’s GP:
It looks as if the Mail on Sunday is investigating this situation. Good!
Killing off ivermectin as coronavirus prophylaxis
In more medical news, we discover how ivermectin was effectively killed off as a prophylaxis for coronavirus in the UK and the US.
Thanks to my reader dearieme for the Vox Day link, which leads to a World Tribune article summarising the incident from Robert Kennedy Jr’s New York Times Bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on Democracy and Public Health.
Excerpts follow:
Andrew Hill, PhD, is a senior visiting Research Fellow in Pharmacology at Liverpool University. He is also an advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. As a researcher for the WHO evaluating ivermectin, Hill wielded enormous influence over international guidance for the drug’s use.
Hill had previously authored an analysis of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 that found the drug overwhelmingly effective.
On Jan. 6 of 2021, Hill testified enthusiastically before the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidlelines Panel in support of ivermectin’s use. Within a month, however, Hill found himself in what he describes as a “tricky situation.” Under pressure from his funding sponsors, Hill then published an unfavorable study. Ironically, he used the same sources as in the original study. Only the conclusions had changed.
Shortly before he published, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Director of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath, England, and one of the world’s leading medical research analysts, contacted Hill via Zoom and recorded the call (transcript below). Lawrie had learned of his new position and reached out to try to rectify the situation.
In a remarkable exchange, a transcript of which appears on pages 137 – 143 in Kennedy’s book, Hill admitted his manipulated study would likely delay the uptake of ivermectin in the UK and United States, but said he hoped his doing so would only set the lifesaving drug’s acceptance back by about “six weeks,” after which he was willing to give his support for its use …
The two scientists discussed ivermectin’s positive results in combating coronavirus:
… the number of preventable deaths incurred by such a delay would be staggering — as many as 504,000.
Hill declined being listed as Lawrie’s head author on the paper with the positive results. Instead, he published the negative findings.
This is why he did so:
Four days before publication, Hill’s sponsor Unitaid gave the University of Liverpool, Hill’s employer $40 million. Unitaid, it turns out, was also an author of the conclusions of Hill’s study …
… when pressed he admitted his sponsor, Unitaid, was an unacknowledged author of conclusions.
“Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah,” he told Lawrie …
Dr. Pierre Kory, of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, commented, “Andrew is apparently making a living now accusing the doctors and scientists who support ivermectin of medical fraud.”
Regulatory acceptance of ivermectin did not delay only six weeks. Instead, almost a year later, it has still not been approved by health agencies in the United Kingdom or in United States. Instead The WHO, CDC, NIH, and FDA have suppressed the drug’s use.
Instead, we are taking notional vaccines. Who knows what they are doing to our bodies?
Boris’s daughter’s name
Boris and Carrie Johnson have named their infant daughter Romy Iris Charlotte. She is shown with her brother Wilfred:
Romy is a ‘rainbow baby’ because she followed a miscarriage.
Best wishes to the Johnsons.
Conservatives lose safe seat for first time ever
In less cheery news for Boris, the Conservatives lost Owen Paterson‘s former North Shropshire constituency for the first time ever — nearly 200 years:
Paterson resigned a few weeks ago over sleaze allegations. He had a 23,000+ majority in the 2019 general election.
Failed candidate Neil Shastri-Hunt, who had been parachuted in from outside the constituency, said he planned to get some sleep and:
go and give my 8-week old a bit of a cuddle.
My commiserations to anyone who took this misguided betting advice:
The by-election took place on Thursday, December 16. The Liberal Democrats won by a landslide, as I thought they might:
Also note how low the vote for Labour was, despite party leader Sir Keir Starmer refusing to admit he is a socialist:
Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden MP admitted his party ‘got a kicking’ but added that such by-election results are not unusual when a Prime Minister is halfway through his or her term in office:
Therefore, this protest vote might be a one-off. Let us hope so.
However, in order for that to happen, Boris must be more of a Conservative and less of a Green Blairite.
Courier’s employees throw parcels against wall
And last, but hardly least, we have distressing news about some Christmas home deliveries.
Hermes is the UK’s worst courier company, but we have to put up with their delayed, sometimes damaged, deliveries.
A reporter from The Times did a brief stint with Hermes and found a group of disgruntled employees, some of whom threw parcels against a warehouse wall. The reporter is shown with his car boot open:
Hermes will investigate but says this is not typical behaviour of its employees. The company is at the bottom of the national delivery league table:
Meanwhile, I have been noting the rather downbeat Christmas notes we have received with our cards this year.
I hope that 2022 brings us far better tidings.
Churchmouse Campanologist 