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Today’s post concludes my long running series on The Telegraph‘s The Lockdown Files.
Those who missed it can read Part 1 of the conclusions.
All other posts in my series are on my Marxism/Communism page under The Lockdown Files.
MPs in the dark (cont’d)
In yesterday’s post, I featured articles about several Conservative MPs who said that they had no idea the Government was suppressing evidence about coronavirus data and that what the WhatsApp messages revealed was shocking, considering Parliament was given so little time to debate pandemic policy measures.
Another MP in this category is David Davis.
On March 6, 2023, The Telegraph published ‘Covid polling data used to shape decision-making still being kept secret, claims ex-minister’ (emphases mine below):
The Government has been accused of failing to rapidly disclose Covid polling data that shaped decision-making during the pandemic.
In the wake of The Lockdown Files, David Davis, the former Cabinet minister, has called for the taxpayer-funded research – worth at least £1.5 million – to be made “easily accessible and comprehensible to the public” after ministers repeatedly refused his requests to publish the information in a near three-year transparency battle.
However, the Cabinet Office has insisted some of the data is already in the public domain …
Until April last year, ministers pushed back time and again against Mr Davis’s requests for polling data to be put in the public domain on the grounds the information was still being used to shape policy, or would cost too much to publish.
Documents seen by The Telegraph show Mr Davis first submitted a Freedom of Information request in July 2020 seeking the cost and content of all polling conducted by the Cabinet Office, dating back to January that year …
After demanding an internal review and investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the former Cabinet minister turned to the parliamentary tools at his disposal – lodging a series of 20 written questions over 18 months.
In September, the government promised to release “evaluation reports” from a review of data held by the Cabinet Office – and wrote to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) in December to say details from surveys by pollsters Kantar had been published online.
Oliver Dowden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, also said in his letter to William Wragg, the PACAC chairman, that further data tables from Ipsos were available “on request”, while the National Institute for Health Research had published results from its own study.
But Mr Davis told the Commons on Monday he had not seen the data in question, while Mr Wragg said the notion the information had been made available to PACAC was “news to me”.
The former Brexit secretary stressed that the details “must be made easily accessible and comprehensible to the public”.
Asked for the whereabouts of the reports promised in September last year, the Cabinet Office pointed to the data referenced in the PACAC letter.
The following is an excerpt from David Davis’s Point of Order raised on March 6, 2020:
… I kept pressing, and eventually, in April last year, I was told that a timetable for releasing the information would be available in the spring. That deadline came and went, so I tried again in September, when I was told that the data would be published by the end of the year. Now, three months into 2023, I have still not seen it. About an hour ago, a journalist was told by the Cabinet Office that it had been made available to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, whose Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), is present; but I have not seen it.
Public money was used to obtain polling information relating to some of the biggest policy decisions in a generation. It must be made easily accessible and comprehensible to the public. May I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how the House can make the Government give it the data on the basis of which it appears to have created policy throughout the pandemic?
William Wragg intervened:
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As my right hon. Friend prayed me in aid during his point of order, let me simply say that this is news to me, as Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. I can certainly inform the House that the Committee has never received the data in any simple form, such as the questions that were asked and the answers that were received.
Deputy Speaker Rosie Winterton (Labour) responded, in part:
… if a Member has been told that information will be made available by a particular date, I would expect that commitment to be met. Knowing him as I do, I am sure that the right hon. Member will be assiduous in pursuing this matter, for example through parliamentary questions, and I hope he will receive helpful responses.
As for the point from the Chair of the Committee, I suspect that he may go back and request further information, but that is entirely up to him and his Committee.
Lockdown a big mistake, Sweden emerges best
Columnists from The Telegraph and elsewhere were deeply disappointed to see that Government officials ruined the British economy for political purposes and expedience.
Matt Hancock wanted to make himself look good. One of Boris’s advisers said that England should side with Scotland on mask-wearing because having a conflict with Nicola Sturgeon would not be worth the trouble.
It’s interesting to note that none of those three is in any leadership role in 2023. Boris’s adviser resigned a long time before ago.
On March 4, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson posted ‘Lockdown sceptics like me were demonised — but we were right’:
… don’t tell me thousands more would have died if we hadn’t locked down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall? They should.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit stupid …
The biggest shock revealed by The Telegraph scoop is quite how often our leaders, who always claimed to be guided by “the science”, were making decisions on the hoof.
Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered through the prism of something called “Comms”.
So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: “No strong reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching.”
But Lee Cain, the PM’s director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. “Why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?” asks Cain …
The Lockdown Files reveal that Matt Hancock and other key players often had a callous disregard for everything except their own egos …
Children’s wellbeing? Forget it. Hancock, we learn, launched a disgraceful “rearguard action” to close schools when Gavin Williamson, then-education secretary, was, to his credit, battling to keep them open … Keeping children out of education for another two months (until March 2021) turned out to be the real car crash …
Ironically, Downing Street had become a prisoner of the public’s fear. That sense of dread which, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her definitive book, State of Fear, was itself created by government scientists “using a battery of weapons from distorted statistics, ‘nudges’ and misleading adverts on TV to control the public in order to make them comply with lockdown requirements”. So people were convinced that Covid was a uniquely ruthless killer.
… The elderly were at risk of “just giving up” because they had been isolated for so long. Too bad. Hancock did nothing to alleviate the misery experienced by tens of thousands as they enacted a pitiful pantomime of intimacy through care-home windows and Perspex screens. (Visits to care homes and hospitals only returned to something like normality in July 2021 and, appallingly, many are still fortresses.) …
… as time went on, and the restrictions bit deeper, I began to shout at the TV during the Downing Street press briefings. Why did no one ask why having a “substantial meal” with alcohol in a pub protected you against Covid in a way that standing at the bar eating a bag of crisps did not? Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary at the time, explained that “a Cornish pasty on its own” would not constitute a substantial meal, “unless it came on a plate, to a table, with a side of chips or salad”. This gave rise to one of the great dilemmas of the pandemic: The Scotch Egg Question. Food minister George Eustice said a scotch egg “probably would count” as a substantial meal, but a No 10 spokesman hastily over-ruled that deplorable, devil-may-care attitude, sternly insisting that “bar snacks do not count”.
Grown men, our democratically elected representatives no less, actually said ludicrous things like that with a straight face. On the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever. It was farcical.
The farce insulted our intelligence, but it was the cruelty I abhorred. Common sense and basic human decency had been overridden, leading to the isolation of the most vulnerable (the very people we were meant to be “saving”); so many lonely deaths, so many families damaged, so many self-harming teenagers. Every day, my Telegraph inbox filled up with devastating stories …
To speak out, however, was to be demonised as a “Covidiot” and worse. The Left of the Labour Party, still smarting from the recent defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, redirected all its fire-breathing zealotry into advancing the cause of “zero Covid”, the better to undermine the hated Tories. I regularly found myself under attack, and trending (not in a good way) on Twitter. Once, it was for the heresy of suggesting that we should allow young people to get Covid and build up natural immunity which could then help protect their grandparents. Prior to the pandemic, that had been an uncontroversial precept of epidemiology. As Martin Kulldorff, former professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, observed drily this week at a Covid hearing in the House of Representatives, “I guess we knew about it [natural immunity] since 430 B.C. – the Athenian plague – until 2020. And then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.”
I was naïve enough to be shocked when I discovered that a Conservative MP, Neil O’Brien, had set up (at the behest, it was alleged, of certain ministers) a McCarthyite website to monitor the work of journalists like me who took a sceptical attitude to lockdown. How could that be happening in a free society? While I undoubtedly got certain things wrong, especially in the early days, I was repulsed by the way that Matt Hancock assumed the moral high ground, bulldozing over any criticism of his own highly questionable decisions. Intoxicated by his new totalitarian powers. Mr Hancock, I felt, was getting away with murder …
The Covid Inquiry, which began this week [albeit not publicly], with a dismaying lack of lockdown sceptics among its “core participants” had better buck up its ideas, or else. (At first, the inquiry wasn’t even going to consider the damage done to children, if you can believe it.
Anne Longworth, the Children’s Commissioner, has not been included and there is still not a single witness from the hospitality sector.) If the Establishment was hoping for a whitewash, the Lockdown Files will make that very hard indeed …
The Lockdown Files are not a betrayal. They are a declaration of loyalty to the public which has the right to know.
May we never forget the stick that Isabel Oakeshott got for The Lockdown Files:
On March 18, The Telegraph published Daniel Hannan’s ‘The evidence is in. Lockdowns kill people — and the more you lock down, the more you kill’:
… Britain was driven into abandoning its proportionate, cool-headed epidemic plan, not just by shrieking TV presenters, but by perverse incentives. Put simply, decision-makers knew that they would not get into trouble for excessive caution. They could blow away billions, bankrupt businesses, ruin children’s education, and none of it would be a resigning matter. But make the slightest mistake the other way, and they would be done for.
Easy to say in hindsight? Maybe. But those of us who said it at the time were roundly denounced as granny murderers. In February 2020, I recalled the ridiculous forecasts that had accompanied bird flu and swine flu, and cautioned against panic: “Politicians, like most people, are bad at calculating risk, and almost every minister would rather be accused of over-reacting to a threat than of having done too little. There is a similar bias, albeit a less pronounced one, among the various medical advisory bodies”.
Every time I criticised the lockdown – and this column was one of only three or four doing so in March 2020 – I would steel myself before pressing send. I knew that demanding a reopening was hugely unpopular. What if it also turned out to be wrong?
Yet the facts remained stubbornly at odds with the policies. As the disease spread from China, Chris Whitty pointed out that it was not dangerous enough to merit an acceleration of the vaccine approval process (no one, at this stage, was contemplating a UK lockdown).
“For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1 per cent) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut,” he messaged on February 29 2020. Reader, the mortality rate for Covid in this country never rose as high as 1 per cent.
Why, then, were we panicked? What happened to the original epidemic plan, which was to allow infections to seep gradually through the population so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed at any one moment?
The answer can be glimpsed in a message on March 8 from James Slack, Boris Johnson’s calm and measured spokesman: “I think we’re heading towards general pressure over why our measures are relatively light touch compared to other countries.”
Too bloody right. And the pressure – cretinous rants from Piers Morgan, false rumours of hospitals being overrun, “Go Home Covidiots” signs – grew until, two weeks later, a prime minister who hated nannying with every bone in his body felt obliged to sentence the population to house arrest.
Could he have resisted that pressure? Other countries had already closed, 92 per cent of the electorate wanted to be confined and the scientific advisers, sniffing the wind, had switched to arguing for tougher measures.
But one country held out. Sweden, lacking its own pandemic plan, had adopted Britain’s – and, unlike Britain, it did not crack under criticism. Sweden is our counterfactual, a laboratory quality control showing what would have happened here had we held our nerve. And the evidence it presents looks damning. A study has found that, from 2020 to 2022, Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe.
That finding blows the case for lockdowns out of the water. In the early days of the pandemic, when the Government was being criticised for what looked like a high death rate (largely because it had sent NHS patients into care homes), ministers and medical advisers urged us to wait until all the evidence was in …
Judged by this metric, Britain did not do badly. Our overall excess death rate was behind Scandinavia, in line with Germany and the Netherlands, and ahead of most of southern and eastern Europe. But the real outlier was Sweden, which had the lowest excess mortality in Europe, and one of the lowest in the world, throughout 2020 and 2021.
During the pandemic, I assumed that Sweden would emerge with a slightly higher death rate, but a much stronger economy. Since poverty correlates with lower longevity, I expected that, over time, Sweden would see fewer deaths from other causes, so ending up healthier as well as wealthier. But I underestimated the lethal impact of the lockdowns themselves. Sweden did not just do better over time; it actually killed fewer people during the pandemic.
How did Britain’s leaders respond to the evidence that they should have stuck to Plan A? They took it as a personal affront. Hancock referred in his messages to the “f***ing Sweden argument”, and asked officials to “supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong”.
But Sweden was not wrong, and no amount of desperate deflection about Norway also having a low death rate can disguise it. The horrible truth is that lockdowns killed people. Sweden had lots of coronavirus cases but relatively few excess deaths. Australia had few coronavirus cases, but a strict lockdown. It ended up with higher excess mortality than Sweden.
Are people ready to believe it? Are we prepared to admit that the disasters we are still experiencing – undiagnosed diseases, absenteeism, debt, lost education, price rises, mental health problems – were self-inflicted?
It seems not. We will go into the next crisis with the same skewed incentives. And all because, like so many Hancocks, we don’t want to “imply we’ve been getting it wrong”.
On March 22, The Telegraph published Madeline Grant’s ‘Nobody wants to confront the truth about lockdown’:
… Even now, pro-lockdowners ignore the example of Sweden because its experience of Covid doesn’t fit their mantra – “we had no choice”. Justifications (but not opinions) have shifted with the evidence. When Sweden appeared to be doing badly, it was “because it failed to lock down”. Now the data have moved in Sweden’s favour, it’s because “Sweden had an unofficial lockdown all along” [false]. The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files exposed the self-fulfilling logic behind many decisions. Coercion became its own justification, as when Matt Hancock feared cutting isolation times would dilute the message and “imply we’ve been wrong”. Whether you agree with lockdown or not, this is an appalling way to govern.
… Public readiness to allow so many basic functions of life – worship, exercise, social interaction – to be dismissed as “non-essential” suggests an inability to bear ordinary risks once inseparable from existence; expectations of a level of “security” unthinkable to previous generations. Even if we never lock down in precisely the same way again, a Rubicon has still been crossed.
So we didn’t finish stronger or more united, we simply ended up with the cold truth that, for many of us, things we claim to value – freedom, the next generation, prosperity, mental wellbeing didn’t really matter that much – at least not enough to fight for. When that becomes clear, there is little left for a society to coalesce around. All that remains are the fragments of those past illusions.
… Vital questions risk being lost along the way; about whether those laws were ever justified, and the incalculable damage they caused.
On March 23, UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers, who is half-Swedish, asked ‘Why doesn’t Britain regret lockdown?’
He says:
… To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.
For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?
To those who place emphasis on good quality evidence, it has been particularly exasperating. In the early days of 2020, we had only intuitions — there was no real data as to whether lockdowns worked, as they had never been tried in this way. As millions tuned in to our in-depth interviews on UnHerdTV with leading scientists, we made sure to hear arguments in favour of lockdowns as well as against …
In the past year, however, we have for the first time been able to look at the Covid data in the round. Many of the countries which appeared to be doing “well” in terms of low levels of infections and deaths caught up in the second year — Norway ended up much closer to Sweden, while countries such as Hungary, which were initially praised for strong early lockdowns, have ended up with some of the worst death tolls in the world. Due to the peculiarly competitive nature of the lockdowns, the results were neatly tracked, allowing clear comparison between countries and regions. While we spent the first year arguing about deaths “with” Covid as opposed to deaths “from” Covid, all sides in this discussion have now settled on overall “excess deaths” as the fairest measure of success or failure: in other words, overall, how many more people died in a particular place than you would normally expect?
My view on these results is quite simple: in order to justify a policy as monumental as shutting down all of society for the first time in history, the de minimis outcome must be a certainty that fewer people died because of it. Lockdown was not one “lever” among many: it was the nuclear option. The onus must be on those who promoted lockdowns to produce a table showing a clear correlation between the places that enacted mandatory shutdowns and their overall outcome in terms of excess deaths. But there is no such table; there is no positive correlation. Three years after, there is no non-theoretical evidence that lockdowns were necessary to save lives. This is not an ambiguous outcome; it is what failure looks like.
If anything, the correlation now looks like it goes the other way. The refusal of Sweden to bring in a lockdown, and the neighbouring Scandinavian countries’ shorter and less interventionist lockdowns and swifter return to normality, provide a powerful control to the international experiment. Three years on, these countries are at the bottom of the European excess deaths league table, and depending on which method you choose, Sweden is either at or very near the very bottom of the list. So the countries that interfered the least with the delicately balanced ecosystem of their societies caused the least damage; and the only European country to eschew mandatory lockdowns altogether ended up with the smallest increase in loss of life. It’s a fatal datapoint for the argument that lockdowns were the only option.
So why, three years on, do most people not share this conclusion? Partly because most people haven’t seen the evidence. Nor will they. The media and political establishment were so encouraging of lockdowns at the time that their only critique was that they weren’t hard enough. They are hardly going to acknowledge such a grave mistake now. Nor do I expect the inquiry to ask the right questions: obfuscation and distraction will continue and mea culpas will never arrive.
But it can’t all be put down to the media. Over that strange period, we were reminded of something important about human nature: when frightened, people will choose security over freedom. Endless opinion polls confirmed it, and politicians acted upon it. Tellingly, those constituencies most in favour of lockdowns in our polling are leafy and affluent — New Forest West, Bexhill, Henley, The Cotswolds. Perhaps some people even enjoyed it.
Meanwhile, the dissenting minority is not going anywhere. This new class of citizen is now a feature of every Western society: deeply distrustful of authority, sceptical of the “narrative”, hungry for alternative explanations, inured to being demonised and laughed at. The dissident class skews young (it includes 39% of 25-34 year olds) and clusters around poorer inner-city neighbourhoods; it heads to alternative media channels for information. Its number was greatly increased over the lockdown era as those people lost faith in the way the world is run. They will continue to make their presence felt in the years to come.
As for me, the past three years have changed how I view the world. I feel no anger, simply a wariness: an increased sense of how fragile our liberal way of life is, how precarious its institutions and principles, and how good people, including those I greatly admire, are capable of astonishing misjudgements given the right atmosphere of fear and moral panic. In particular those years revealed the dark side of supposedly enlightened secular rationalism — how, if freed from its moorings, it can tend towards a crudely mechanistic world in which inhuman decisions are justified to achieve dubious measurable targets.
I hope there is no “next time”, and that the political class will never again think nationwide lockdowns are a proper policy option in a liberal democracy. But if they do, I suspect the opposition, while still perhaps a minority, will be better organised.
On March 9, The Telegraph‘s Fraser Nelson, who also edits The Spectator, had more on Sweden’s success in ‘Britain may well repeat its lockdown blunders sooner than anyone thinks’:
… The winner, with the smallest rise in “excess” deaths since the pandemic began, is Sweden.
For those who had accused the lockdown-rejecting Swedes of pursuing a “let it rip” policy that left people to die, this is all rather baffling …
Sweden had the unflappable Anders Tegnell as chief epidemiologist, who went all-out to argue against what he saw as populism: lockdowns that were not backed by science and could cause more harm than good. He never stopped arguing, giving television interviews while waiting on train platforms and publishing study after study. He won people over. Sweden ended up with middling Covid but among Europe’s least economic damage and lowest increase in deaths. In an interview last week, Tegnell offered advice for his successor: “Have ice in your stomach.”
… The science on Covid still isn’t clear. On masks, on social distancing, even school closures – it’s hard to say what difference they make to the spread of a virus. The UK hasn’t commissioned a single high-quality study into what works and what doesn’t. Even the excess deaths count is complicated – but Sweden is at or near the bottom, whichever way you cut it. But even now, no one seems very interested in the actual science, or learning lessons any time soon.
It’s now 20 years since the boring old coronavirus mutated into a killer in the Sars epidemic. Asian countries updated their pandemic emergency plans – but Britain didn’t, sticking with its flu-based approach. Are we seeing the same complacency yet again? We have now seen, in the Lockdown Files, much of what went wrong. We have also seen, in Sweden, what can go right. We will now see whether Rishi Sunak can put the two together.
The following day, The Telegraph reposted Nelson’s February 23, 2022 article, ‘Was Sweden right about Covid all along?’
It explains more about the psyche of the Swedes as a people:
To understand Sweden, you need to understand a word that’s hard to explain, let alone translate: lagom. It means, in effect, “perfect-simple”: not too much, not too little. People who are lagom don’t stand out or make a fuss: they blend right in – and this is seen as a virtue.
Essays are written about why lagom sums up a certain Swedish mindset – that it’s bad to stand out, to consider yourself better or be an outlier. That’s why it’s so strange that, during the lockdowns, Sweden became the world’s defiant outlier.
Swedes saw it the other way around. They were keeping calm and carrying on: lockdown was an extreme, draconian, untested experiment. Lock up everyone, keep children out of school, suspend civil liberties, send police after people walking their dogs – and call this “caution”? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, never spoke about a Swedish “experiment”. He said all along he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven.
Tegnell also made another point: that he didn’t claim to be right. It would take years, he’d argue, to see who had jumped the right way. His calculation was that, on a whole-society basis, the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do. But you’d only know if this was so after a few years. You’d have to look at cancer diagnosis, hospital waiting lists, educational damage and, yes, count the Covid dead.
The problem with lockdowns is that no one looks at whole-society pictures. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team from Imperial College London admitted this, once, as a breezy aside. “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression,” they wrote in a supposed assessment of lockdown, “which will be high.” But just how high? And were they a price worth paying? …
… its people were incredibly cautious. But unlike Brits, they had a government that trusted them.
There were some Swedish diktats: a “rule of eight” was set up for a while. Bars, restaurants and cafes were all socially distanced and, at one point, had to close by 8.30pm. For a few weeks, Swedes even had vaccine passports. But that was about it: the rest was guidance, and it was followed.
What no statistic can convey is just how careful Swedes were; something that struck me whenever I’d visit. It was perfectly legal to meet up in bars and for a fika in a coffee shop, but most didn’t. A friend of mine had a rule that she’d only ever meet friends outside – even in the Stockholm winter (she did this so much that she got frostbite). In summer last year, studies showed Swedes working from home more than in any other European country.
This kept Covid low, while the lack of rules allowed for people to use their judgement while minimising economic and social damage. Sweden’s GDP fell by 2.9 per cent in 2020, while Britain’s collapsed by 9.4 per cent.
The cost of the various Covid measures is best summed up by the debt mountain: an extra £8,400 per head in Britain, and £3,000 in Sweden.
Swedish schools kept going throughout, with no face masks. Sixth-formers and undergraduates switched to home learning, but the rest of Swedish children went to school as normal. That’s not to say there weren’t absences as the virus spread: it was common to see a third, at times even half of the class absent due to sniffles or suspected Covid. But there were no full-scale closures and, aside from some suspicions about minor grade inflation (the average maths grade sneaked up to 10.1, from 9.3), there is no talk in Sweden about educational devastation …
Pimlico Plumbers’ Charlie Mullins recants on the vaccine
Charlie Mullins was, until recently, the owner of London’s Pimlico Plumbers, the capital’s best known plumbing outfit. He has since sold the company.
He still owned it during the pandemic and insisted that all of his many employees have the vaccine. In fact, he went so far as to say that no one — no one — should be walking around in public unless they had the vaccine.
On March 7, Mullins changed his tune after having read The Lockdown Files. He appeared on GB News that day to say that the British people were ‘misled and lied to’. The second video has the content of what he said when he was pro-vaccine:
Better late than never. I wonder how many of his plumbers lost their jobs because they refused the jab.
He’s the sort who probably would have agreed with the jailing of the Scarborough woman for coughing in February 2021:
Shameful.
Don’t mention China; meanwhile, Joe Biden and FBI are on the case of suspected virus origin
From the beginning of the pandemic, Matt Hancock, to his credit, was suspicious of the origins of the virus. He wanted to include that in his December 2022 book, Pandemic Diaries, but Downing Street refused.
On March 8, The Telegraph published ‘Matt Hancock Covid memoirs censored over Wuhan lab leak comments’:
Matt Hancock was censored by the Cabinet Office over his concerns that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab leak in Wuhan, the Lockdown Files reveals.
The former health secretary was told to tone down claims in his book because the Government feared it would “cause problems” with China.
Mr Hancock wanted to say that the Chinese explanation – that the virus being discovered close to a government science lab in Wuhan was coincidental – “just doesn’t fly”.
But, in correspondence from late last year and leaked to the Telegraph, the Cabinet Office told him that the Government’s position was that the original outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” .
It is the first time that the British position has been categorically stated. Mr Hancock was warned that to differ from this narrative, which resembles China’s version of events, risked “damaging national security”.
In his book, Pandemic Diaries, Mr Hancock also wanted to write that “Global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation into what happened” but this too was watered down …
The changes to the book were made by the Cabinet Office when Mr Hancock submitted his manuscript for review – a process all former ministers are expected to follow – last year. Once alterations were made, the book was signed off for publication by Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, on November 4 2022.
That same day, Hancock’s co-author Isabel Oakeshott, to whom he gave his WhatsApp messages that form the basis of The Lockdown Files, noted that the FBI has since gone public with its suspicions in ‘Upsetting China is the Government’s biggest taboo, as I found out the hard way’:
Sunak recently used his first foreign policy speech to declare that the “golden era” of relations between our two countries is over. Unfortunately, the panjandrums in the Foreign Office have yet to catch up, as the Cabinet Office’s painstaking attempts to water down Matt Hancock’s book about the pandemic expose.
Did Covid-19 originate in a Wuhan lab, a global centre for the study and storage of exactly the type of coronaviruses that led to the outbreak? The FBI is certainly warming to the theory. Just last week, the US intelligence agency said that was the most likely cause of the outbreak.
Choosing his words carefully, FBI director Christopher Wray declared that a “potential lab incident” was “most likely” to blame. Other intelligence agencies also struggle to believe that the proximity of the first known case to the world’s leading coronavirus research laboratory – a place where samples are deliberately altered to make them more deadly to humans – is just happenstance.
As for Downing St? They won’t go there. During tortuous negotiations between Hancock and the Cabinet Office over what he could and could not say in his Pandemic Diaries, officials let slip something quite extraordinary: that they believe the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first recorded Covid outbreak is “entirely coincidental.” They seem terrified of anyone saying otherwise.
On March 20, The Guardian reported that Biden ordered the release of intelligence relating to potential links between the virus and the Wuhan lab:
It was discussed on March 21 on GB News:
Conservative MPs have been eager to discuss this in more depth; The Telegraph covered their concerns two weeks before Biden ordered the American intelligence release.
Let us hope that Rishi is not reticent. His father-in-law has an important Infosys office in China.
Conclusion
The Telegraph did the UK a huge favour in publishing The Lockdown Files.
They confirmed all my suspicions in their marvellous ‘read it and weep’ articles.
Sadly, even friends of mine have criticised Isabel Oakeshott — ‘that girl’ — and say that everything will be properly dealt with during the inquiry. As if!
Then again, they were proponents of lockdown. And, yes, they live in a leafy place in the Home Counties with a huge garden where they plant their own vegetable supply. They didn’t suffer one bit.
When will some people ever learn?
End of series
Yesterday’s post introduced Matt Hancock’s hunger for absolute control during the coronavirus debacle.
The story, with excerpts from The Telegraph‘s The Lockdown Files, continues after a brief interlude.
Giles Coren: ‘we all broke the rules’
On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 22, broadcaster and Times columnist Giles Coren, son of the late humourist and Punch editor Alan Coren, gave a radio interview in which he said that ‘we all broke the rules’, meaning during the pandemic.
The subject arose as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was taking his place at the parliamentary Privileges Committee hearing to defend himself over Partygate.
As a result, Giles Coren trended on Twitter — and not in a good way:
A few of the cleaner tweets follow:
However, this next tweet nails it. Giles Coren doesn’t mean average Britons. He’s referring to the media class and other privileged oafs:
Which brings me neatly to Matt Hancock.
Hancock wants immunity over care home deaths
On March 4, 2023, Chronicle Live recapped an article from the Mirror about a talk that the former Health and Social Care Secretary gave to a group of top-flight London lawyers about who was to blame for care home deaths (emphases mine):
Matt Hancock told a gathering of city lawyers he should be immune from court action over Covid blunders, The Mirror reports – just days before shocking WhatsApp messages he sent during the pandemic were published.
Mr Hancock said he should not be held personally responsible for failings during the fight against Covid-19, such as the Department of Health and Social Care’s failure to safeguard care home residents, simply because he was Secretary of State. Instead he said that “HMG” – the whole Government – should take the blame.
This comes even as prominent campaigners call for the ex-minister to be prosecuted.
He was heard saying that he believes lawyers pursuing him personally “were chasing tabloid headlines”. He was speaking to lawyers from firm Mishcon de Reya in a talk over his book, Pandemic Diaries, coming just months after his stint in the I’m A Celebrity jungle.
Mr Hancock has furiously denied claims that his leaked WhatsApp messages show he ignored Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty’s advice to test all people going into care homes.
His department’s policy of discharging untested patients into them from hospital was ruled unlawful by the High Court in April in a case brought by Dr Cathy Gardner, who lost her father. At the time of the ruling, union GMB said the department had shown a “callous disregard” for care homes.
The messages leaked to the Daily Telegraph this week by Isabel Oakeshott, journalist and the co-author of Mr Hancock’s memoir, show he thought committing to testing people coming into care homes from the community – including staff – didn’t “add anything” and “muddies the waters” …
And 12 days ago he held an online question and answer session with top lawyers from Mishcon de Reya and told them it was wrong that a Secretary of State of a department should be held legally responsible for failures and it should be “HMG” instead. Currently, the defendant in any judicial review against a Government department has to be the Secretary of State.
But Mr Hancock said: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the courts to essentially go chasing tabloid headlines. You know, ‘Hancock broke the law’ – I didn’t break the law.” In the Q&A, Mr Hancock also claimed to have “banned alcohol” in his department to stop his team being “more social”.
Some of the leaked WhatsApp messages reveal then-aide Gina Coladangelo – who is now his partner – telling him there were drinks in the fridge to celebrate hitting his testing target in May 2020. She wrote, adding a beer glasses emoji: “Drinks cold in fridge at DH. Feel free to open before we are back.”
A spokesperson for Mr Hancock confirmed he did not introduce a booze ban until the next January. Mr Hancock also blasted criticism of the Tories’ bungled PPE procurement as “offensive” in the Q&A and justified writing off £12billion of PPE, most of it unusable, saying: “I’d rather save lives.”
… Meanwhile, activist Gina Miller, leader of the True and Fair Party and who took the Government to court over Brexit, has written to Met Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley calling for Mr Hancock to be prosecuted.
She wrote: “The threshold has been met to investigate Mr Hancock for gross negligence manslaughter… a common law offence that carries a maximum of life imprisonment.”
‘Mr Vaccine’
As 2020 dragged on for many of us, Hancock was keen for his moment of glory, as The Telegraph related in ‘Inside Matt Hancock’s desperate bid to be known as ‘Mr Vaccine”’.
Emphases mine below:
Matt Hancock feared he would not get credit for the UK’s vaccine success and described the speeding up of the jabs rollout as a “Hancock triumph”.
The former health secretary’s WhatsApp messages show he fought to be the face of Britain’s vaccine campaign at the height of the pandemic and became furious if he thought others were getting the credit.
And he was told by his media advisers that fronting Britain’s vaccine programme would allow the press and public to “forgive” him for imposing lockdowns and that “politically” he must balance the two.
However, the Department of Health and Social Care had to work with the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on the vaccine procurement.
Hancock was unhappy:
Mr Hancock had already battled with his Cabinet colleagues over who should have overall control of the procurement strategy, and struck an uneasy compromise between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The announcement of the Pfizer vaccine made things worse for him:
In November 2020, the Department of Health caught wind that Pfizer was planning an imminent announcement that its vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective against Covid-19.
The Pfizer vaccine was the first to report its interim trial data and went on to be the first to be administered to the public in the UK the following month …
On hearing that the news was about to break, Mr Hancock bemoaned he was not live on camera and worried he would be overshadowed by Alok Sharma, the then business secretary.
The article has a screenshot of the WhatsApps he exchanged with adviser Damon Poole:
Pity I’m not up in the Commons!
I should do a clip
We should pump out the NHS doc
Do No10 know?
When Poole answered in the affirmative, Hancock was eager to do the media round the next morning:
I should DEFINITELY do the round tmrw
Just to reinforce the point, he messaged Poole again:
It MUST NOT be Alok!
On December 8, Hancock appeared on ITV’s breakfast show, Good Morning Britain (GMB), to watch the first Britons, a man and a woman, both elderly, get their ‘jabs’:
… Mr Hancock gave one of his most memorable interviews of the pandemic …
Wiping a tear from his eye, he told the programme it had “been such a tough year for so many people” and he was relieved that people could at last “get on with their lives”.
The lady was Margaret Keenan, aged 90 at the time. She received her jab in Coventry.
The man’s name was William ‘Will’ Shakespeare. He was 81 at the time and has since died (nothing to do with the vaccine). When the presenter announced his name, it was hard to know whether Hancock was laughing at it or crying about his step-grandfather who died of Covid (more here).
The frames extracted from that moment don’t exactly make for comfortable viewing. Thank goodness someone online captured them for posterity. Don’t miss the caption:
However, there was no immediate big media momentum for Hancock after those initial jabs, even though millions of people watch GMB.
On Boxing Day 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock to ask if he had spoken with journalists from the Sunday papers. Poole did not like all the articles about the vaccine, which he called ‘this vaccine spray’. As it was the day after Christmas, Hancock hadn’t looked at the papers until he heard from Poole:
Now I’ve seen it. Sure it’s not No10?
Poole replied:
I’m pretty sure it’s them
MOS [Mail on Sunday]/Times/Tele[graph]
Hancock fired back:
The thing that p—–s me off is the Mail on Sunday links it to Rishi. What’s that all about?
The first few days of 2021 proved no better for Hancock’s desired media exposure. On January 7, Hancock asked Poole to send him the link to a Mail story with the headline ‘Vaccine approval is finally cut from TWENTY days to five’. Poole sent him the link and added:
MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency] briefing [I’m] pretty sure
Hancock asked if that was true. Poole said he thought it was and sent him a link to a tweet of the Mail‘s front page:
Hancock replied:
I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph! And if it IS true we neeed [sic] to accelerate massively.
The Lockdown Files article continues:
The strategy of taking credit for the vaccine, and therefore the impact on lockdown restrictions, was eventually given its own slogan: “Own the exit.”
The phrase is repeated several times between Mr Hancock and his aides in the months that followed.
Then, finally, there was success at last. On January 11:
… the day the official vaccine delivery plan was published, Mr Hancock sent Mr Poole screenshots of news articles about his announcement.
Hancock messaged Poole:
These shots are extraordinary. Positive coverage in the Sun AND Mail.
Poole replied:
Keep riding it through to spring – own the exit!
Well, Hancock owned his own exit that June. That’s for sure.
‘Headless chicken’ over vaccines
Not everyone who worked with Hancock would call him ‘Mr Vaccine’.
Clive Dix wrote a first-person article for The Telegraph about his experience, ‘I worked with Matt Hancock on Covid vaccines – he’s a headless chicken’:
I worked with Matt Hancock the whole time I was at the Vaccine Taskforce and he was, without doubt, the most difficult of all the ministers because he didn’t take time to understand anything.
He was all over the place, a bit like a headless chicken. He often made statements saying “we are going to do X and we want to let the world know about it”, but we were dealing with an uncertain situation in bringing the vaccines forward.
The manufacturing process was brand new and any process like this is fraught with problems, which we need to fix as we go along, but normally you would spend two or three years stress-testing something like this.
Hancock was laying down timelines by saying things like “we will vaccinate the whole population”, and these timelines drove his behaviour.
Hancock was upset when there was a problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine production:
When we said the AstraZeneca vaccine had manufacturing problems, that is when Hancock panicked.
He didn’t believe us. We were working night and day to make it work and he was turning around and saying: “I have said the UK population will all get vaccinated.”
But we couldn’t change the nature of the process and he didn’t get that. He thought it was like procurement. That is where his behaviour came from. He panicked and that led to them going to India and taking vaccines that had been meant for the developing world.
I thought that ethically it was very wrong to take doses that it had been agreed would go to the developing world just to meet an arbitrary timeline. This is why I ended up resigning, because I could no longer advise a government that acted on these terms.
Nonetheless, the team pressed on with getting doses from India:
Here, we were taking 10 million doses from the developing world just to meet Hancock’s timeline and it was a timeline that had just been plucked out of the air. We were still well ahead of the majority of the world, ministers should have been upfront and said that we can vaccinate everyone within a month, but we won’t quite hit the timeline. They should have admitted that they were slightly wrong.
I couldn’t stop them doing it, because it wasn’t my job to make policy decisions about where we get the vaccine from. But I said if this is where you are, then I don’t want to advise this government anymore. I didn’t resign there and then, but I did resign in March 2021. I didn’t want to disrupt the work.
It was all driven for the wrong reasons and then Hancock – rather than put his hands up – blamed the Vaccine Taskforce for stalling.
For him to be sending messages and saying Kate Bingham [head of the Vaccine Taskforce] was not reliable is appalling.
On October 4, 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock a link to a Financial Times article: ‘Less than half UK population to receive coronavirus vaccine, says task force head’.
Hancock replied that he didn’t have a subscription to the paper, which is behind a paywall. He asked Poole:
… is that Kate?
When Poole responded in the affirmative, Hancock messaged back:
If so we absolutely need No10 to sit on her hard. She has view [sic] and a wacky way of expressing them & is totally unreliable. She regards anything that isn’t her idea as political interference
Poole messaged back, agreeing, saying he’d had a ‘blazing row’ with her when he was working at No. 10.
Clive Dix resumes his story, alive with memories of Hancock:
We were working as hard as we could and he thought he could just come in and make a bold statement to the public and tell us that we have got to do it. I don’t think he understood the process. He was a loose cannon.
Dix tells us more about how Health and Social Care worked with BEIS. Here, too, Hancock had to have his own way:
The taskforce sat in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and that is where the budget came from. We reported to Alok Sharma and then Nadhim Zahawi came in as vaccines minister. Hancock wanted to get involved and because he was secretary of state, Alok stepped aside.
He was using the vaccine to protect his reputation.
Dix, who was a volunteer, gives us an insight into the wider politics involved:
I had worked for nine months from 4am until midnight without any pay to do this.
It is certainly extraordinary to see how two-faced they are. They were all nice to me to my face but to see what they were saying to Boris Johnson was particularly unpleasant.
It reflects badly on Nadhim and all the civil servants who worked so hard to get this right. In my humble opinion, Hancock was actually the problem.
Hancock hoped to treat French Covid patients
Incredibly, during lockdown, Hancock wanted to appeal to French president Emmanuel Macron to allow his nation’s coronavirus patients to be treated in the UK.
With the NHS under pressure, Hancock somehow thought he managed to find spare beds … for the French.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the French as much as I love the British and the Americans, in no particular order. They’re the three societies I know the best. But this was a step too far.
After all, the Government locked down the UK to save the NHS, right? So how was it that Hancock suddenly found spare beds, especially for patients from other countries?
Meanwhile, British patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses couldn’t get a look in to a doctor, never mind a hospital.
The Telegraph‘s ‘Matt Hancock’s secret plan to import French Covid patients’ says that, in November 2020:
Matt Hancock planned to bring French Covid patients to the UK for treatment during the second wave of the pandemic, despite national lockdown restrictions in force to protect the NHS.
Messages between the then health secretary, his advisers and Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, show he hoped to offer “spare” intensive care unit beds to Emmanuel Macron to help the French president deal with a major outbreak in his country in November 2020.
At that time, Britain was under a second national lockdown that was sold to the public as necessary to prevent the “medical and moral disaster” of an overwhelmed NHS.
But Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care created a secret plan to transfer Covid patients from the busiest French hospitals, bringing more cases of Covid to the UK.
However, that wasn’t enough. Hancock also wanted to make the same offer to Italy. The article has screenshots of the relevant WhatsApp messages.
That aside, let’s continue with France:
The plan is not thought to have ever been implemented, but Mr Hancock said: “We may need to make a similar offer to Italy,” despite exponential increases in Britain’s own case numbers.
On Nov 13, Mr Hancock shared with his top advisers a letter that he planned to send to Olivier Veran, the French health minister, offering to import French Covid patients to the UK for treatment.
“I have seen the pressure on your hospitals, and that some patients are being transferred abroad,” the letter said. “We have our epidemic largely in the north of England, and some spare capacity in London and the south.
“We could provide some ICU beds to which you could transfer some patients. Would that be helpful to relieve pressure on your most affected regions? Our countries have always stood by each other in times of need.”
By this point in the European second Covid wave, the UK was looking to Europe as case numbers exploded in France, Italy and Spain, with a second national lockdown imposed in an attempt to reduce transmission.
France had already been taken off the UK’s travel corridor list, meaning that any person travelling to Britain from France was required to quarantine for 14 days or face a fine. By late November, France and Britain had similar rates of the virus, with around 275 cases per 100,000 people.
However, on October 31, Boris stated publicly that the UK had reached capacity:
In an address to the nation on Oct 31, Mr Johnson said that even in the south-west of England, where Mr Hancock had proposed housing French patients, “it is now clear that current projections mean they will run out of hospital capacity in a matter of weeks unless we act”.
He said that if new measures were not imposed, the growth of Covid numbers would mean that “doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would get oxygen and who wouldn’t”, adding: “The overrunning of the NHS would be a medical and moral disaster beyond the raw loss of life.
“It is crucial to grasp that this general threat to public health comes not from focusing too much on Covid, but from not focusing enough, from failing to get it under control.”
It should be noted that Hancock got this mad idea from a life peer and was immediately swept up by it:
An earlier WhatsApp conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Johnson about the idea shows it originated with Lord Llewellyn of Steep, who was then serving as Britain’s ambassador in Paris.
“I love this idea of Ed Llewellyn’s to offer Macron (privately) to treat some of their cases where they have pressure on the health system,” Mr Hancock wrote to Mr Johnson on Oct 2, 2020. “Because we have a regional problem we also have regional capacity in East Anglia (Cambridge?) or the SW.”
Lord Llewellyn is now serving as the UK’s ambassador to Italy. He is a former Downing Street chief of staff, serving in Number 10 under David Cameron.
The mind boggles.
That’s enough Matt Hancock for one day.
Don’t worry. There’s more to come.
Soon.
Over the past several days, I have been digesting The Telegraph‘s series about the pandemic, The Lockdown Files.
Readers who missed them can catch up on my posts here, here, here, here and here. That last post, from March 8, 2023, discusses then-Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock’s desire to ‘frighten the pants off people’ with the Kent variant at the end of 2020. Top civil servant Simon Case agreed that behavioural change using fear and guilt was paramount. Masks, as many Covid sceptics suggested at the time, were the most visible means of compliance — or submission — to Government diktats.
Top oncologist reacts
On Thursday, March 9, The Telegraph published a post from the UK’s top oncologist, Prof Karl Sikora: ‘Lockdown supporters called me a killer — they should be disgusted with themselves’ (emphases mine below):
Opposing the relentless raft of lockdown policies was a lonely and, at times, extremely unpleasant experience. Those of us who voiced concerns about effectively closing down a country were labelled as far-Right extremists who were happy to see millions perish to the disease. It was a disgrace, legitimised by low-grade politicians such as Matt Hancock who were far too interested in advancing their own public image. Thousands succumbed to the destructive, and often pointless, lockdown measures they pushed at every opportunity.
There will be no apologies from the baying lockdown mob – the damage has been done, the debate has mostly moved on and the inquiry may well become a total whitewash. The Telegraph’s lockdown files have done a great service in partially halting that march.
… Many of those voices are now totally silent on the thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths related to lockdown delays and backlogs. I have no regrets in my opposition to a variety of lockdown policies and the language I used throughout the pandemic – I wonder if they can say the same?
We now know for sure that some decisions taken were based in PR and politics, rather than science and sense. When the Health Secretary is talking about “frightening the pants off everyone” with a new strain, those of us who voiced scepticism at the time about the language used can feel vindicated …
I’m desperate for a Covid inquiry whitewash to be avoided for one simple reason: this cannot be allowed to happen again. If we don’t at least ask the questions, when another pandemic, or the threat of one, comes around, lockdown cannot be the go-to option. The advisers who made the past recommendations cannot be used ever again.
… Routine healthcare for non-Covid conditions was effectively shut down to millions for months on end, and now we have thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths. What did they think would happen, honestly?
My lockdown inbox was overflowing with desperate cancer patients whose treatment had been indefinitely postponed. I remember one case of a mother who had her chemotherapy cancelled, leading to her tragic death leaving behind three young children and a loving husband. And it’s not just cancer: cardiac issues untreated, blood pressure out of control, strokes uncared for, other preventative measures forgotten and of course soaring obesity. The post-lockdown crisis is across all aspects of healthcare, physical and mental. That is for those lucky enough to receive any medical support or diagnosis at all. Others were told to stay home and that’s exactly what they did – dying there without the care they needed and deserved.
To those of you who took a brave stand speaking out against various restrictions and policies – from me, a sincere thank you. We comprehensively lost the argument in the court of public opinion, but hopefully a small difference was made. I suspect the national mood may have significantly shifted over the last week. Sunlight is the best disinfectant after all, and spring is on the way.
That same day, Helia Ebrahimi, who had a mastectomy in 2022, told her story to the paper: ‘They said I’d lose a breast and maybe my life — but the NHS made me wait four months’:
In the UK, more than 5,500 women are diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma every year. But often their diagnoses are late. Sometimes too late. When it became clear how progressed my cancer was, my surgeon wanted to start treatment immediately. I was at The Royal Marsden in London, a standard bearer in cancer care that also benefits from charity funding. But even at the Marsden, the pressures on the NHS are inescapable. Especially last year, when the country was reeling from a Covid backlog and 327,000 people were on the cancer waiting list in England alone, with 34,000 people failing to get treatment within the Government target of 62 days – the worst backlog on record. Almost 10,000 people were still not receiving treatment within 104 days …
Ultimately, my husband and I decided we couldn’t wait, so I used my work health insurance scheme to cover most of the cost. My surgeon from the Marsden still performed the operation but at a private hospital, with theatre space.
An article about the waiting list times also appeared in The Telegraph that day, ‘Nearly half of cancer patients waiting too long for treatment, the worst on record’:
More than 7,000 patients did not receive their first treatment within 62 days following an urgent GP referral, official figures for January show.
Only 54.4 per cent of patients with an urgent referral were seen within the target time, against a benchmark of 85 per cent – the lowest on records dating back to 2009 …
It comes after NHS bosses admitted this week cancer recovery targets are likely to be pushed back another year to March 2024.
The article has more statistics.
It is interesting that there is no mention of the pandemic or the lockdown of the NHS to patients such as these. Equally interesting is Prof Stephen Powis’s response. Powis was also an adviser on pandemic policy:
Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said there had been “no let-up” of pressures, with staff facing “significant levels of respiratory illness in hospital, which came at the same time as disruption from industrial action”.
“Despite this, staff continued to deliver for patients, bringing down elective waits, treating more cancer patients and delivering more diagnostic tests for people than ever before,” he said.
Instead, he points to possible upcoming strikes by junior doctors:
He added: “The NHS will not stop in its efforts to bring down 18 month waits for elective care and bring down the cancer backlog, but it is inevitable that if the upcoming junior doctors strikes happen they will have a significant impact on cancer care and routine operations that were scheduled to happen.
“As ever, we will do all we can to limit the impact to patients.”
Early 2020: Persuading MPs through messaging
Going back to the start of 2020, chief Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock thought that Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign director could get ‘hawkish’ Cabinet members on board with the pandemic measures. A full lockdown began on March 23, 2020.
On March 2, 2023, The Telegraph explains how the two did it in ‘Dominic Cummings deployed election mastermind to reassure Cabinet hawks of public support for lockdown’:
they set up a meeting between Cabinet ministers and Isaac Levido in April 2020.
Mr Levido, an Australian political strategist and protegee of the former Tory aide Sir Lynton Crosby, was recruited to Downing Street in March 2020 to improve the Government’s Covid messaging.
He is credited with masterminding Mr Johnson’s 2019 election victory three months earlier and is a close ally of Mr Cummings.
In a conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Cummings on April 23 exactly one month after the imposition of the first lockdown, the former health secretary said his Cabinet colleagues should be told that more than half of voters either supported lockdown measures or thought they should be strengthened.
At that point, if we look at Boris’s words from March, the two or three weeks ‘to flatten the sombrero’ would have meant that a lifting of lockdown was in sight. Not so. England remained in lockdown until July 4 that year, with a gradual loosening in between for construction workers and, in June, schools.
Not surprisingly, in April, some Cabinet members were ready to lift lockdown, for obvious reasons:
… the conversation took place as some ministers were beginning to make the case, often in anonymous briefings to newspapers, that keeping lockdown measures in place for too long would have serious consequences for the economy and society.
It was unclear what polling Hancock was using. In addition, Isaac Levido stayed on board only for a few months before pursuing his own interests:
It is unclear which polling Mr Hancock was referring to in his messages to Mr Cummings, but research from a Cambridge University team led by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter in April 2020 showed 87 per cent of the public did believe lockdown should remain in place for at least another three weeks.
Mr Levido left Downing Street in July 2020 and founded Fleetwood Strategy, a public relations firm. He was later brought back into Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) as a strategist during Nadhim Zahawi’s tenure as chairman.
By late April, Mr Hancock had recently announced a testing capacity target of 100,000 swabs a day, and been criticised by Downing Street sources for an “irrational” and “arbitrary” approach to the pandemic.
“Hancock’s not had a good crisis,” one No10 source told The Telegraph at the time.
“The prime minister will say he has confidence in him, but it doesn’t feel like that.”
At this point, Boris was out of hospital recovering from his near-fatal bout of the virus. According to a WhatsApp message from Cummings shown in the article, he allegedly urged harmony:
“FYI Boris called a few people tonight to say — all these attacks [on] Matt, I want us to stick up for him etc,” he said.
Cummings’s approach to policy was similar to Hancock’s:
On June 1, the day schools began to reopen from the first lockdown, he suggested enforcing mask-wearing on trains and buses.
“I think we shd make it legally compulsory to wear mask on public transport (with only eg small child/disabled etc exception). It’s free, buys us some R, no real downside,” he said.
Lee Cain, the Downing Street director of communications, replied: “We need to bottom out enforcement etc – if we are doing it PM can drop it on Wednesday.”
The policy was announced three days later, and came into force on June 15.
How libertarian Boris became lockdown ‘zealot’
On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘How Boris Johnson veered from lockdown sceptic to zealot’.
The article explains how Cummings began to refer to the then-Prime Minister as ‘the trolley’. In other words, like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, he careered all over the place with decision-making during the pandemic:
New evidence suggests Mr Cummings was at least partially right. In WhatsApp conversations with ministers and officials, Mr Johnson veered between lockdown sceptic and lockdown zealot, as he reacted to the ever-changing data and advice.
The former prime minister would sometimes introduce an idea, only to abandon his stance even when others agreed with him.
Mr Johnson’s biggest internal conflict came over the three national lockdowns that were controversially imposed in 2020 and 2021.
A libertarian by nature, Mr Johnson repeatedly changed his mind over forcing people to stay at home depending on who he had been talking to …
In July 2020, Mr Johnson described the idea of a second lockdown as the “nuclear option”. In Oct 2020, he described the idea as “the height of absurdity”.
Yet in June 2020, when the country was still in the grip of the first national lockdown, Mr Johnson’s attitude seemed to be different …
He has always denied that his brush with death changed his mind on government policy.
The article includes screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges during that time.
Later in 2020, Matt Hancock began to find Boris’s vacillating exasperating:
At the end of Oct 2020, the then prime minister was wrestling with the decision of whether or not to put the country into lockdown for a second time.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Oct 21, in response to a question from Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, Mr Johnson described a second lockdown as “the height of absurdity”.
And on Oct 30, Mr Hancock was messaging Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, expressing exasperation that Mr Johnson appeared even more reluctant than Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, to take tough measures.
Less than a week later, Mr Johnson introduced a second lockdown, saying: “Now is the time to take action, as there is no other choice.”
It was claimed at the time that he had been “bounced” into announcing the lockdown after Michael Gove, the then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was accused of leaking plans for the lockdown to the media before Mr Johnson had made up his mind.
England entered a third semi-lockdown on Monday, January 4, 2021. Pupils had returned to school that day only to be told by the end of it that schools were closed for the forseeable future.
Hospitality venues, having lost out on Christmas 2020 bookings, were also severely affected during that time. Some never recovered.
Nor, indeed, had a significant number of schoolchildren. Mental health problems exploded during and after lockdown.
Schoolchild kills himself
On March 4, Isabel Oakeshott, to whom Hancock gave 100,000 WhatsApp messages which form the basis of The Lockdown Files, told us about a tragic case of suicide in ‘The dreadful consequences of Matt Hancock’s lockdown scare tactics’:
While Matt Hancock breezily discussed how to “frighten the pants off everyone” with a new strain, a boy called Mark was listening to the drumbeat towards another national lockdown grow louder in deepening despair.
It was December 2020, and the 15-year-old’s life had already been turned upside down by the pandemic.
A few months earlier, his mother Anna Marie had decided that they should move house because they couldn’t even go to the local park during the first lockdown.
She describes how over-zealous council officials had shut the playground, leaving her struggling to cope with Mark’s little brother, a hyperactive five-year-old …
Now, the family was in a better place in the North East, but Anna Marie had been unable to get Mark into a new school.
With “home schooling” now an easy default, education authorities shrugged that he could just study for his GCSEs online.
Unable to play football during the first lockdown, he started putting on weight. When other children returned to school that autumn, he became increasingly isolated – and frightened.
As Mr Hancock and his acolytes plotted to use a new strain of coronavirus to terrify the population, that fear descended into paranoia. Mark became so scared of the virus that he would not even open his bedroom window.
“His nails were bitten to the bone. He was literally frightened of the air. He wore a mask everywhere,” his mother says …
“We tried to keep the TV off, but we were being bombarded,” she says, of the prophecies of doom relentlessly pumped out by an acquiescing media.
“Mark knew we were going into another lockdown. The fear was the thing that affected him most. He was disconnected; distant. I didn’t know what to do.”
In December 2021:
Almost exactly a year later, when most of the population had been vaccinated against Covid but the Omicron variant prompted yet another fear campaign, he told his mother he was popping out to the shops – and never returned.
His body was found by dog walkers three days later, hanging from a tree.
Though he had never talked of taking his own life, his family had been prepared for the worst, after discovering that he had searched the internet for how to tie a noose …
An intelligent child, Mark had hoped to study computer science when he left school. Instead, his education came to a juddering halt …
After the harrowing discovery on Christmas Eve, Mark was cremated. His mother and siblings took his ashes to Seaton Carew Beach near Hartlepool, a place Mark loved. They scattered the ashes over the sand dunes.
“He went off on the wind,” Anna Marie says quietly.
Let not the lessons from this tragedy also blow away on the breeze.
“Frightening the pants off people” had truly dreadful consequences.
Oakeshott expresses thoughts I have had since March 2020 about Britons who had houses with gardens versus those who were trapped in flats along with our notional betters who were at the helm of this tragic decision-making:
Those responsible for “Project Fear” had no idea about the lives of people like Anna Marie and her children.
In their spacious houses, in leafy parts of London, with access to all the luxuries that made lockdowns quite tolerable for the better off, their own families were doing fine.
Hancock and his advisers were caught up in their own sense of heroism.
Mr Hancock and his advisers did not even try to imagine how the tactics they were gleefully discussing to achieve “proper behaviour change” would affect the most vulnerable in society.
Heady on the unprecedented power they had seized to control all our lives, they were caught up in the excitement of managing the day-to-day crisis and their own sense of heroism at their leading roles in the drama.
They were completely removed from the reality of lockdowns for those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum.
Judging from the total absence of any discussion about collateral damage in their WhatsApp messages, they had zero interest in hearing about it either …
Is Simon Case pondering his future?
Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who is also the head of the Civil Service, has come under criticism for his WhatsApp messages revealed in The Lockdown Files.
Case’s messages show that he that he thought quarantining holidaymakers ‘hilarious’. He also thought that fear and guilt were appropriate tools to get the British public to comply with pandemic policies.
Conservative MPs were unhappy with what they had read in The Telegraph. On Saturday, March 4, the paper published ‘Tories accuse Simon Case of left-wing bias over Covid rules’:
Britain’s top civil servant has been accused of left-wing bias by senior Tories after he dismissed concerns about Covid rules as “pure Conservative ideology”.
Simon Case is facing questions over his political impartiality and conduct during the pandemic, following the emergence of leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph.
On Saturday Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was forced to declare that Mr Case, who is Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, retained his “confidence”.
Mr Case’s comment that Sir Alok Sharma, the then business secretary, opposed compelling hospitality venues to keep customers’ details because of “pure Conservative ideology”, have led to claims that he overstepped the mark of Civil Service impartiality.
At the time, Mr Case was the Downing Street permanent secretary in charge of the Civil Service response to Covid.
At various points during the pandemic, he appeared to side with Matt Hancock against other Cabinet ministers, including Mr Sunak, the then chancellor, who on one occasion he described as “going bonkers” over a policy that hospitality venues should keep customers’ details for contact-tracing purposes. Mr Case added that Sir Alok would be “mad” to oppose it.
Elsewhere, the leaked messages show that he joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms in quarantine hotels.
The criticism of Mr Case comes at a time when the Civil Service is facing increased scrutiny over its impartiality, after the decision of top mandarin Sue Gray to quit Whitehall and accept a job as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
Esther McVey, a former Cabinet minister, led the criticism of Mr Case’s conduct, saying: “This is the highest civil servant in the land letting the cat out of the bag by suggesting that one of the most centrist of Conservative MPs was pursuing ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply for questioning some of the lockdown rules.
“Leaving aside the fact that this is a Conservative government and so what would he expect from its ministers, if Mr Case thinks Alok Sharma was pursuing such a hard-line Conservative ideology it can only mean that he is yet another senior civil servant on the left wing of British politics.”
She was joined by fellow former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg who said the messages revealed that there was a desire from Mr Hancock and Whitehall officials to “lock us down and keep us locked down”.
“They seem to have enjoyed taking control of people’s lives,” he said, adding that the messages between Mr Case and Mr Hancock show that “they criticised the Chancellor and anyone who is not in favour [of stricter measures], then they tried to marginalise them” …
A third former Cabinet minister said Mr Case’s language is “inappropriate”, adding that civil servants are “not there to make judgement on people’s motivations. It just undermines people who are democratically elected. They are meant to be impartial, professional and objective”.
And a fourth said: “Sue Gray is clearly not the only party political civil servant who doesn’t like the Conservatives. She confirmed what many people thought – that the Civil Service is hostile to the Tory party. And this [Simon Case’s messages] just underlines it.”
However, civil servants also objected to what they have read about Case. One spoke to The Telegraph:
Jill Rutter, former Treasury mandarin, said she was surprised by the “casual callousness” of Mr Case’s remarks.
“The interesting thing is who does Case think he is working for?” she said. “Does he think he is there as a neutral broker to get all the ministers to a view they can accept? Or does he know what the PM wants and is helping him to achieve that outcome? Or is he just trying to achieve Matt Hancock’s objectives?” …
Case’s remarks were one of the more surprising revelations from The Lockdown Files:
The Lockdown Files piled further pressure on Mr Case after a string of difficult news stories.
He faced questions over his apparent role in clearing a controversial £800,000 loan facility for Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and he was also criticised over the partygate affair.
In one exchange with Hancock, Case seemed to doubt Boris Johnson’s honesty:
In another, from October 30, 2020, Case intimated that Boris — his boss — was seen to be untrustworthy:
By Monday, March 6, 2023, despite Rishi’s expressed confidence in him, Cabinet ministers were calling for Case’s departure for his ‘level of indiscretion’. The Times had the story:
That day, The Financial Times had a story about Case on its front page, purporting that he was eyeing an ‘early exit’:
“I can’t see how Simon Case survives this, especially if there are more messages of his directly slagging off other ministers,” one senior Conservative backbencher told the Financial Times.
While friends of the cabinet secretary say that he has continued to receive support from his colleagues, he is also said to be “fed up”.
Among Case’s fellow officials, there is particular concern about his handling of “partygate”, which centred on rule-breaking in Downing Street and Whitehall during Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.
One senior official said: “Simon didn’t stand up for his own people over partygate,” adding that junior staff were issued with fines for attending events happening on his watch.
Case has also drawn scrutiny for his knowledge of Johnson’s personal financial relationship with the chair of the BBC and for the government’s response to bullying allegations against Dominic Raab, the justice secretary.
Rishi Sunak’s spokesman declined to comment on the WhatsApp messages. Downing Street said: “The cabinet secretary has the confidence of the prime minister and that has not changed.”
An ally of Case said that they contained “casual language being used in a casual setting . . . There are a lot of Conservatives who dislike the civil service, but who can name only one civil servant.” Another ally of Case said that his “original sin was being young and talented and promoted to that job before he was grey”.
Another issue upsetting officials was the removal of Tom Scholar, the former permanent secretary of the Treasury, by Kwasi Kwarteng, who briefly served as chancellor in Liz Truss’s shortlived government. This was regarded as inappropriate over-reach by ministers. Case, however, is known to be wounded by the implication that he failed to support Scholar.
And yet:
A Cabinet Office insider said they considered a departure this year very unlikely.
Another senior official said: “The charge sheet is now so long against him, the only interpretation can be that the PM probably doesn’t want to get rid of him.”
However, The Financial Times had pointed the finger at Case on January 31 this year in ‘Simon Case: can the head of Britain’s civil service survive?’
Although he is a career civil servant, Case took a break to work for Prince William. The Prince highly recommended him to Downing Street when Boris became Prime Minister.
It seems as if Case picked up courtier-type habits:
One serving senior official said: “He operates as a courtier. His writ doesn’t run across Whitehall. He doesn’t seem to be in key meetings with the prime minister.” Another former permanent secretary in a major department said: “I don’t think he has any credibility left and really he should go.”
That said, he has his supporters:
… Case’s supporters insist that he is determined to uphold standards and that he retains the confidence of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister. They also argue that he has given the “best possible advice” and point out his job was not always easy during the chaotic premierships of Johnson and Liz Truss.
In the last days of Truss’s crumbling 44-day administration, he advised her to reverse parts of her disastrous “mini” Budget to stave off economic disaster, according to Downing Street insiders. They say he was also instrumental in coordinating with Buckingham Palace over arrangements for the Queen’s funeral.
Case’s supporters add that he hoped to serve at Sunak’s right hand until at least the next election, expected in late 2024. “Cabinet secretaries tend to change after an election,” said one.
Case became cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in September 2020 when Johnson sacked his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, after only two years in the post.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, was instrumental in bringing Case in. At the age of 41 he had held a range of roles in Whitehall and had been Prince William’s private secretary.
A series of scandals engulfed Johnson’s premiership, ranging from the financing of his flat refurbishment and the partygate scandal over Covid-19 lockdown-breaking gatherings in Downing Street, to the appointments of Zahawi and Sharp, which reverberate today. Case, as the prime minister’s most senior adviser, is inevitably in the line of fire.
The article goes on to enumerate the scandals.
Apparently, morale among civil servants began declining in 2022:
Case recognised the problem of falling morale last month in a memo to civil servants, saying that results from a staff survey were “heading in the wrong direction and show that you feel things have become worse”.
Returning to March 6, The Telegraph published ‘Simon Case branded “naive” by top civil servants over “embarassing” WhatsApp remarks’:
Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages, exposed by the Lockdown Files, reveal a “naivety” and “inexperience” that has damaged his reputation, current and former senior civil servants have said …
One former permanent secretary told The Telegraph that the messages showed “a certain naivety and to be honest inexperience”, adding: “It will hurt his reputation.”
The source said: “You should be a bit above the fray [as Cabinet Secretary]. I don’t know why he engaged in those sorts of exchanges. He didn’t need to.”
A former civil servant who advised prime ministers during a decades long career in Whitehall is understood to have found the exchanges highly unusual in their political nature.
The concerns also stretch into the senior echelons of the current civil service, with some insiders noting the pronounced difference in tone of Mr Case’s messages to senior scientific advisers such as Prof Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.
A senior Whitehall source told this newspaper of the Case messages: “They are really embarrassing. It is absolutely cringe-worthy. The things he was saying, the way he was saying them, the awful embarrassing chumminess of them all.”
Mr Case and the Cabinet Office have not responded directly to the contents of the leaked messages sent by Mr Case …
Mr Case became the youngest ever Cabinet Secretary when he was appointed to the role in September 2020 under Boris Johnson.
He had never headed up a government department as a permanent secretary before taking up the position, breaking with the experience of many of his predecessors.
Mr Case is onto his third prime minister, having served as Cabinet Secretary to Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and now Mr Sunak.
Fraser Nelson, The Spectator‘s editor who also writes for The Telegraph, made some excellent points in ‘Simon Case must take his share of the blame for chaotic lockdown decision-making’:
When Simon Case was made the youngest-ever Cabinet Secretary, Matt Hancock sent a message congratulating him.
“I think 41 is a good age to be in these very big jobs,” said the 41-year-old health secretary. By this time, both were wielding incredible power, overseeing the biggest suspension of civil liberties in peacetime.
The members of the “top team” WhatsApp group had started to see lockdown as a political campaign – with enemies to be identified, mocked and destabilised. The only person in the group in a position to lower the political temperature and insist upon sound government was Simon Case.
But The Lockdown Files show that, time and time again, he ended up as political as the politicians – in some cases, even more so. Some of the most outrageous comments on the files are his.
Like others, he started off quite moderate. But before too long he was revelling in the power to lock people up (saying he wished he could see “some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a Premier Inn shoe box”) and being just as gung-ho as the ministers he worked with. The civil servant became indistinguishable from the politicians …
His predecessor, Mark Sedwill, had clashed with Dominic Cummings about reshaping the Civil Service. Case, a former principal private secretary to David Cameron, had by then left the civil service and was working for Prince William.
He was called back to Whitehall to run the Government in a new, more buccaneering way: first in Number 10 and then running the whole show as Cabinet Secretary. There seemed to be an unspoken deal: Case would be given unprecedented power at a young age. In return, he’d be more likely than his predecessor to go with the political flow …
We know what other permanent secretaries might have done because they’ve made it public. Gus O’Donnell, who ran the Civil Service from 2005 to 2011, has pointed out the biggest architectural flaw.
Sage had far too much power, he says, and its reports should have been fed into a higher committee that would have made the decisions – not just on Covid, but factoring in economic and social damage. In other words, there would have been a cost-benefit analysis: a basic tool for public health interventions.
In The Lockdown Files, we see the prime minister appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred – thinking it’s 0.04 per cent, not four per cent. It’s easy to mock a Classics graduate for numeracy issues, but it raises another question.
He had Simon Case by his side: so why did Case not make sure the PM had all of these basic facts to hand? Or had Case, like Cummings, come to regard his boss as a “wonky shopping trolley” to be steered, rather than served? And if so, steered at whose direction? …
Simon Case could at least have addressed the abysmal state of Sage reports: opaque, confusing and – as it turned out in the omicron wave – staggeringly wrong. By then, JP Morgan ended up giving its clients far better Covid analysis than ministers were given by the UK Government, and these ministers (including Rishi Sunak) ended up phoning around contacts to find non-government (ergo, trustworthy) advice. Case presided over this shambles …
Prime ministers run the civil service, and they are ultimately responsible for any dysfunction. But Case should not have taken sides during the lockdown wars. He ought to have been on the side of basic government standards, of cost-benefit analyses and informed, properly-communicated decisions.
The Lockdown Files show that Britain ended up with a standard of decision-making far below what could or should have been. And for that, Case deserves his full share of the blame.
I will have a few more articles about Simon Case to share next week. Along with that comes political infighting over pandemic policy.
Fraser Nelson is right. This was an absolute shambles.
Karol Sikora is also right. This must never happen again.
The SNP (Scottish National Party) are currently looking for a new leader with the recent resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister.
I’m doing a brief series on Sturgeon’s time in office. Part 1 appeared last week.
Style over substance
Sturgeon will long be remembered for her expensive suits and shoes.
She prioritised style over substance and often had a grand project in mind, such as a publicly owned not-for-profit energy company announced in 2017, which never saw the light of day:
In 2019, she gave us her reading list, which, ironically, included 1984. A Twitter user reminded her that the SNP were imitating Orwell’s dystopia rather too well. Their Named Person project would have seen a government representative monitor each child’s upbringing:
During the 2021 election campaign, a local one for much of England but one of governance for the devolved nations, Sturgeon felt the need to announce her pronouns:
While Sturgeon did participate in some debates during the 2021 campaign …
… she pulled out of the BBC Question Time special. Guido Fawkes pointed out that, suddenly, after giving coronavirus press briefings nearly every day, she became camera-shy (red emphases his):
When Boris refused to debate Sturgeon in 2019, the SNP put out a Facebook graphic accusing him of “running scared” and being a “big feartie”.
Sturgeon hasn’t been having a great campaign, getting dragged into debate scraps with Douglas Ross, and appearing relatively low-energy. Today’s poll has the SNP’s constituency vote share down by 3%, and their list voting intention down to 38%. It’s amazing someone who’s hosted unchallenging live television briefings almost every day throughout the last year has suddenly become camera-shy…
When put on the spot, Sturgeon does not react well. In this BBC interview, fellow Scot Andrew Neil gave her a grilling over her poor record on almost everything north of the border. Unfortunately, the following clip does not include her response, but her facial expression is a familiar one, often seen at First Minister’s Questions when Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar question her government’s shortcomings:
Scotland’s drug deaths highest in Europe
One of Sturgeon’s most appalling failures is the number of drug deaths in Scotland.
During the 2021 election campaign, Douglas Ross asked her about them.
Guido had the story and a video:
Nicola Sturgeon was put on the back foot last night during STV’s Scottish leadership debate. Pressed by Douglas Ross over her appalling record on Scotland’s escalating drug crisis – drug deaths have doubled since she became First Minister – Sturgeon floundered, saying:
I think we took our eye off the ball with drug deaths and I’ve said as much to the Scottish Parliament […] I set out at the start of this year £250 million investment programme to build up rehabilitation services including residential rehabilitation to make sure we give more support to community services, to make sure we provide faster access to treatment.
… Taking her eye off the ball is putting it mildly…
On August 2 that year, Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, a retired Presbyterian minister, wrote an article for The Conservative Woman: ‘Sturgeon’s catalogue of catastrophe’.
On the drug deaths, he says (purple emphases mine):
… some SNP failures enter the realm of the tragic. If we are to judge a government on how they treat society’s most vulnerable members, the SNP have a long way to go before their practice matches their pronouncements on the country’s drug crisis.
A report released by the National Records Scotland on Friday shows that for the seventh year running Scotland had a record number of drug deaths last year with 1,339. The rate of drug deaths in Scotland, 231 people per million, is more than three and a half times higher than that in the rest of the UK and is the worst in Europe, 15 times higher than the European average. Statistics from developing countries are hard to come by but it is generally acknowledged that Scotland’s record is one of the worst in the world.
The SNP government, which has devolved power over health, has been in place since 2007. The number of drug deaths in 2007, when it came to power, was 455. This was considered scandalous at the time.
Nicola Sturgeon said the number of lives lost ‘is unacceptable, each one a human tragedy’. She added, ‘Today, my thoughts are with every family who has lost a loved one – I am sorry for the loss you have suffered.’ Ms Sturgeon, however, has previously admitted some responsibility, saying that her government ‘took our eye off the ball’ on drug deaths.
Not surprisingly, the SNP blame the UK government for not allowing Scotland to have supervised shooting galleries for drug users.
However, the other three nations of the UK do not have the same problem:
Whilst it is possible to make an argument for a health-based approach to drug use, one wonders why if present drug laws do so much supposed harm in Scotland they don’t do equivalent harm in England and Wales? Scotland’s drug problem cannot be argued away by saying ‘It wisnae me, a big boy did it and ran away’. The SNP have to take responsibility for their actions.
Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack alleges some drug users are so desperate for rehabilitation treatment that they commit a crime in order to get it in prison:
Rather than funding more rehab facilities and restoring the budgets of local alcohol and drug partnerships, which is within their power, the SNP have taken the easy way out by accusing the UK government of binding their hands by blocking plans for their innovative policies such as safe consumption rooms where addicts could shoot up in sanitary conditions rather than in underpasses and waste ground.
There is such an acute shortage of publicly funded rehabilitation places and cuts to local multi-agency drugs services that Scotland has entered Kafkaland where some addicts pursue what seems to them a logical course of action: they choose to commit crimes ensuring a prison sentence rather than remaining in the community because they know they have a better chance of accessing treatment behind bars. For Scotland’s addicts, HMP Barlinnie beats NHS Scotland.
A failed lawyer [Sturgeon] leading a failed government is leading almost inexorably to a failed country, and the most vulnerable are paying the price.
On February 19, 2023, four days after Sturgeon stood down as SNP leader, veteran political journalist Simon Heffer wrote an article for The Telegraph: ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s dreamland is over — Scotland faces a painful reckoning’.
Since 2021, there have been only nine fewer drug deaths — 1,330 instead of 1,339:
An indication of the state of Scottish society is that nearly 60,000 people in a country whose population is five and a half million have a drug addiction problem. That is a higher proportion of addicts than any other country in Europe. Recent figures showed that Scotland had an annual rate of 1,330 deaths from drug addiction. In Slovakia, which has an identical-sized population, the number of deaths (in 2017) was 19.
In Scotland, the government-run treatment services for addicts are dismal. Around 40pc of Scottish addicts are in treatment, compared with 60pc in England. The rate of around 25.2 deaths per 100,000 of the population is three and a half times England’s.
Incredibly, Sturgeon’s government blames Margaret Thatcher, who left office in 1990:
When being forced to admit this shocking failure, the SNP blames Margaret Thatcher and the legacy of her economic policies for closing down much (inefficient and obsolete) Scottish heavy industry. In other words, the failure of the British state (which the SNP purports to loathe) to use the money of predominantly English taxpayers to subsidise the inefficiency and restrictive practices that undermined so much Scottish industry is the cause of the country’s out-of-control drugs problem.
Mrs Thatcher left office more than 32 years ago; an SNP administration has run Scotland since 2007. There are, frankly, no excuses. If parts of Scotland are enduring poverty it is largely down to the failings of those who have ruled the country for the last 16 years, whose hostility to capitalism and incomprehension of business were proved by the many businesses that planned to relocate in England had the referendum in 2014 gone the other way.
Education disaster
Simon Heffer reminds us that Scottish schools were, until recently, the envy of the world. They aren’t anymore:
Education has also been a disaster under the SNP. Scotland’s schools were once among the finest in Europe; in the 18th and 19th centuries they sent young people to university from social classes that would not get inside an English university until the 1940s.
In June 2021, however, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said that the SNP administration had no long-term strategy or vision for schools, and had failed to keep abreast of best practice. It attacked the examinations system, curriculum development, the management of teachers and the availability of data for measuring schools’ performance. John Swinney, who has proved an entirely incapable education minister, was so embarrassed that he delayed publishing the report until after that year’s Holyrood elections.
For maths and sciences, in which high attainment is now considered essential for the prosperity and development of any society, Scotland ranks 25th and 24th respectively among OECD countries. In 2019-20, the proportion of pupils in Scottish schools passing three or more Highers was 43pc lower than in any other year since 2015, when another international report from the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] condemned the standards of attainment in reading, maths and science.
To try to massage the figures, the SNP has relied on a feeble system of continuous assessment rather than rigorous examinations. This has ensured that the gap in attainment between those at the bottom of the ladder economically and those at the top has widened.
The other consequence of this failure to develop Scotland’s human resources through education is that the brains, skills and talent that might improve the Scottish economy are scarce: and for those whose talents are developed, Dr Johnson’s adage that the noblest prospect many of them ever see is the high road that takes them to England remains painfully true.
NHS and National Care Service in dire straits
At First Minister’s Questions, Sturgeon becomes deeply annoyed at questions from Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar over the lingering problems with the NHS and Scotland’s National Care Service.
It is worth noting that Sturgeon was Scotland’s health secretary for several years before becoming First Minister in 2014. According to Ross and Sarwar, some of the existing problems began then.
Simon Heffer tells us:
If the NHS is said to be on its knees in England, it is prostrate in Scotland. The British Medical Association said last month that the country was 2,000 GPs short and about three in 20 vacancies for consultants were unfilled. There were also 6,400 vacancies in nursing and midwifery. A Royal College of Nursing spokesman said that six in 10 nurses were thinking of leaving their profession because they have had enough of their overloaded working conditions.
The medical and paramedical professions in Scotland have repeatedly savaged Humza Yousaf, the Scottish Health Minister, for having (in the words of a Scottish geriatrician) “no plan, no strategy”, and therefore inspiring “no trust” from the professions.
Waiting times in A&E have reached a record high, with 5,000 people in the last week of 2022 waiting over eight hours, and half of them for over 12 hours. The malfunctioning of Scotland’s National Care Service means hospital beds are filled with people who otherwise could be discharged. Over 600,000 people are awaiting “planned procedures” compared with just over 300,000 when Ms Sturgeon took office in 2014.
High taxation, sluggish economy
The SNP are fond of blaming Brexit and the UK government for Scotland’s economic woes.
However, Heffer says that a report from January 2023 points out that Sturgeon’s government has no clear economic strategy:
The report said there was no clear strategy for innovation, that for the last decade productivity had been “muted” and that Scotland had failed to become a “hotbed of start-up activity”. The SNP blame Brexit for this, which hardly explains why other cities in Britain are performing far better; the SNP will not admit that it has no idea how to encourage and support entrepreneurs …
The entrepreneurs Scotland so desperately needs are driven away by high taxation, the deep economic uncertainty provided by the threat of separatism, and a shrinking skills base.
Independence dream dies
During the 2021 election campaign, Holyrood magazine featured Mandy Rhodes’s highly critical editorial, ‘The mendacity of hope’.
Rhodes takes us back to the 2014 independence referendum campaign:
Back in 2014 in a campaign video for the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon asked us to imagine a baby – Kirsty – and to think about what kind of country we wanted her to grow up in.
It was a brilliant, evocative message, a hopeful one, with a positive vision that things could only get better, that our children could live their best lives. And who wouldn’t want that?
Two years later, after the SNP were re-elected, Sturgeon made this pledge:
Let’s all resolve that, when this parliament dissolves five years from now, we’ll be able to say we’ve done everything we can to give all of Scotland’s young people the best possible future.
Rhodes continues:
Well, we are now five years on, with independence no closer and Baby Kirsty now seven. The SNP heads into an election that it will win, still stuck on repeat, pledging to make Scotland the best country for any child to grow up in.
The SNP has been in power for 14 years and despite cleverly positioning itself as the party of opposition, lest you blame it for any of the country’s ills, it is set to return to power on the back of yet more promises for that same change.
So, when is it coming?
… Yet here we are, with the SNP still winning votes on the back of a promise to build a fairer, more equal, Scotland. If it’s window dressing you are after, then artifice has won over substance.
Every opinion poll has the SNP winning this next election. The only question now, is by how much.
Yet contrast that 2014 video message of hope, that forward-looking vision for a more positive future, with the dystopian styled, party-political broadcast issued by the SNP last week and the difference is clear. Fourteen years in government, and the SNP can’t offer a positive narrative for its record, it can only blame Westminster for everything that is still wrong …
But if the Scottish Parliament does not have the powers to find Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, then what is its point? What is the point of a party of independence being in power for so long but not delivering on independence? What is the point of having a woman in power but who lets women down?
What is the point in an election that will merely deliver more of the same? And what is the point in promising a better future for children when those already growing up under the SNP’s watch have been let down?
Come on. Nicola Sturgeon has said she hopes that this election will breathe fresh air onto the toxicity of our politics, but those winds of change need to sweep over her and her party too. It needs a clear out. Some fresh thinking. Some challenge, and some ambition to make the change it has promised over and over again.
There is something very sour about the SNP right now – a party that doesn’t take well to criticism; that sneers at opposition; that hectors journalists, and silences its detractors.
Too often, political commentators are assumed to be people who care too much about party politics. We are accused of having an agenda, of being too close to power, of having nefarious causes that we are trying to promote. That in fact we are political stooges. But none of that is remotely true.
In the main, we are here to see change, to hold truth to power …
During the 2021 campaign, Sturgeon said she wanted to sort out the coronavirus crisis before holding a second independence referendum.
The Revd Stu Campbell of Wings Over Scotland took issue with Sturgeon’s preference for ‘patient persuasion’ before a second referendum. On April 30 that year, he wrote:
As we noted earlier today, her “patient persuasion” has taken Yes from a 10-point lead to an 8-point deficit in the last four months. She’s going backwards at a rate of knots, and in the most favourable circumstances she could ever dream of – Brexit, a pandemic in which she’s been (erroneously) seen to have performed well, and a wildly unpopular and almost comically crooked complete buffoon in 10 Downing Street.
She HAD a majority for independence, and she’s blown it. It’s almost impossible to imagine anything that could possibly provide a bigger boost to the Yes vote than what she’s already had and wasted.
She used to promise that she’d deliver a second indyref “before it is too late” to avoid the effects of Brexit. But Brexit happened 15 months ago and now we have to wait for some unspecified point at which the effects of COVID are over before she’ll even begin to try. There’s always an excuse, and there always will be …
The truth of the matter is that Nicola Sturgeon has poisoned the Yes movement. Every part of it is now at war with every other part, and so bitterly that it’s hard to imagine the peace and unity of 2014 returning even if and when she’s finally dragged kicking and screaming out of Bute House.
Simon Heffer, writing in 2023, seems to be of the same opinion:
… the nationalist movement may well become more of a minority sport. It is already split following the creation of the Alba party by Alex Salmond, who fell out with Ms Sturgeon over her handling of complaints of sexual misconduct against him. He was later acquitted of 13 offences in a criminal trial.
And although the fanatics will endure any hardship to be shot of the colonial oppressor, many others won’t. Scotland reached peak Sturgeon a couple of years ago, after her polished performance in the pandemic, when she enjoyed being more welfarist at every turn than the English government.
It will require a remarkable achievement by her successor to lift support for nationalism to the point where it would look likely that the Scottish people would back separatism in a referendum. The SNP has scrapped a special conference it was holding on the question. Talk of the next UK election being a referendum on separatism is ending.
When SNP sources say, as they have in recent days, that a second referendum is off the agenda for the next five years, what they really mean – all being equal – is 10, 15 or 20 years. Every further failure in health, education, infrastructure planning and social care lines up more voters against them: for in the extensively devolved system, only they are responsible.
Heffer tells us how important English subsidies are to Scotland:
It is one thing to tell an opinion pollster that you, as a Scottish voter, would like to be shot of England; quite another to vote in a referendum, were there to be one, to cut the umbilical cord to the Treasury in Whitehall, whose subventions to Scotland under the block grant are around £41bn per year.
For every £100 the government spends per person in England, it spends £126 in Scotland. As the IFS’s comments on the country’s economic future imply, the SNP has nothing but pie in the sky to suggest as the source of that money post-independence.
The SNP never had a detailed plan for independence.
More on that tomorrow.
According to statistics, 19% of Britons are classified as disabled.
The Government has a rather loose definition of disability as ReviseSociology explains (emphases mine):
Anyone ticking YES/ YES and either ‘my illness affects me a lot or a little’ is classified by the UK government as disabled.
The problem with the above is that if you have Asthma and similar mild conditions you could be classified as disabled, and this doesn’t tie in with the government’s own definition of disability which requires that someone has a condition which ‘substantially’ affects their ability to carry out every day tasks.
Stating that you have asthma which affects your breathing a little, does NOT IMO qualify you as disabled, but it does in this survey.
The government doesn’t publish the breakdown of responses to the final disability question, but it’s roughly a 50-50 split between those answering ‘a lot’ and ‘a little.
In conclusion, it might be more accurate to say that one in ten people is disabled.
Even so, that is still a lot of people.
The report, Family Resources Survey 2018/2019, states (p. 7, PDF p. 8):
Of those who reported a disability, 27 per cent reported a mental health impairment in 2018/19, up from 24 per cent in 2016/17. This is an increase of 12 per cent in the numbers of people reporting a mental health impairment, overtaking the number reporting dexterity impairments (which fell by five per cent).
The next page says:
Working–age adults were the most likely group to report mental health impairments, with 39 per cent of disabled working–age adults reporting this type of impairment, compared to 36 per cent in 2016/17. In contrast mobility impairments for disabled working–age adults have fallen from 43 to 40 per cent in the same period. Children were much more likely to have learning or social/behavioural impairments than adults. Thirty–four per cent of disabled children were reported to have a learning impairment. Across all ages, there has been an 18 per cent increase in social/behavioural impairments during the last three years, with 42 per cent of disabled children now reporting a social/behavioural impairment.
Beneath that paragraph is an alarming graph breaking down reported disability by nation or, in the case of England, by region, with the following explanation:
The prevalence of people reporting a disability varied across the UK. The North East had the highest percentage of people reporting a disability in 2018/19; 28 per cent (0.7 million people). The percentage of people reporting a disability was higher than the UK national average in Wales (25 per cent), Scotland (24 per cent), and Northern Ireland (23 per cent). In contrast, London had the lowest percentage, 13 per cent, of people reporting a disability (1.2 million people), followed by the South East, with 19 per cent (1.7 million people).
These regional differences could partially be explained by the varying demographics in each region, for example disability prevalence may correlate with the percentage of the population of State Pension age in a particular region, noting that reporting of a disability is more than double amongst this age group, compared to the overall population (see Table 4.1 and 4.4 for full data).
Hmm.
A cynic would say that this is about benefits, or, in popular parlance, ‘being on the sick’.
With that in mind, I was intrigued and encouraged to read an article in The Guardian on February 13, 2023: ‘The big idea: your personality is not set in stone’.
It’s by David Robson, the author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life.
I skipped through the first half of the article, which most people commenting, sadly, did not. Here’s the main point:
What if educating people about their potential for personality change placed them on a more positive trajectory? To test this idea, Jessica Schleider, assistant professor of clinical psychology at Stony Brook University, New York, and John R Weisz, professor of psychology at Harvard, selected a group of around 100 adolescents who had previously shown signs of anxiety or depression. They took a brief computerised course that explained the science of brain plasticity, alongside statements from older students, who described the ways they had grown over their school years. They were then given worksheets to consolidate what they had learned.
When Schleider and Weisz checked in on the teens’ mental health nine months later, the students reported a significant decrease in their anxiety and depression compared with those who had instead taken part in a course on “emotional expression”. The same strategy has since been tested in other settings, with larger numbers of participants, that have produced equally positive outcomes. Teaching people about personality growth is not a panacea, but these results suggest that it may be a useful tool to help build greater psychological resilience.
Whether you are wrestling with serious issues or simply want to polish off your rougher edges, it is reassuring to know that character is ultimately within your own hands. DNA and our upbringing may predispose us to certain traits, but we also have the power to shape our future selves.
It is a pity that comments on the article were so negative. What logically-thinking person wouldn’t want to be less anxious or depressed?
Then again, some people use depression and anxiety — the two often go together — as a comfy cloak. I know one person who has been on anti-depressants for years. The dosage seems to get higher and higher as the decades pass. That person had a well-educated married mother who, for whatever reason, became a recluse in middle-age and stayed that way for the rest of her life. How tragic. Did my friend adopt a learned example?
Parliamentarians often bring up the UK’s mental health statistics during debates, especially those involving young people. It would seem to me that teaching youngsters about brain plasticity and hearing from older students who evolved positively during their school years would be a good direction in which to move. It would enable them to progress to further education, either in a trade or at university.
The article discusses another experiment involving changing personality traits:
In one 15-week trial of nearly 400 people, participants accepted an average of two challenges each week. Provided they actually completed those tasks, their traits shifted in the desired direction, according to a standard big five questionnaire.
Similarly exciting results could be seen in a later experiment, which used a smartphone app to coach participants in their desired big five traits. Crucially, this study involved a much larger sample – 1,500 people. And in addition to the typical self-report questionnaires, it asked participants’ friends and family to rate their personalities before and after the intervention. The differences were still apparent three months after the experiment had ended. As Aristotle argued more than 2,300 years ago, we become what we repeatedly do.
The unexpected malleability of our minds should be good news for anyone who wishes they were a bit more sociable, organised, or happy-go-lucky. Another potential benefit is that awareness of this research could help improve mental health.
What are we waiting for?
I remember when, in the 1980s, self-help books were all the rage. Maybe it’s time to give them — and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) — another look rather than play the victim.
Yesterday, I began a brief series on dating.
That post addressed dating in the offline world.
Today’s looks at the online dating scene, upon which more Westerners depend for their love lives. Offline life doesn’t often present all the opportunities for meeting new people that the online universe does.
Everyone who has used one of these sites has a firm opinion on them, one way or another.
Furthermore, every online dating customer has a list of dos and don’ts on how to present oneself.
Fundamentals to bear in mind
In ‘Dating Advice: A Practical, Modern Guide’, Mark Manson advises people to get themselves together when embarking on finding the love of one’s life.
Excerpts follow, purple emphases mine.
About that perfect partner, he says:
First, consider this: everyone wants a perfect partner, but few people want to be the perfect partner.1
I think the vast majority of problems around “finding someone” are caused by uneven expectations like this.
But when you flip this on its head and you start taking a little more responsibility in this area of your life—when you start focusing on what kind of life you want to live and what kind of partner you want to be—you’ll start to see all the flakes and narcissists and liars fade into the background. You’ll start making genuine connections with people and make each other’s lives more enjoyable.
For years, I probably obsessed a little too much over this part of my life. But after stumbling through one unhealthy relationship after another, I learned a very important lesson: the best way to find an amazing person is to become an amazing person.2
Then there’s neediness, which he presents in a unique way:
Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself.
Any time you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else’s needs rather than your own, that is needy. Any time you lie about your interests, hobbies, or background, that is needy. Any time you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself, that is needy.
Whereas most people focus on what behavior is attractive/unattractive, what determines neediness (and therefore, attractiveness) is the why behind your behavior. You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, it will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off …
Now, we all get needy at times because, of course, we do care about what others think of us. That’s a fact of human nature. But the key here is that, at the end of the day, you should care more about what you think of yourself than what others think …
We behave in needy ways when we feel bad about ourselves. We try to use the affection and approval of others to compensate for the lack of affection and approval for ourselves. And that is another root cause of our dating problems: our inability to take care of ourselves.
Taking care of ourselves is an essential factor in finding the right person to love:
No one can see your value as a person if you don’t value yourself first. And taking care of yourself, when done from a place of non-neediness, is what demonstrates that you value yourself …
Think of it this way: people won’t love you until you love yourself.
Health is an essential part of taking care of ourselves:
When you feel better—when you have more energy and your mood is raised a little—it’s a lot easier to get your ass out of the house and into the world so you can engage with people genuinely and confidently. You’re also more pleasant to be around.4
And if you have any past traumas or psychological issues that need to be dealt with, do it. Talk to friends and relatives and get therapy if you need it.5 You’re ultimately the one who can help yourself the most, but it’s okay if you need a little help in this area. Get it taken care of.
Personal finances are also part of self-care:
Money is a major source of stress for a lot of people. It can be so stressful, in fact, that most people end up ignoring a lot of their financial problems altogether. This, in turn, leads to a vicious cycle, where ignoring your money problems only makes them worse and you end up even more stressed as time goes on …
In short, get this area of your life handled so it’s not dragging you down in other areas.
So is one’s career, he says. Do what you can to find the best job for yourself because:
To put it bluntly, no one wants to be around someone—let alone date someone—who complains about their job all the time.
Having an expanded social life is also important:
Developing an active social life not only makes for a more fulfilling, enjoyable life, it also puts you in contact with more (and different) people, upping your chances of meeting someone you click with.
In closing on health, he says:
You’ll notice that all of these areas take quite a bit of time and effort to develop. In fact, you’ll probably never stop working on each of them to some degree, and that’s okay. The best way to get these areas of your life handled is to develop healthy, consistent habits around them.
And the point isn’t to reach some state of nirvana in your life where you have six-pack abs, a bazillion dollars, and a packed social schedule with thousands of friends and then, FINALLY, you’ll suddenly find true love. The point is to just always be working towards being the best version of yourself you can be at any given time.
He has advice on using dating sites:
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with online dating and studies have shown that more and more people are meeting online and having long-term relationships.7 It’s definitely doable and it can be a great way to meet people, especially if you’re new to a city, extremely busy with work, or just “getting back out there.”
With that said, most people don’t use online dating very effectively. If you’re having problems with people being flaky and/or lukewarm, well I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it’s not them, it’s you.
You see, online dating and dating apps are great for meeting people quickly and efficiently—and that’s about it. After that, it’s up to you to be bold and clearly communicate what you’re looking for.
This will freak some people out. This will cause some people to “ghost” on you. And I’m here to tell you this is a good thing.
Think about it: the people who freak out and ghost on you, they are the flakes and wishy-washy people you’re so tired of going on dates with. It’s best to weed them out as quickly as possible and not play into their wishy-washy games. This is doubly true the older you get.
If you tell someone on a first date that you’re looking for a long-term relationship and it scares them off, then you just did your future self a huge favor. If simply stating your general intentions freaks somebody out, then the reality is that they don’t want the same thing as you and/or they have their own issues to work out. Learn to see it as a blessing when someone eliminates themselves for you.
Your job is to simply express yourself honestly and not be ashamed of that.
Manson says this about the myriad ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ of dating. Ultimately:
Vulnerability, when done correctly, is actually a show of strength and power. Telling someone you like them and want to get to know them better doesn’t “give them all the power” unless you’re entirely invested in the way they respond to you.
If, instead, you are merely expressing yourself to make your desires known and you’re willing to accept the consequences, good or bad, others will notice that. And it’s incredibly attractive …
But before moving on, I want to make something clear about being vulnerable: this is not another “tactic” or “strategy” to use to get people to like you. That, by definition, is neediness (we always come back to neediness, don’t we?).
A person who is truly secure and comfortable with being vulnerable is simply expressing themselves and saying, “This is who I am, faults and all. You don’t have to like me for me to be OK with that.”
He says it took some time for him to find the right partner:
My first handful of significant relationships were mired with a lot of manipulation and victim/rescuer dynamics. These relationships were great learning experiences, but they also caused me a great deal of pain that I had to eventually learn from.
It wasn’t until I managed to find myself in relationships with some emotionally healthy women who were able to manage their flaws well that I really learned what to look for when dating someone.
And I discovered in this time that there was one trait in a woman that I absolutely must have to be in a relationship with her, and it was something that I would never compromise on again (and I haven’t). Some of us are unwilling to compromise on superficial traits: looks, intelligence, education, etc. Those are important, but if there’s one trait that I’ve learned you should never compromise on, it’s this:
The ability to see one’s own flaws and be accountable for them.
Because the fact is that problems are inevitable. Every relationship will run into fights and each person will run up against their emotional baggage at various times. How long the relationship lasts and how well it goes comes down to both people being willing and able to recognize the snags in themselves and communicate them openly …
You may think a person like this doesn’t exist. That they’re a unicorn. But you’d be surprised. Your emotional integrity naturally self-selects the emotional integrity of the people you meet and date. And when you fix yourself, as if by some magical cheat code, the people you meet and date become more and more functional themselves. And the obsession and anxiety of dating dissolves and becomes simple and clear. The process ceases to be a long and analytical one but a short and pleasant one. The way she cocks her head when she smiles. The way your eyes light up a little bit more when you talk to him.
Your worries will dissolve. And regardless of what happens, whether you’re together for a minute, a month or a lifetime, all there is is acceptance.
He concludes:
And so, if you take nothing else away from this, just know that the way to find true love is to be the best version of yourself and do it unapologetically and without shame. You’ll attract people into your life who connect with you on your level and, just as importantly, you’ll weed out all the people who don’t.
And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Online tips for better results
Mark Manson’s essay was mentioned in a Guardian article from 2022: ‘Swipe less, don’t be a sleaze, do say hello — and 10 more tips to raise your dating game’.
Online dating has become more popular because, with many people working from home, chance meetings are becoming rarer:
According to a 2020 YouGov survey, only one in 20 Britons in their 20s met their current or most recent partner “out and about” – at a gig, bar or bookshop, for example – versus one in five aged 50 to 64.
Focus, including time management, is important:
Annie Lord, a dating columnist for Vogue whose memoir Notes on Heartbreak will be published in June, recommends using them at a particular time, “rather than spending every evening just scrolling”, and making a plan to meet any promising matches as soon as possible.
Many people have profiles just for the ego boost, Lord says. “If you haven’t arranged a date within 48 hours of talking, it’s never going to happen. You can overthink it, or procrastinate. If you’ve had one OK conversation, you should probably just meet them.”
Jo is one successful user. Her time management brought benefits:
She met someone last year. Her top tips are to limit your activity and take months-long breaks. On her last venture on the dating scene, she swiped for no more than 10 minutes, a few times a week.
Profiles should be targeted and honest. Getting a second opinion can be helpful.
The aforementioned Mark Manson advises:
… appeal to the 10% of people who will think you are fascinating and fun, instead of downplaying them for the 90% who will think you are merely fine. If you are not sure of your best or defining traits, ask a friend.
The same goes for what you are looking for: if you want a long-term relationship, or to be friends first, don’t be afraid to say so. The only people you will put off will be those who want something different. But emphasise what you do want, not what you don’t want: positive, upbeat profiles get more messages and matches.
Getting a second opinion on your profile doesn’t hurt. Jo says her partner’s profile stood out for its detailed description of his interests, which made it easy for her to ask questions, and several decent photographs (not selfies). “He told me later that a female friend helped him.”
On the subject of photographs, an old OkCupid blog post from 2009 has excellent advice.
OkCupid’s data man, Christian Rudder, says:
no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.
He has four photographs of women, two among those ranked most attractive and two from the middle range in the popularity stakes.
All four ladies are easy on the eye. However, there is one big difference between the top group and the middle-ranking group: the smile. Rudder doesn’t elaborate on that, but the top group are smiling with their lips whereas the other two have a full-frontal, toothy smile. This indicates to me that a partial smile — not 100% toothy — works better: Mona Lisa.
There are also four photos of four men. The chap with the guitar has probably posted a professional publicity photo. His stands head and shoulders, as it were, above the other three.
Get professional photos taken — whether from a friend or a pro — and avoid selfies or party photos. Include more than your head so that people can see part of your torso. Some people are suspicious of head shots, wondering how heavy the person is.
On the other hand, a few of the male commenters said that, for them, the photo matters less.
Returning to the Guardian article, forget about a type of person you want to date. When I was single, I never had a type and had loads of great dates.
The Guardian advises:
Apps make it easy to be overprescriptive about a potential partner, but it is impossible to gauge chemistry or compatibility from a profile. If you are curious about someone, meet them …
Lizzie Cernik, who has interviewed many couples for the Guardian’s How we met column, says it can be helpful to reflect on your “attachment style” – your approach to intimate relationships, established in childhood. “Don’t look for what you want in a partner and try to tick boxes – look for what you need,” she says. “The two can be very different.”
I would add: try not to take remarks personally. Think of any first meeting as a job interview. Also, keep that meeting brief. You’re meeting with strangers, not friends. Do you like every potential employer in an interview? No. Do you take their remarks to heart? Probably not, in most cases. Apply the same principles to dating:
Generally, anyone who demonstrates controlling or problematic behaviour, is consistently poor at communicating or does not meet your effort …
Then move on to the next candidate:
Allow yourself to be excited about your next date: “Life would be so depressing if you didn’t have hope.”
As I said yesterday, being able to converse is vital. The Guardian cites Vogue’s dating columnist Annie Lord, who suggests:
being friendly and striking up a conversation. “There’s less of a risk factor if you can find common ground that will make it seem less intrusive, and you’re not going to feel rejected if the conversation stops.”
If flirting seems foreign, keep it light, says Jean Smith, a “flirt coach” and the author of Flirtology: Stop Swiping, Start Talking and Find Love: “You’ll soon find it’s not as scary as you imagined. Just go up and say hi.”
The article says that, not surprisingly, many men today are hesitant to talk to women, much less ask them out. However, most women should be able to discern a sincere invitation:
“If you’re really attracted to a woman and think the vibe is right, but you’re scared to ask her out, ask yourself: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’” says Kieran, 26. “Then walk yourself concretely through that worst-case scenario.”
If it is nothing more than a polite no and some mild embarrassment, he says “shoot your shot – send a DM or ask her for a drink like you’re ripping off a plaster. And if the answer is anything other than a resounding yes, take it as a no – and live to try another day.”
… the difference between a cynical come-on and a genuine compliment, offered without expectation, is like night and day.
While using online dating, remember the offline world and ask your friends, especially married couples, to help you find someone:
Partnered people, in particular, love to hear dating stories. Put them to work by asking them to set you up with a single friend or colleague, or engineer an introduction to a stranger. Combining groups can often be less intimidating.
Finally, it’s okay not to date at all, even if I’m one of those who thinks the world needs more well-matched couples with a view towards marriage:
It is easy to feel the pressure – from friends or family, or our couple-centric culture – to “put yourself out there”, but no one gains from you going on dates you don’t fancy. “Only date when you’re enjoying it,” says Alison. “Doing it for the sake of it will zap the joy from your life and take away much-needed energy reserves.”
When dating doesn’t happen or ‘doesn’t work’
I now return to the theme at the beginning of this post: self-improvement.
I suspect that many, although not all, people who don’t want to date actually do want a regular companion with whom to share life.
Mairi Macleod PhD is a married mother of three from Edinburgh and the author of Dating Evolved, an advice website designed with women over 50 in mind.
In her post, ‘Lessons on dating in midlife’, she writes:
Yes I know, online dating is no panacea, but it can work and we all know someone who’s found love this way. This is a numbers game and the more men we can sift through the more likely we are to find a good one, so online dating is just another potential way to meet more men.
But your chance of success here is dependent on your attitude and if you like to moan about the horrible selection of men online – change the record. Having a more positive attitude will help you to see the good guys and will make decent men more likely to get in touch.
You might think that actually, there are no decent men out there. This belief often stems from the fact that the ones who approach you are the confident ones, the experienced ones, the ones with the moves but who don’t really care what people think. The nice guys that you could have a decent relationship with – they won’t be so in-your-face, perhaps not so confident.
And you might think, “I’m not interested in men who don’t have the balls to approach me”.
But there are a load of perfectly legitimate reasons why a good guy might keep away:
– You look amazing – why would you be interested in him?
– You’re busy, he doesn’t want to disturb you – he’s considerate, remember
– He doesn’t want to be that creep – he’s respectful.
It’s time to get off your phone, open your body posture, make eye contact, and smile. And if he doesn’t come and speak to you? There’s nothing stopping you speaking to him. It’s the 21st century.
Whatever you do, don’t leave it up to the universe to deliver your man – it ain’t gonna happen. You’ve got to put in a bit of effort, make opportunities, and help your luck along.
Finally, you need to know that you’ve got what it takes to be attractive to a man who’s right for you. Everyone’s different in what they like so show off those unique foibles. Yes, if you’ve a PhD in astrophysics and like doing maths in your spare time some men will run a mile – you don’t want them. Some men will love you and your particular quirks and those are the ones you’re interested in.
Get out there and hold your head high. Good self-esteem and confidence, when you have them, are your most powerful tools for finding the right man. The self-esteem means you won’t put up with crap, and the confidence will make you glow.
And when you meet someone, instead of asking yourself “how can I be attractive to this guy?”, it should be “is this man showing up for me”, “is he capable of being the kind of partner I need?”
This is how to put yourself in the best position to find a fabulous relationship.
Returning to Matthew Hussey from Get The Guy, from which I cited yesterday, he has an excellent post on this subject, ‘5 Reasons You’re Still Single (That Have Nothing To Do With Love)’.
He begins with what’s involved in becoming a millionaire, something else that many hopefuls get wrong, too:
… the results we want to achieve in life are best achieved indirectly. So, if you want to be a millionaire, don’t focus on becoming rich. Focus on creating an amazing product that meets people’s needs. Focus on your leadership skills. Focus on your ability to build an amazing team and get them on board with your vision so that they can help you get there.
For those without partners, Hussey says that they often need a wide social circle, new communities in addition to personal friends:
Reason number one you may be single that has nothing to do with love. You have friendships, but not communities. There are a lot of people that will say to me, “Matt, I have a social life. I have great friends.” I know that when they say they have great friends, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re part of any communities …
And one of the great antidotes to online dating and burning out through dating apps is to have communities in real life. If someone invites me somewhere, and it’s not someone I know really well, it’s more of an acquaintance or someone who’s on the way to becoming a friend, but they invite me somewhere. They invite me to a party they’re going to or a social event, they’re running. If I go there, I’m probably going to meet 99%, if not 100%, new people. That gives me a shot at becoming part of a new community, especially if I get invited two or three times and I become a new staple part of that group.
If I join a running club, I am going to be exposed to a new community of people that I wouldn’t otherwise have met. Most of us spend our lives in the exact same communities we’ve always been in. And so, once we’ve exhausted those pools and realize there’s no one there for us, our opportunities stop there, apart from online dating. The antidote to that is not spending more time with your existing friends. It’s two things. Say yes to people you don’t normally say yes to that can expose you to brand new pools of people, and go do things you are interested in in community. Because you could just put your headphones in and go for a run on the street. But when you do it as part of a running club, you are in a community doing it.
And that gives you the added benefit that you’re going to meet people there, some of whom will be new friends that will invite you to new communities again. And if you hit the jackpot, one of whom might actually be the love you’ve been looking for.
The second reason is working from home:
The second reason you might be single that has nothing to do with love is that you work from home …
… It’s always easier not to leave the house. When you go to a place of work, you might bump into someone on public transport on the way, you might bump into someone in the building you work in, you might bump into someone at lunch or at happy hour that someone is holding from your office after work. These are all opportunities to collide with another person. You can sometimes end up in a relationship by accident that way. Some of you have because you worked somewhere and that being somewhere meant that you collided with someone at some point. You ended up in a relationship that could not have happened if you worked from home that day.
… Anywhere that you can bump into someone is a plus and a moment where an opportunity could arise. Don’t use working from home as an excuse to be passive.
The third reason is living in a remote location, in which case, get into larger towns or big cities more often:
If we’re going to remain where we live right now, we have to create multiple wins that we’ll get from going to the nearest place where there are people. What are the four reasons that you could be going into the city that you can combine on a single day or on a weekend? Go do that, and make sure that while you’re there, you attend something social or you meet up with someone or you just go hang somewhere and work for a couple of hours in a busy spot. Or you go on dating apps, and you line up a date while you’re there. Or you may look at something a little more drastic. You may look at your choice in life to live where you live and say, “Does it work with my key priorities?”
“If one of my key priorities is I really want to meet someone, do I want to live a little closer to the action? Is it worth it? Is it possible? If it’s more expensive to live there, could I take a smaller space to go and live there so that I can have the possibility of a different kind of social life that might bring more opportunities for love?” Or, “If I’m looking after my sick mother where I am, do I need to be one minute from her? Or could I be 20 minutes from her and 20 minutes from the nearest place where there’s lots of people, instead of one minute from her and 40 minutes from the nearest civilization?” These are all options. I’m not here to put any judgment on what you’re doing right now or to tell you you should do anything. But they’re questions worth asking.
Life is all about choices. It’s all about priorities. And if we have a setup right now of where we live that’s making it disproportionately difficult to meet someone, something has to give somewhere, and we need to find where that give is.
The fourth reason is personal appearance which does affect how we feel about ourselves:
The fourth reason we may be single that has nothing to do with love is that we’re not proud of ourselves. And more specifically, we’re not taking pride in ourselves and our appearance right now …
It could be getting up and getting ready in the morning and feeling good. It could be doing our hair or makeup. What are those things that make you feel sexy? … I’m wearing shoes that I like. I’m wearing an outfit that’s new and crisp. My hair’s done, my skin feels good. And in that moment I’m open to the world. I’m looking around. My head is up. I’m ready for interactions. I’m going to make eye contact with the person serving me my coffee.
I might have a bit of banter. I’m open to the world. And that energy produces a whole different world of opportunities. There is one face that we have that tells the world to go away, that tells opportunity to go in a different direction. And there’s another face we have that invites everything into our lives. The difference is when we leave, do we feel that energy that makes us proud to take ourselves out? Do I feel good? Do I feel like I’m taking myself on a date right now? And am I doing the things that make me feel that? A small thing for me is getting ready first thing in the morning. Showering and making myself look as good as possible in the morning so that I feel like that for the rest of the day. That cheesy cliche, “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready,” right? When you go out and you just feel ready, then anything can happen.
… So, is your head up? Are you open to the world? And are you doing the things for yourself, your presentation, your image that make you feel like doing those things? Are you taking yourself out on a date each day? Because if you are, other people will want to date you.
The fifth and final reason is being too tired and lacking energy:
The fifth reason you may be single that has nothing to do with love is you’re too freaking tired. And I would combine this with you don’t have time. Time and energy are two things that are very connected. In fact, I would go as far as to say energy is time because most people have some kind of time.
Most people find time to watch the latest Netflix show, regardless of how busy they are. They somehow have still seen the episodes that we’re all talking about when we say, “Have you seen this?” So, they have some time. But time without energy is redundant. If you don’t have the energy to reach out to somebody, to flirt, to go out and be where people are, to be on a date with great energy, then it doesn’t matter how much time you have. You’re just exhausted. You’re never going to be able to do it. So, we have to look at our lives and say, “If I’m getting real with myself, what needs to happen for me to have more time and perhaps, even more importantly, more energy to actually invest in creating opportunities in my love life?” And I say this humbly, knowing that there are those of you who are working multiple jobs, who are looking after sick relatives, who have children that you’re raising on your own, that are dealing with all manner of issues in your life. You may be dealing with your own health issues …
And that might involve recalibrating. Who do I need to start saying no to? Who do I keep making more important than me? And they shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of that list. Where do I need to have more boundaries? Where am I doing too much people pleasing in my life? Where am I taking on responsibilities that aren’t my responsibilities? Where do I need to start putting myself first? What help and support could I get? And how do I start to crowbar, albeit imperfectly, time for my love life into my week? Whether it’s time to go and join a community where I might have a hope of meeting somebody, or whether it’s time to go on a date. I need to find that time. If it’s as important to me as I say it is. There may be areas I need to pull back, but if it’s important, I’ll find a way.
When you do these things, it’s not just about giving you more time because, by the way, if you’re honest with yourself, you might already have some time. But it may be more about where do I need to pull back so that I have more energy? Because energy is ultimately going to be the thing that allows me to start to be enthusiastic and more optimistic about this area again.
Conclusion
The above citations are the best advice I have found about online dating.
There wasn’t any of that when I was single over three decades ago. Back then, the offline world was ‘it’. I met people behind the counters in a bank and a railway station. Nowadays, no one needs human contact to get cash or a train ticket.
However, I did meet someone in a restaurant which could have led to something more if we had lived closer to each other. We kept communication going for eight weeks, but it just wasn’t viable.
As it was, several months later, I met the love of my life through a new mutual friend at the time. I had moved far away for a new job. We met soon afterward.
See? A move, new communities and new people really can lead to that special person — and a satisfying marriage.
Tomorrow: Surviving disastrous dates and rejection
Three recent news items about coronavirus are worth passing along.
Long Covid and olfactory nerves
One of the many drawbacks of long Covid is the loss of the sense of smell.
To some extent, this can happen with any virus. Fifty years ago, my mother contracted a winter virus and lost her sense of taste and smell for two years. Although she wasn’t a foodie, her inability to enjoy our daily family dinner disappointed her the most. Her GP said there was nothing he could do. She would have to wait and see what happened. Two years later, suddenly, her olfactory senses returned and she had no more problems.
A December 22 article in The Times said that researchers are working on a similar problem with long Covid. It seems that the immune system blocks olfactory nerves (emphases mine):
The loss of smell suffered by people with long Covid is caused by an immune response affecting nerve cells in nasal tissue, scientists have said.
The researchers who conducted the study found that there was a decline in the number of these nerve cells in such patients.
The study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, was led by researchers at Duke University in the US and involved colleagues from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego.
They looked at tissue taken from the olfactory epithelium, found in the nose, where nerve cells responsible for smell are located …
The single-cell analyses revealed that there was a widespread infiltration of T-cells, a type of white blood cell used by the immune system, engaged in an inflammatory response in the nasal tissue.
Researchers found this immune response from these T-cells continued even when there were no detectable levels of Covid in the patient …
Dr Bradley Goldstein, an associate professor in neurobiology at Duke, who was a senior author for the study, said researchers had been encouraged to find that nerve cells appeared to maintain some ability to repair themselves.
He said learning which sites in the nose were being damaged and what cell types were involved would be a key step in designing treatment. “We are hopeful that modulating the abnormal immune response or repair processes within the nose of these patients could help to at least partially restore a sense of smell,” he added.
In the meantime, the only prescription is patience. Patience is a virtue.
Recovering from long Covid: mind over matter
On November 19, The Times featured an article by Francesca Steele, a long Covid sufferer, detailing how she overcame her debilitating condition.
Steele had tried everything and ended up spending £15,000, most of which was for naught. In fact, some of the medical treatments she underwent made her feel worse.
As a last resort, she embarked on putting mind over matter. The old saying worked.
She describes the journey back to normality:
It was on a particularly bad day that I started to wonder about mind-body courses, which suggest you can control the reactions of your body by “retraining” your brain. I had come across people who had success with these courses while searching online. One that kept cropping up was called the Lightning Process (LP), a short brain-training programme that, enthusiasts said, also had an impact on the body.
Developed in the Nineties by the British osteopath Phil Parker, LP is a three-day seminar (which you can do in person or on Zoom, with a range of coaches you can find online) that combines neuro-linguistic programming with life coaching, hypnotherapy and osteopathy. Its goal is to give people tools to help themselves with a range of conditions, including post-viral fatigue syndromes, chronic pain and anxiety, by reducing the brain’s stress response. It claims to have helped 25,000 people around the world.
Whenever I found someone online who claimed to have recovered from post-viral fatigue conditions in this way I tried to track them down and speak to them directly to check they were real and not invented by snake oil salesmen. They weren’t. I spoke to a journalist who said the techniques had cured him entirely of ME. I spoke to a GP who had gone on to train as an LP practitioner after it helped her ten-year-old daughter to recover after three years. I chatted to several writers who said mind-body work had “cured” them of long Covid but they were afraid to speak out, something I understand because I was trolled after mentioning the concept on Twitter …
However, I kept hearing positive things about it on social media, and decided it was at least worth a shot. In March I did the course. The thinking is that a serious shock like a bad virus can send your body into permanent “fight or flight” mode and that your nervous system gets stuck sending messages of sickness that are no longer needed. Using the science of neuro-plasticity, which says that the brain adapts to the neural pathways used most often — and that in this case your brain has adapted to using neural pathways that prompt a sickness response — the course teaches you to “train your brain” to send different signals. So, instead of your immune system, your endocrine system and your inflammation responses all gearing up for an attack, they relax. Your hormones, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your thermoregulation and so on, all, in theory, return to normal. As Dr Anna Chellamuthu, a GP and LP practitioner, puts it: “The LP is absolutely not saying, ‘This is all in your head.’ This is a physical illness. It’s saying that physiology can change when you change your thoughts.”
During a £750, three-day Zoom course, our coach talked the three of us (all with long Covid) through various exercises and taught us all a routine to interrupt negative thoughts. Every time I had an anxious thought about symptoms, I had to say “Stop” and do an intense visualisation, imagining myself in a situation where I was energetic, healthy, confident.
It was not easy to stick to. Constantly interrupting your thoughts feels unnatural at first and there were times I was out at the park with my kids when I really didn’t feel like scooting off to do the process behind a tree. I often doubted it would work. Yet within a month I was back at work. Two months later I celebrated my 40th birthday with a long walk and delicious dinner. Seven months on from the course, I am about 80-90 per cent back to my old self. I do sometimes get symptoms but they are far fainter and less frequent than before.
To those who say that I’d have got better anyway and that LP just happened to coincide with my recovery, I strongly disagree. I was unable to walk beyond our street for months. Within a week of the course I was able to go much further; within eight weeks I was able to run, after 16 months without exercise.
Various studies suggest the efficacy of mind-body work. In a recent pilot study conducted by a professor at Harvard Medical School, for example, all symptoms of patients with long Covid improved on a 13-week psychophysiological course. There is no doubt that more biomedical research is needed into post-viral fatigue conditions, and I, like others, hope that more evidence is found of the exact mechanisms at play. Dr Boon Lim, a consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Hospital who has treated many people with long Covid, says: “As medics we have been taught to focus all our attention on physical issues, to the detriment of patients. I think you need both physical and mind- body help to improve.”
I am also conscious that mind-body courses can be expensive. LP costs £750 (plus more for follow-up guidance). I found the intense nature of it uniquely motivating but cheaper mind-body work does exist, including the app Curable (I know one woman who recovered from 14 years of ME using it) and Suzy Bolt’s extremely compassionate, cheap (and some free) online classes.
For me, the process has been gradual, not immediate. I don’t claim that it will work for everyone or even that the theory is definitely correct, but I feel as if I’ve come back from the dead. Before it, I tried everything mainstream medicine had to offer, to no avail. Mind-body work has got me this far, and I believe it will get me the rest of the way. Without it, I believe I’d still be in bed, without hope.
What an encouraging story. This is further evidence that alternative medicine is viable and worth trying. As with any treatment, conventional or otherwise, doing one’s homework beforehand is a prerequisite.
Parliamentary debate on vaccines: broken silence
On Tuesday, December 13, the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen was granted an adjournment debate in the Commons on the potential harms of coronavirus vaccines. Finally, someone had the gumption to break the silence in Parliament.
I had just tuned into BBC Parliament by chance at the moment he started speaking. How providential.
Here’s the beginning:
The transcript is here. Excerpts from his hard-hitting speech follow:
Three months ago, one of the most eminent and trusted cardiologists, a man with an international reputation, Dr Aseem Malhotra, published peer-reviewed research that concluded that there should be a complete cessation of the administration of the covid mRNA vaccines for everyone because of clear and robust data of significant harms and little ongoing benefit. He described the roll-out of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine as
“perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science, attack on democracy, damage to population health, and erosion of trust in medicine that we will witness in our lifetime.”
Interestingly, there has so far not been a single rebuttal of Dr Malhotra’s findings in the scientific literature, despite their widespread circulation and the fact that they made international news.
Before I state the key evidence-based facts that make a clear case for complete suspension of these emergency use authorisation vaccines, it is important to appreciate the key psychological barrier that has prevented these facts from being acknowledged by policymakers and taken up by the UK mainstream media. That psychological phenomenon is wilful blindness. It is when human beings—including, in this case, institutions—turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, reduce anxiety, avoid conflict and protect their prestige and reputations. There are numerous examples of that in recent history, such as the BBC and Jimmy Savile, the Department of Health and Mid Staffs, Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, and the medical establishment and the OxyContin scandal, which was portrayed in the mini-series “Dopesick”. It is crucial to understand that the longer wilful blindless to the truth continues, the more unnecessary harm it creates.
Here are the cold, hard facts about the mRNA vaccines and an explanation of the structural drivers that continue to be barriers to doctors and the public receiving independent information to make informed decisions about them. Since the roll-out in the UK of the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine, we have had almost half a million yellow card reports of adverse effects from the public. That is unprecedented. It is more than all the yellow card reports of the past 40 years combined. An extraordinary rate of side effects that are beyond mild have been reported in many countries across the world that have used the Pfizer vaccine, including, of course, the United States.
… Only a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by a journalist from a major news outlet who said that he was being bombarded by calls from people who said that they were vaccine-harmed but unable to get the support they wanted from the NHS. He also said that he thought this would be the biggest scandal in medical history in this country. Disturbingly, he also said that he feared that if he were to mention that in the newsroom in which he worked, he would lose his job. We need to break this conspiracy of silence.
It is instructive to note that, according to pharmaco-vigilance analysis, the serious adverse effects reported by the public are thought to represent only 10% of the true rate of serious adverse events occurring within the population. The gold standard of understanding the benefit and harm of any drug is the randomised controlled trial. It was the randomised controlled trial conducted by Pfizer that led to UK and international regulators approving the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine for administration in the first place.
Contrary to popular belief, that original trial of approximately 40,000 participants did not show any statistically significant reduction in death as a result of vaccination, but it did show a 95% relative risk reduction in the development of infection against the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. However, the absolute risk reduction for an individual was only 0.84%. In other words, from its own data, Pfizer revealed that we needed to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one infection. The World Health Organisation and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges have previously stated and made it clear that it is an ethical responsibility that medical information is communicated to patients in absolute benefit and absolute risk terms, which is to protect the public from unnecessary anxiety and manipulation.
Very quickly, through mutations of the original strain—indeed, within a few months—covid fortunately became far less lethal. It quickly became apparent that there was no protection against infection at all from the vaccine, and we were left with the hope that perhaps these vaccines would protect us from serious illness and death. So what does the most reliable data tell us about the best-case scenario of individual benefit from the vaccine against dying from covid-19? Real-world data from the UK during the three-month wave of omicron at the beginning of this year reveals that we would need to vaccinate 7,300 people over the age of 80 to prevent one death. The number needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death in any younger age group was absolutely enormous.
At this point, Bridgen’s fellow Conservative, Danny Kruger (Prue Leith’s son), intervened to ask whatever happened to the initial policy (Matt Hancock’s) to vaccinate only the vulnerable and certainly not children. Note the pro-vaccine statements BBC Parliament put up when he spoke:
Kruger said:
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House. It is a very important debate that we should be having. He is talking about the relative risks for different cohorts of the population. He will remember that, when the vaccine was first announced, the intention was that it would be used only for those who were vulnerable and the elderly because, as he says, the expectation was that the benefit to younger people was minor. Does he agree that it would be helpful for the Minister to explain to us why the original advice that the vaccines would be rolled out only for the older population, and would not be used for children in particular, was laid aside and we ended up with the roll-out for the entire population, including children?
Bridgen responded as follows, then continued:
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and his support on this very important issue. Of course, it is important that the Government justify why they are rolling out a vaccine to any cohort of people, particularly our children. He will recall that, in the Westminster Hall debate, we questioned the validity of vaccinating children who have minimal risk, if a risk at all, from the virus when there is a clear risk from the vaccine. I will again report on evidence from America later in my speech about those risks, particularly to young children.
In other words, the benefits of the vaccine are close to non-existent. Beyond the alarming yellow card reports, the strongest evidence of harm comes from the gold standard, highest possible quality level of data. A re-analysis of Pfizer and Moderna’s own randomised controlled trials using the mRNA technology, published in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine, revealed a rate of serious adverse events of one in 800 individuals vaccinated. These are events that result in hospitalisation or disability, or that are life changing. Most disturbing of all, however, is that those original trials suggested someone was far more likely to suffer a serious side effect from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. These findings are a smoking gun suggesting the vaccine should likely never have been approved in the first place.
In the past, vaccines have been completely withdrawn from use for a much lower incidence of serious harm. For example, the swine flu vaccine was withdrawn in 1976 for causing Guillain-Barré syndrome in only one in 100,000 adults, and in 1999 the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn for causing a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting one in 10,000. With the covid mRNA vaccine, we are talking of a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, because that was the rate determined in the two months when Pfizer actually followed the patients following their vaccination. Unfortunately, some of those serious events, such as heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism will result in death, which is devastating for individuals and the families they leave behind. Many of these events may take longer than eight weeks post vaccination to show themselves.
An Israeli paper published in Nature’s scientific reports showed a 25% increase in heart attack and cardiac arrest in 16 to 39-year-olds in Israel. Another report from Israel looked at levels of myocarditis and pericarditis in people who had had covid and those who had not. It was a study of, I think, 1.2 million who had not had covid and 740,000 who had had it. The incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis was identical in both groups. This would tell the House that whatever is causing the increase in heart problems now, it is not due to having been infected with covid-19.
It was accepted by a peer-reviewed medical journal that one of the country’s most respected and decorated general practitioners, the honorary vice-president of the British Medical Association and the Labour party’s doctor of the year, Dr Kailash Chand, likely suffered a cardiac arrest and was tragically killed by the Pfizer vaccine six months after his second dose, through a mechanism that rapidly accelerates heart disease. In fact, in the UK we have had an extra 14,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in 2021, compared with 2020, following the vaccine roll-out. Many of these will undoubtedly be because of the vaccine, and the consequences of this mRNA jab are clearly serious and common.
Bridgen then went on to discuss conflicts of interest and how they influence vaccine approvals. He then talked about a few subsequent investigations:
In a recent investigation by The BMJ into the financial conflicts of interest of the drug regulators, the sociologist Donald Light said:
“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data.”
He went on to say that doctors and patients
“must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”
Similarly, another investigation revealed that members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation had huge financial links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation running into billions of pounds. Ministers, the media and the public know that the foundation is heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks.
Unfortunately, the catastrophic mistake over the approval, and the coercion associated with this emergency-use authorisation medical intervention, are not an anomaly, and in many ways this could have been predicted by the structural failures that allowed it to occur in the first place. Those shortcomings are rooted in the increasingly unchecked visible and invisible power of multinational corporations—in this case, big pharma. We can start by acknowledging that the drug industry has a fiduciary obligation to produce profit for its shareholders, but it has no fiduciary obligation to provide the right medicines for patients.
The real scandal is that those with a responsibility to patients and with scientific integrity—namely, doctors, academic institutions and medical journals—collude with the industry for financial gain. Big pharma exerts its power by capturing the political environment through lobbying and the knowledge environment through funding university research and influencing medical education, preference shaping through capture of the media, financing think-tanks and so on. In other words, the public relations machinery of big pharma excels in subterfuge and engages in smearing and de-platforming those who call out its manipulations. No doubt it will be very busy this evening.
It is no surprise, when there is so much control by an entity that has been described as “psychopathic” for its profit-making conduct, that one analysis suggests the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is the side effects of prescribed medications, which were mostly avoidable …
It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries. It is covering this up for fear that it may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry. The lead of that cardiology research department has a prominent leadership role with the British Heart Foundation, and I am disappointed to say that he has sent out non-disclosure agreements to his research team to ensure that this important data never sees the light of day. That is an absolute disgrace. Systemic failure in an over-medicated population also contributes to huge waste of British taxpayers’ money and increasing strain on the NHS.
Danny Kruger intervened a second time:
My hon. Friend is being very good with his time. I just want to call his attention to some research, since I chair the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence. He refers to the waste of money; there is £500 million being spent every year by the NHS on prescribed drugs for people who should not be on those habit-forming pills, causing enormous human misery as well as waste for the taxpayer.
Bridgen acknowledged what Kruger said, then concluded his speech:
I thank my hon. Friend for making a point that only reinforces the items in my speech that the public need to know. I thank him again for his support.
We need an inquiry into the influence of big pharma on medications and our NHS. That is been called for many occasions and by some very influential people, including prominent physicians such as the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and personal doctor to our late Queen, Sir Richard Thompson. On separate occasions in the last few years those calls have been supported and covered in the Daily Mail, The Guardian and, most recently, The i newspaper.
We are fighting not just for principles of ethical, evidence-based medical practices, but for our democracy. The future health of the British public depends on us tackling head-on the cause of this problem and finding meaningful solutions …
That first step could start this evening with this debate. It starts here, with the vaccine Minister and the Government ensuring in the first instance an immediate and complete suspension of any more covid vaccines with their use of mRNA technology. Silence on this issue is more contagious than the virus itself, and now so should courage be. I would implore all the scientists, medics, nurses and those in the media who know the truth about the harm these vaccines are causing to our people to speak out.
We have already sacrificed far too many of our citizens on the altar of ignorance and unfettered corporate greed. Last week the MHRA authorised those experimental vaccines for use in children as young as six months. In a Westminster Hall debate some weeks ago, I quoted a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association studying the effect of the covid-19 mRNA vaccination on children under five years of age. It showed that one in 200 had an adverse event that resulted in hospitalisation, and symptoms that lasted longer than 90 days.
As the data clearly shows to anyone who wants to look at it, the mRNA vaccines are not safe, not effective and not necessary. I implore the Government to halt their use immediately. As I have demonstrated and as the data clearly shows, the Government’s current policy on the mRNA vaccines is on the wrong side of medical ethics, it is on the wrong side of scientific data, and ultimately it will be on the wrong side of history.
Conservative MP Maria Caulfield responded on behalf of the Government. She is a nurse who worked on the front line during the darkest days of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, she strongly, but politely, disagreed with Bridgen:
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) for securing the debate. It is important that all Members get to discuss and debate such issues, and they are entitled to their opinion.
I have to say that I strongly disagree with my hon. Friend, not only in the content of his speech, but in the way he derided doctors, scientists and nurses. Many of us worked through the pandemic and saw at first hand the devastation that covid caused. There is no doubt in my mind that, despite the personal protective equipment, social distancing and infection control, the thing that made the biggest difference in combating covid was the introduction of the vaccine …
Caulfield told us things we already know about the Government’s support of the vaccine and how the yellow card system works. She refused to take an intervention from Bridgen but did take one from Kruger, who asked about vaccinating children:
I am grateful. The Minister’s predecessor had asked the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to review the evidence behind the decision to roll out the vaccine to children. Can she update the House or write to us to explain where that review has got to? Does she agree that the JCVI should be looking at the vaccination of children?
She responded, then continued:
I will write to my hon. Friend with an update on that report. It was touched on that the MHRA has licensed the vaccine for babies, but that has not yet been approved by the JCVI, so that is just a licence rather than a recommendation to roll out. However, I am happy to send him the details of that report.
I want to put on the record that the covid vaccines have saved tens of thousands of lives and prevented hundreds of thousands of people from being hospitalised. I completely disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire that there is a whole conspiracy of doctors, nurses and scientists—they have done nothing but work hard to get us through the pandemic.
In the end, Bridgen got his intervention:
I thank the Minister for giving way on that important point. The claims about the number of lives saved worldwide by the vaccination are sponsored by vested interests. The modelling is the lowest form of scientific evidence—in fact, it is more science fiction than science fact.
Needless to say, Caulfield disagreed and concluded by promoting the vaccines:
I completely disagree. I worked on the covid wards with patients who were dying from that virus. We had infection control measures, antibiotics, dexamethasone—a steroid—and every known facility available, and the only thing that made a difference was when those vaccines were introduced. They do not necessary stop people from getting the virus, but they certainly reduce its intensity and the likelihood of someone dying from it.
I completely debunk the conspiracy theories about a whole group of people benefiting financially from the roll-out of the vaccine and would gently say to my hon. Friend that if he has evidence, there are mechanisms in place for raising concerns, as we have seen with other drugs. Only today, I was before the Health and Social Care Committee talking about sodium valproate—we also had an Adjournment debate on that last week—where there are genuine safety concerns. The MHRA is taking that extremely seriously. It is not worried about pharma concerns; its first priority is patients, and it is exactly the same with the covid vaccine. So if there is evidence—I am not saying that there is not—it absolutely must go through the proper channels so that it can be evaluated.
We have launched a nationwide campaign to encourage people to come forward this winter to get their booster. I recommend that people do that safe in the knowledge that the vaccine is safe for people to have.
The debate ended and the House was adjourned.
Last Saturday, December 18, GB News’s Neil Oliver covered Bridgen’s debate and Aseem Malhotra’s findings in his editorial. Oliver rightly wonders why the vaccine scandal isn’t getting plastered all over the media the way coronavirus statistics were in 2020 and 2021. Instead, he says, there is nothing but deafening silence:
Dr Aseem Malhotra’s journey
When governments first announced the vaccines, Dr Malhotra, a cardiologist, was enthusiastic and encouraged everyone to get them.
Like the rest of us, he believed it when world leaders said the vaccines would prevent transmission. We saw that they did not.
Then, Malhotra’s father fell ill from one of the jabs. While he was an older gentleman, he was fit and ran daily. He also led an active life.
Malhotra examined his father and saw that he had suddenly developed heart problems.
On October 6, the cardiologist spoke publicly at the World Council for Health about the dangers the vaccines pose. He also said he doubted whether the original claims about preventing transmission were true. He urged a pause in vaccine roll outs:
Even with treatment from his son, Malhotra senior died in October. What a blow that must have been:
On December 17, Malhotra and Dr Peter McCullough discussed the vaccine’s dangerous side effects with Jan Jekielek of Epoch Times:
Medical practitioners now speaking out
Fortunately, within the past week, medical practitioners have begun speaking out about the dangers of the vaccines.
On December 16, a vascular specialist urged a pause in the vaccine roll out:
On December 17, a British GP said he would like an investigation into the vaccines:
Doctors for Patients UK aired their views on Wednesday, December 21:
Their video was taken down for a time but is now back up and running:
Apparently, one place where speaking out is forbidden is California, where one’s licence to practice can be suspended. No surprise there:
We can but hope that 2023 blows the vaccine controversy out into the open once and for all.
I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that every media outlet knows these interventions don’t work and are injurious to health. As Andrew Bridgen said of the media personality he spoke with, they’re afraid of losing their jobs if they say something openly.
One media outlet that is covering the vaccines is GB News, particularly on Mark Steyn’s weeknight show. My best wishes go to him as he recovers in France from two heart attacks in succession. I hope they are not related to ‘the jabs’.
Anyone who has missed the previous entries in the series of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, now a backbench MP with the Conservative whip withdrawn, can catch up on Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
I left off on Friday, June 25, 2021, with Dominic Cummings’s Substack post on Hancock’s and Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic.
However, the big news that day was The Sun‘s front page — a ‘world exclusive’ — which had a large photo of Hancock handling a part of his assistant’s anatomy. A security camera captured the image a few weeks before, when social distancing was still in place:
It was bad enough, as I wrote, that he lost all credibility with the Queen the day before when she aired her views to Boris during their weekly meeting.
But The Sun‘s scoop surely meant that Hancock’s dictatorial time was up. And, lo, so it was:
UK coronavirus news: Matt Hancock’s final 48 hours as Health Secretary (June 25-27)
That post included these tweets, the first about his marital situation …
… and the second and third featuring polls saying that Britons wanted him gone, especially under those circumstances:
It was a wonderful start to the weekend.
Matt Hancock’s side of the story
In the final instalment of Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries that the Mail published, he tells his side of the story. Emphases mine below.
Friday, June 25:
The Sun published the story at 2am as a ‘world exclusive’. The picture was a grainy CCTV image of me and Gina embracing in my departmental office.
It was immediately obvious that the story would be huge.
I knew I had to get out of London, and my wonderful driver Mark came to pick me up very early and take me to stay discreetly in the countryside.
At about 8am, a welcome call from No 10: Dan Rosenfield [chief of staff] to say they’d got my back. He offered any support we might need, including sending a Conservative Party press officer to my house.
By 9am I’d had half a dozen sympathetic messages from ministerial colleagues: a terrible sign. They knew that I was in deep trouble.
Nadhim [Zahawi, Minister for vaccine deployment] sent me a piece of advice ‘from a brother’, which sounded very much like an appeal not to resign.
Meanwhile, I went back over all our movements and tried to think of any other rules we might be accused of breaking. Other than the one-metre-plus rule, I couldn’t think of any. ‘Should I do a fast apology for letting everyone down/breaching guidance?’ I asked.
Gina thought it was a good idea, so Damon [Poole, media adviser] began crafting a short statement. I tried to focus on the words, but my head was spinning. The final version of the statement, which went out at lunchtime, accepted that I breached social-distancing guidance and said I was still focused on working to get the country out of the pandemic. I hoped it would quiet the furore.
Yet the story continued to rage: on all the news websites, on the BBC, on Twitter and on just about every other conceivable news outlet.
By mid-afternoon, there were still suggestions that we’d broken the law. It was categorically untrue, and Damon thought we needed to brief harder or put out another line. ‘What’s wrong with ‘No laws were broken’?’ I suggested.
Round and round in circles we went, trying to find the right words. Damon’s mobile phone was practically melting, and I was more stressed than I have ever been in my entire life.
All afternoon, the ‘what, when, where, who, why, how much?’ questions continued. Journalists began suggesting I might have broken the Ministerial Code. I hadn’t, but I could see the way this was going.
My local constituency association in Suffolk was wonderfully supportive. Allan [Nixon, special adviser] worked the phones, trying to get MPs to say something helpful.
My spirits lifted a little when William Hague [former Tory leader] publicly declared that I shouldn’t resign. Not for long, though: by late afternoon it was clear tomorrow’s papers will be hideous.
Saturday, June 26:
Privately, I was still getting positive messages from colleagues. Publicly, few were willing to defend me. Politically, I was increasingly isolated. I felt desperate for my family, my children and Gina’s family and her children, and powerless to protect them. Worse was the knowledge that Gina and I had brought all this on them.
Gina’s feelings of shame and guilt were nearly overpowering her. The jokes and cartoons on social media were excruciating. We were being publicly humiliated, again and again.
While close friends and family were amazing, I also had messages from friends and colleagues who had had terrible lockdown experiences and were very upset. Their disappointment in me – and their sense of betrayal – was agonising.
It is all my fault, of course. I knew I had to take responsibility. I knew in my heart that I had to resign.
I went to Chequers to see the PM. I explained that I had been thinking about what had happened and how it had made people feel – and that my mind was made up. The damage to my family and to the Government was too great.
I told Boris I had to resign.
He was regretful but didn’t argue. We sat on the patio and talked about what this would mean for the management of the rest of the pandemic.
An exchange of letters was prepared, offering and accepting my resignation, and we each edited our letters. We had to decide how to make the announcement, what to say and how.
I must have shot a thousand videos over the course of the pandemic, levelling with the public and thanking the NHS for their dedication. This would be the last.
In the end, the great machinery of the State was nowhere. It was just me and the PM fumbling around with an iPhone. He stood on the grass, holding the phone while I said my piece. It took a few goes to get it right.
He nodded sympathetic encouragement so much throughout the first take that the camera waved up and down. In the end it wasn’t perfect, but I was beyond caring: I had to get it out.
Now messages of sympathy and support flooded in: from my team, the Prof [Chris Whitty, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer], JVT [Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer], Pascal [Soriot, head of AstraZeneca] – and just about everyone else who worked so hard alongside us to save lives.
I’m incredibly grateful to all my team, especially my spads [special advisers] and private office, for going above and beyond in supporting me in what is such a difficult time for them, too.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I told them all. ‘I mean, the honest truth is I made a mistake due to love and it doesn’t matter that it was only guidance. I should not have broken advice that I myself signed off.’
This evening Jamie N-G [Njoku-Goodwin, former spad] whose endless advice – offered long after he stopped working for me – has been so valuable throughout the pandemic, messaged to say I’d done the right thing.
‘There is so much you have done that you should be incredibly proud of. There are people alive today who wouldn’t be if you hadn’t made the decisions you did,’ he said.
‘I love her. That’s what screwed my judgment,’ I replied wretchedly. ‘Love does that to us all. I hope you can both be happy,’ he said.
‘Of that I have no doubt,’ I replied.
As for Boris – well, if anyone knows how to survive a catastrophic political and personal mistake, it’s him.
‘Time to dive beneath the ice cap,’ was his advice.
Here’s the awkward video from Sky News:
That concludes the Mail‘s excerpts from Pandemic Diaries. The paper posted the following (emphasis in the original):
Matt Hancock’s book sale royalties will be donated to NHS Charities and good causes relating to dyslexia.
Hancock is a dyslexic and had special tutoring to enable him to pursue his studies at Oxford University.
The book is available now. Someone on social media repositioned it at a bookshop in the Crime section:
However, as my post on his last 48 hours as Health Secretary pointed out, Hancock told us in April 2020 that social distancing was more than guidance, it was an ‘instruction’. I’d included this tweet as proof:
In the days that followed, Sajid Javid — Boris’s first Chancellor — became our new Health Secretary. Questions whirled about the camera, security breaches and ministerial code breaches. Oliver Tress is the name Hancock’s girlfriend’s husband. He owns the Oliver Bonas chain of shops:
UK news: Sajid Javid’s return to Cabinet as Health Secretary (June 27-28)
UK coronavirus news: will Matt Hancock be investigated? (June 28; Oliver Tress, restriction-free Wimbledon video)
MPs worried about Matt Hancock’s security camera (June 28)
By now, most Britons know that Hancock met his girlfriend when they were undergraduates at Oxford. They both worked at the student radio station. Recollections from their contemporaries differ as to whether Hancock was part of the in crowd or whether he was a geek on its periphery.
Sky News’s Beth Rigby put that period of history in perspective for us:
On June 26, 2021, The Telegraph explained how the woman got involved in Hancock’s parliamentary career:
Gina Coladangelo started work for Matt Hancock during his short-lived Conservative Party leadership campaign in 2019, it has emerged.
Sources said Ms Coladangelo provided unpaid advice on the Health Secretary’s bid to replace Theresa May.
The work coincided with Mr Hancock sponsoring a parliamentary pass at the same time for his longtime friend, who has worked as communications director of Oliver Bonas, the homeware store, since 2014.
Mr Hancock declared his candidacy during a broadcast interview on May 25 2019, saying “we need a leader for the future, not just now”.
He quit the race on June 14 2019 – a day after coming sixth in the first ballot of Conservative MPs.
Ms Coladangelo was registered as holding a pass sponsored by Mr Hancock under her married name, Gina Tress, from June 2019.
Sources suggested she then started providing unpaid advice to Mr Hancock during the Covid-19 pandemic, before she was hired as a non-executive director at the Department of Health in September.
Her non-executive directorship also raised eyebrows. Who appointed her and how?
Tatler‘s profile of Hancock, published on June 28, told us:
… Both Hancock and Coladangelo, who were contemporaries at Oxford, have three children …
But, what of this relatively youthful minister? In 2014, he was touted as a junior minister with the skills ‘to reach the top’. Certainly, academically, his results are a tour de force of excellence, a first at Exeter College, Oxford, in what many consider a politician’s ‘rite of passage’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). He worked briefly for a Tory backbench MP before breaking loose as an economist at the Bank of England specialising in the sterling money markets and on housing, before being sent to do a masters at Cambridge. On return, he was plucked out by George Osborne (in 2005) to join the Conservative economics team, later becoming the future chancellor’s chief of staff, and a bonafide ‘high-flyer’.
It was in 2010 that he became an MP for West Suffolk, and today – or at least before the lockdown – he balanced his time between his weekday home in London and his abode in Little Thurlow, in his Newmarket constituency, at the weekends. He has admitted that the work-life balance can sometimes be a challenge, explaining in an interview with the Financial Times in 2014, ‘I pay a lot of attention to timetabling. Both my professional and social and family time gets booked up a long way in advance and then you have to be strict about it.’
Hancock married an osteopath, Martha Hoyer Millar, in 2006, and together they have three small children, a daughter and two sons as well as a dachshund called Hercules (which Hancock will occasionally document via his Instagram). With noble connections, Martha, a red head, is the granddaughter of Frederick Millar, 1st Baron Inchyra, a British diplomat who served as Ambassador to West Germany from 1955 to 1956. Baron Inchyra had four children, two sons and two daughters, their youngest, Dame Annabel Whitehead, was a Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret and later to the Queen …
By his own admission, Hancock is fiercely competitive. He once, in 2012, trained as a jockey and won a race at the beating heart of British racing, Newmarket, in his constituency. Going the whole hog, he trained rigorously, shedding two stones and even seeking advice from champion jockey Frankie Dettori. He keeps it up; in December, 2019 he posted a video of himself galloping atop a racehorse on the Newmarket heath, summarising afterwards, ‘absolutely exhilarating, every single time’.
It’s been far from plain sailing for Hancock, he’s overcome his own difficulties. One being dyslexia. His political career apparently practically ended before it even started, when a simple spelling mistake relayed the dead opposite of what he was trying to communicate. As a young Tory campaigner in Guildford he wrote an election leaflet. Instead of saying that candidate Nick St Aubyn wanted to ‘unite’ the community during the 2001 election, a then 22-year-old Hancock wrote: ‘I want to untie the community’. The mistake was spotted after the leaflet had been printed and landed in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn went on to lose the seat by 538 votes.
Hancock reportedly winces at the memory, but told the tale since he does not want other dyslexics growing up thinking they are ‘useless’ like he did. His wife, too, is dyslexic. He says he got on by focusing on numbers-based subjects, taking A Levels in maths, physics, computing and economics, but told the Telegraph, ‘I wish I had been diagnosed earlier’.
Sheer hypocrisy
On June 25, before he resigned, the media rightly began enumerating Hancock’s diktats and his own actions, proving the man’s hypocrisy.
… How has the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care managed to cling on this long in the first place? …
As the man in charge of England’s health system when the pandemic struck, he is accused of overseeing the disastrous discharge of Covid-positive hospital patients into care homes, mismanaging the supply of personal protective equipment, and the multi-billion pound failure that is NHS Test and Trace.
According to Mr Cummings, Mr Hancock “lied” to Mr Johnson and the public about much of this …
Mr Hancock strenuously denies much of this.
Nevertheless, it comes on top of allegations that he awarded a lucrative contract to supply the Government with tens of millions of Covid test vials to a former neighbour, who lacked experience producing medical supplies after he received a WhatsApp from him.
He also committed a “technical” breach of the ministerial code by failing to declare that a firm run by his sister, in which he has a 20 per cent stake, had been awarded an NHS contract …
The danger lies in the familiar territories of hypocrisy and the alleged “chumocracy” of the Johnson administration.
If Mr Hancock’s embrace of Ms Coladangelo contravened government guidelines, as he has now admitted it did, many will remember his reaction to last year’s Neil Ferguson scandal, where he suggested it could be a matter for the police, not to mention countless hugs with loved-ones missed over recent months.
Meanwhile, if evidence emerges suggesting that Ms Coladangelo was brought into the Government because of her personal relationship with Mr Hancock, rather than her expertise, the rap sheet all too quickly becomes too heavy to survive.
The Spectator‘s Steerpike, their gossip columnist, posted ‘Nine times Matt Hancock told us to obey the rules’, most of which follows (bold dates in the original):
From threatening to ban outdoor exercise and close the beaches to advising against sex outside ‘established’ relationships, Mr S presents his round-up of Hancock’s best/worst moments:
9 February 2021: Ten years in jail for Covid returnees
Hancock announced that people returning from holidays who conceal that they’ve been in a red list country would face a prison sentence of up to ten years …
1 February 2021 ‘Don’t even think about stretching Covid rules’
At another No. 10 press conference, Hancock gave an update on the South African variant in which he said that those living in postcodes affected by the mutation should ‘not even think about stretching the Covid rules.’
10 January 2021: Hancock claimed that flexing of rules ‘could be fatal’
The Health Secretary appeared on the Andrew Marr Show where he was asked about the police fining two women who went for a walk five miles from their homes. Hancock told Marr: ‘Every time you try to flex the rules that could be fatal’ and that staying at home is the ‘most important thing we can do collectively as a society.’
24 September 2020: Hancock warned people to ‘be sensible’ when having sex during lockdown
Asked about the government’s guidance that only ‘established’ couples should be having sex, Hancock told Sky News: ‘There have to be boundaries, to coin a phrase.’ He warned against casual sex, advising the public to stick to ‘well-established relationships’ and joking, ‘I know I am in an established relationship,’ with his wife …
5 July 2020: Hancock threatened to shut down non-compliant businesses
In an interview with Sky Hancock said: ‘We also have the authority to shut down a business if it doesn’t follow that [Covid] guidance.’ When asked by Sophy Ridge if he is ‘looking at shutting down businesses’ Hancock replied: ‘Yes and that’s happened, absolutely’. He added: ‘We’re not just asking nicely, we’re very clear to businesses that these are their responsibilities.’
25 June 2020: Hancock theatened to close the beaches
After sun lovers flocked to the seaside on Britain’s hottest day of the year, Hancock warned that he could close beaches …
5 April 2020: Hancock threatened to ban outdoor exercise
At the beginning of the first lockdown, Hancock criticised sunbathers and warned the government would ban outdoor exercise if people continue to ignore government advice. He said on Sky that those who flout the guidance were ‘putting others’ lives at risk and you are putting yourself in harm’s way’. He told Andrew Marr that same day: ‘I don’t want to have to take away exercise as a reason to leave home… if too many people are not following the rules.’ He added: ‘If you don’t want us to take the next step and ban exercise… then the message is very clear… you have to follow the rules.’
Sickening.
The Mail has a report with reactions from several journalists also calling out Hancock’s disgusting hypocrisy, well worth reading.
Questions, questions
Also on June 25, The Spectator‘s Isabel Hardman asked:
Why was it appropriate for Gina Coladangelo to have a parliamentary pass, to become an unpaid adviser at the department and then to receive the paid non-executive director post?
… the important matter here isn’t the affair: these things happen and they’re not normally anyone else’s business. But where it becomes other people’s business is when the affair is interlinked with government business and taxpayer’s money.
Then there’s the hypocrisy charge, not just from someone in a government that has restricted personal freedoms so much this past year, but from the very minister responsible for the lockdown legislation and guidance.
Questions about the camera and security were many.
At lunchtime that day, The Telegraph reported:
The Government Security Group, which is in charge of security at 800 buildings across Whitehall, has been asked to investigate, with Alex Chisholm, the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, expected to be in charge of an inquiry.
There have also been calls for MI5 to get involved in order to rule out any involvement from hostile foreign states.
Government insiders said it is “unheard of” for security cameras to be placed in the offices of Secretaries of State, raising questions about whether the footage of Mr Hancock was filmed on a pre-existing camera or could even have been filmed by a camera deliberately placed there to catch him out.
Day-to-day security at government buildings is typically contracted out to private firms, though the Department of Health and Social Care has yet to confirm if this was the case at their offices in London’s Victoria Street …
One source said: “There are an awful lot of questions that need answering. Lots of government buildings have cameras outside offices that film people going in and out, but I have never seen one inside a Secretary of State’s office. It’s unheard of.
“What was that camera doing there, was it even a CCTV camera, and did Matt Hancock know it was there?
“More importantly, who is it that has access to what is going on inside that office? We are talking about people being able to spy on a Secretary of State, so this is a serious breach of security, regardless of what you think of Matt Hancock’s behaviour” …
Among the questions the Government Security Group will have to answer is whether proper vetting was carried out of staff who have access to CCTV footage, and whether they have been required to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Breaches of the Official Secrets Act can carry a maximum punishment of 14 years imprisonment.
The paper had a follow-up article that evening:
The Telegraph understands Mr Hancock had no idea the camera existed when it captured him kissing adviser Gina Coladangelo …
It raises the possibility that the camera was deliberately placed by someone with access to his office with the intention of catching the pair cheating on their spouses and breaking Covid rules. It is the first time a Cabinet minister has been filmed in their own office without their knowledge.
In a further twist, the Department of Health and Social Care’s offices use CCTV cameras made by the Chinese company Hikvision, which is banned in the US because of national security concerns …
One theory being investigated is that the footage was filmed by someone on a mobile phone as it was being played on a CCTV screen, which could make it more difficult to prove who was responsible.
While the revelation could spell the end of Mr Hancock’s Cabinet career, the leak has also triggered a red alert in the Government over who could be spying on the country’s most senior ministers …
A source told The Sun that the pair had regularly been caught embracing and that their affair was an open secret among staff. The newspaper claimed the footage was released by a whistleblower disgusted that Mr Hancock was breaking Covid rules while telling people to obey them.
At the time, the country was in stage two of the lifting of lockdown, meaning hugging anyone from outside your own household was banned. On Friday, Mr Hancock admitted breaching social distancing guidance and said he was sorry for having “let people down” …
The £144 million building is owned by Singapore-based property firm Ho Bee Land, which bought it five years ago and has not so far responded to requests for comment.
Cameras on the outside were made by Hikvision, which is owned by the Chinese state and banned in the US because of national security concerns and alleged human rights violations. The firm is alleged to have provided cameras that monitor Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang …
One covert security expert said: “In all my years of working in this field I have never known a camera to be positioned inside an office like this. An office is a private space and that raises all sorts of issues.
“The camera is facing the door so it will give you a record of who is coming and going. But if you wanted to do that you would place the camera outside of the office in the corridor. Also, the angle of the camera is all wrong because if someone walks into the office with their head down this will not be able to see their features. To me it smacks more of a small covert camera that has been placed in a light fixture” …
The fact that the camera was part of the overall CCTV network ruled out any suggestion that Ms Coladangelo could have been behind the leak, and friends of Dominic Cummings, the former Downing Street special adviser who has waged a campaign against Mr Hancock since leaving his job last year, insisted he had nothing to do with the leak.
One government source suggested it was possible the camera had been placed in the office to increase security as a result of the Covid pandemic, while another person familiar with the layout of the office speculated that extra cameras could have been put there because it has a balcony, making it more vulnerable to break-ins …
Indignity for his wife
On Saturday, June 26, the papers had stories about what was happening in the Hancock’s marital home.
The Mail‘s first report was ‘Callous Matt Hancock dumped wife on Thursday after learning his affair would be finally exposed’:
Matt Hancock dumped his university sweetheart on Thursday night after learning video footage of him kissing an aide in his ministerial office would be exposed.
The ex-Health Secretary, who announced his resignation this evening, raced home to tell his wife of 15 years that he would be leaving her after he was contacted by The Sun newspaper over his affair with Gina Coladangelo …
Martha Hancock, a 44-year-old osteopath, had no clue about the affair until her husband told her their marriage was over, reports The Sunday Times …
The reports of the affair came just weeks after Hancock was seen enjoying lunch out with Martha – the granddaughter of Frederick Millar, 1st Baron Inchyra – in London.
The pair were seen waiting for a taxi after eating at Exmouth market in the capital.
They were last seen together in public at the England vs Scotland Euro 2020 match at Wembley a week ago …
Mrs Hancock is said to have met her future husband while they were students at Oxford University. Both are dyslexic and he once revealed that the condition helped them bond.
Descended from a baron and a viscount, Mrs Hancock had a privileged upbringing. Her father, Old Etonian Alastair Hoyer Millar, 84, was secretary of The Pilgrim Trust between 1980 and 1996. The organisation supplies grants to preserve historically significant buildings or artefacts.
Her mother, Virginia Hoyer Millar, 70, an antiques dealer, was yesterday pictured comforting her daughter in the street by putting her arms around her shoulders. They also linked arms as they strolled around North-West London.
The couple [the Hancocks] divide their time between London and their West Suffolk constituency home, where there was no sign of Mr Hancock following his resignation.
The ex-Health Secretary wrote in his letter: ‘The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.
‘I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need (to) be with my children at this time.’
Another report from the Mail followed that day, discussing Conservative MPs’ disgust with their colleagues and more information about the respective marriages involved, complete with photographs:
… Mrs Hancock looked sad and upset as she left the couple’s home but didn’t speak to reporters about her husband’s alleged infidelity. Her husband was nowhere to be seen, however, she was still wearing her wedding ring.
The shutters were closed at the £4.5million South London home Mrs Coladangelo shares with Oliver Tress and their three children yesterday. They are also believed to have a country home near the West Sussex coast. She has been working as an advisor for Mr Hancock since last year, with one source saying: ‘Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina’ …
Mr Hancock was meant to be at Newmarket Racecourse to visit the vaccination centre but a spokesman revealed he cancelled at the last minute ‘early this morning’.
A Department of Health probe into how the footage from outside Mr Hancock’s office was leaked is expected, with the whistleblower described as a former civil servant who was angry about his ‘brazen’ affair, adding: ‘They have tried to keep it a secret but everyone knows what goes on inside a building like that’ …
Mrs Coladangelo was appointed as a non-executive director at the department in September, meaning she is a member of the board.
She can claim up to £15,000 in taxpayers’ money in the role, though there is no public record of her appointment …
The woman Matt Hancock has been allegedly having an affair with is married to the millionaire founder of fashion firm Oliver Bonas and has worked as its communications director for the past seven years.
Gina Coladangelo, 43, knows the Health Secretary from Oxford University, where they both worked on the student radio station and studied politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) – and where he also met his wife Martha, 44.
Mrs Coladangelo remains Facebook friends with Mr Hancock’s osteopath wife – with whom the Conservative politician has two sons and a daughter – after they both graduated from the university at around the same time.
And they all reside in London, with Mrs Coladangelo living with her multi-millionaire fashion tycoon husband Oliver Tress and their three children in Wandsworth, while the Hancocks live in Queen’s Park with their children …
Mr Hancock met Mrs Coladangelo when they worked on Oxford student radio together in the 1990s. Mr Hancock was a minority sports reporter on Oxygen FM and they would have socialised together at Exeter College, Oxford.
… Mrs Coladangelo went on to marry Mr Tress, 53, who is founder of fashion chain Oliver Bonas, named after his ex-girlfriend Anna who is cousin of Prince Harry’s former partner Cressida Bonas.
It is not known exactly when Mrs Coladangelo and Mr Tress wed, although they were listed on the electoral roll together with her maiden name as recently as 2008, and then her married name of Gina Tress by 2011.
Mr Tress founded Oliver Bonas in London in 1993 with handbags and jewellery he had brought from Hong Kong where his parents lived, and his wife began working there in June 2014 after 11 years at Luther Pendragon.
They live together in a five-bedroom detached property believed to be worth around £4million in Wandsworth, South West London, on a quiet tree-lined street with residents-only parking bays that is popular with families.
Many of the cars parked in the street – which is a 20-minute drive away from Central London – are top-of-the range BMW 4x4s and Volvos. Neighbours of Mrs Coladangelo remained tight lipped and refused to comment.
But one visiting workman who left a neighbouring home was unimpressed by Mr Hancock. He said: ‘The guy had been caught bang to rights on film. He will have to do some smart talking to get out of that one with the wife.’
The Spectator‘s editor, Fraser Nelson, called readers’ attention to a Sunday Times report saying that Hancock took his girlfriend to a G7 summit:
The Sunday Times has something more significant: that Hancock took Mrs Coladangelo to the G7 health ministers’ summit, raising questions about whether they stayed together (the event took place a month after their being filmed canoodling in his office). The brilliantly-informed Tim Shipman has a devastating quote from a Cabinet source.
She went with him to the G7 health ministers summit. Did he disclose this to the PM? If it was shown he was shagging on the taxpayer he had to go. He’s been puritan-in-chief in the government and now it turns out he’s a massive, lying hypocrite.
… In this week’s magazine, Kate Andrews has dossier of how ministers have been living la vida loca, travelling globally at a time when they made it illegal for others to do so. All within the loophole-addled rules, yes, but generally conducting themselves in a way that others have been unable to do.
The girlfriend’s brother
More news emerged on June 26, this time concerning Hancock’s girlfriend’s brother.
Sky News reported:
A relative of the Whitehall director alleged to have had an extramarital affair with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is an executive at a private healthcare company which has won a string of NHS contracts.
Sky News can reveal that Roberto Coladangelo – who is Gina Coladangelo’s brother – works at Partnering Health Limited (PHL Group), a specialist in the provision of urgent and primary care services to NHS patients …
People who know Mr Coladangelo said that he and Mr Hancock’s aide were siblings, and social media profiles and electoral roll data appear to confirm a relationship between them.
None of those contacted by Sky News on Friday afternoon would confirm or deny the relationship between the Coladangelos.
Weekend papers
The weekend papers were magic for those of us rejoicing over Hancock’s resignation:
Also see The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph.
Of the resignation news, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens tweeted that it was sad that the government didn’t believe in their guidelines but the public did — ‘our tragedy’:
He added that, given all the damage Hancock caused Britain, it was ironic an illicit grope brought him down:
Maybe that’s why Hancock wants to return to private life after the next general election. Will the formal coronavirus inquiry advance that far in two years’ time? If not, he could be safe in the knowledge he won’t be asked to testify.
No. 10: photos ‘in the public interest’
On July 16, The Telegraph had a follow-up on The Sun‘s photos: ‘Leaked Matt Hancock CCTV footage was “in public interest”, says Boris Johnson’s office’:
The leaked CCTV footage which exposed Matt Hancock’s affair was in the public interest, the Prime Minister’s spokesman has said, as an investigation into an alleged data breach continues.
Two people suspected of recording the film without consent had their homes raided on Thursday by officials from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Police and Crime Commissioners have also called for the police to launch an urgent investigation amid concern over the security of government buildings.
But the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said Boris Johnson believed in the importance of a free press being able to investigate matters that were in the public interest …
Excellent!!!
There ends the resignation saga.
A final instalment on Hancock’s time as a backbencher will come next week.
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.
My series on Matt Hancock MP continues.
Those who missed them can catch up on parts 1 and 2.
Today’s post takes us further into the late Spring up to the early autumn of 2020. The Government’s policy on coronavirus held the UK hostage at home, for varying amounts of time, depending on what part of the country one lived in.
Testing centres popped up around the country. Hancock, who was Health Secretary at the time, urged everyone to go to one of these centres to find out if they had the virus. The narrative was that the asymptomatic could still have it and transmit it to someone else. What a load of cobblers. As Mike Yeadon, who used to work for Pfizer said, if you’re ill, you’ll know about it.
A mobile phone app also appeared: Test and Trace. Another load of rubbish, which was very expensive. Surprisingly, many Britons with smartphones used it. Another good reason for not having a smartphone.
Imperial College’s SAGE modeller, Prof Neil Ferguson, was discovered to have broken lockdown with his mistress, who lived on the other side of London.
In May, news emerged that Boris’s top adviser Dominic Cummings slipped off from London with his wife and son to Barnard Castle, County Durham. As penance, Boris made Cummings give a 90-minute press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden. Excruciating.
England’s Independence Day was declared on the Fourth of July. Then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s hospitality plan, Eat Out to Help Out, started a short while later, boosting restaurant sales.
During this time, the borders were open and people could travel freely. The problem were the sudden embargos which interrupted holidays at inconvenient hours of the day. Britons were often told to return home from a European country, mostly France and Spain, at midnight or 4 a.m.
However, it wouldn’t be long before the long tentacles of SAGE would find more doom and gloom in the autumn.
More extracts from Matt Hancock and Isabel Oakeshott’s Pandemic Diaries, serialised in the Mail, continue, with news items I bookmarked from the time. Emphases mine below.
May 2020
Amazingly, Hancock managed to achieve his testing goal of 100,000, which seemed impossible when he announced it only a month earlier.
These are the principal extracts from the Mail for the entries below, unless otherwise indicated.
Friday, May 1:
We did it, and with a very comfortable margin. 122,347 tests! Let the naysayers put that in their pipe and smoke it! I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed my moment, given how desperately certain people were willing me to fail.
Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fascinated by Australia’s low rate of infection. Little did he know at the time that Australia would go into a prolonged lockdown lasting months.
Sunday, May 3:
We still haven’t figured out what to do about borders. [Dominic] Raab, [Grant] Shapps and Sunak all want to keep the borders open. Crucially, they’re supported by the Prof [Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty]. On the other side, Priti Patel and I are in favour of far tougher measures, as is Boris.
Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was enjoying her power over her people, starring in daily briefings which the BBC televised. She gave her briefings at lunchtime. The UK government gave theirs in the early evening.
Monday, May 4:
Tonight, Nicola Sturgeon announced a ‘summer push to elimination [of Covid]’, a policy which has about as much hope of working as Chairman Mao’s attempt to eliminate sparrows by getting the Chinese population to bang pots and pans.
Much as I’m sure Nicola would love to build a Trump-style wall between her fiefdom and the rest of Great Britain, we’re all in this together. One person who’s clearly not keen on a hermit lifestyle is Prof Neil Ferguson [who was advising the Government on its Covid response].
I wasn’t particularly sympathetic when I heard he’d been caught breaking the rules [by meeting with his lover]. He’s issued a grovelling apology, but it was obvious he couldn’t continue to act as a Government adviser.
Ferguson resigned from SPI-M, SAGE’s modelling team, but was reinstated in 2021.
The care home situation continued to loom large. Infections and deaths were ever present. Furthermore, families were rightly distressed by having to press up against a window to see their elderly loved ones, a situation that persists in some care homes even today.
Boris suggested that Hancock hire Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist with a background in pharmaceuticals, as the head of the Vaccine Taskforce.
Also on May 4, we discovered that Good Morning Britain‘s star presenter Piers Morgan was a ‘Government-designated essential worker’. His test was negative, but he was experiencing symptoms, so he stayed off air for a few more days. The Mail reported that Hancock tweeted his best wishes before Morgan got the results of his test:
Mr Hancock, who had his own battle with coronavirus and who has previously clashed with the GMB host on the ITV morning show, tweeted that he hoped if Mr Morgan did test positive for Covid-19 that the symptoms would be mild.
On May 7, Hancock announced that Baroness Dido Harding would head the Test and Trace programme:
On May 9, the Mail on Sunday reported that Boris and Cabinet members were clashing with the beleaguered Health Secretary:
Matt Hancock is living on ‘borrowed time’ as Health Secretary following clashes with the three most powerful members of the Government over the Covid crisis, The Mail on Sunday has been told.
Mr Hancock is understood to have pleaded ‘give me a break’ when Boris Johnson reprimanded him over the virus testing programme – leading to open questioning within Downing Street over Mr Hancock’s long-term political future.
His run-in with Mr Johnson follows battles with both Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove over the best strategy for managing the pandemic.
Shortly after Mr Johnson returned to work at No 10 a fortnight ago, he and Mr Johnson had a tense exchange about the the Health Department’s ‘grip’ on the crisis, during which Mr Hancock said to the Prime Minister, in what has been described as a ‘petulant’ tone: ‘That’s not fair – give me a break.’
He is also being blamed in some Government quarters – or scapegoated, according to his allies – for not moving quickly enough to do more to protect care homes from the epidemic.
On Wednesday, May 13, Hancock announced a new genomics initiative in order to better understand the virus:
People are starting to blame us for discharging elderly people from hospital into residential settings without testing them properly, before we introduced strict rules. The evidence simply doesn’t bear that out: care home outbreaks rose sharply long after we had enough tests to put that right.
That day, a Labour peer was mystified as to why the Government did not know how much PPE there was:
Friday, May 22:
Westminster is abuzz with claims that Cummings broke lockdown rules, going to stay with his parents while he had Covid, which looks like a mega breach.
Saturday, May 23:
Downing Street called asking if I’d do some media [to support Cummings], but I’m uneasy. Despite all the reassurances, it feels off.
In the end, I issued a supportive tweet, saying he was right to find childcare for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill.
[Former Chancellor] George Osborne messaged me this evening warning me not to stick my neck out for Cummings again. ‘Lie low’ was his advice.
Sunday, May 24:
I spent much of the day fielding angry messages, many of them questioning why the PM is still standing up for Cummings. The answer is that he rules through fear and intimidation, squashing those who dare to challenge him or get in his way.
Monday, May 25:
Cummings tried to draw a line under the Barnard Castle affair by holding a press conference in the Downing Street garden. He sat behind a table, squinting awkwardly into the sun, looking like a sulky teenager who’d been sent outside to do his work for disrupting the class.
Afterwards, I found myself feeling strangely sorry for Boris.
Cummings has only one setting – divide and destroy – and now the boss is having to say some pretty stupid things as he machetes his way through the resulting mess.
The only thing for it was to keep backing Cummings – silence from me would only create an unhelpful story – so this evening I tweeted that I welcome the fact that Cummings ‘has provided substantive answers to all the questions put to him’. Apparently it got me some credit in No 10, but I can’t say I felt good about it.
Away from the Cummings s*** show, we had a Cabinet meeting to discuss plans for easing restrictions. It was a bizarre Cabinet, held on Zoom without a single mention of the Cummings-shaped elephant in the room.
In fact, an absurd amount of bandwidth was occupied by a discussion about whether – when we allow two households to get together outside – people should be permitted to walk through a house to get to a friend’s garden.
It’s fine by me, but are people going to ask whether they will also be able to go inside to use the loo? ‘If they’re quick and disinfect the handle?’ the Prof replied.
Who could believe that under a Conservative government, the long arm of the State would find its way into people’s loos?
On Tuesday, May 26, a Sky News reporter called out to Hancock asking if he was going to sack Cummings. Ermm, it wasn’t Hancock’s responsibility, only Boris’s:
June 2020
Thursday, June 4:
Boris messaged me at 6.43am saying he was ‘going quietly crackers’ about not testing enough people. He told me he sees it as our ‘Achilles heel’. He was in a proper flap. ‘What is wrong with our country that we can’t fix this?’ he complained.
I tried to calm him down. ‘Don’t go crackers,’ I said. ‘We now have the biggest testing capacity in Europe.’ Tempting as it was, I refrained from saying we did this against the obstruction of his own No 10 operation.
Wednesday, June 17:
In an embarrassingly crude power grab, [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen is trying to wrest control of vaccine research and procurement from EU member states.
Never mind that health is a matter for individual countries: the woman who once sent German army units on manoeuvres with broomsticks – because they didn’t have any rifles – wants to move responsibility for scientific development and manufacture into the sticky paws of Brussels bureaucrats.
I may have voted to Remain, but it’s enough to make a Brexiteer out of anyone.
Friday, June 19:
A massive blow-up with Kate [Bingham, head of the Vaccine Taskforce]. She simply doesn’t see the need to order 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine – she wants 30 million – and can’t seem to grasp almost everyone may want or need it.
I warned her during today’s meeting that if we don’t get our ducks in a row on this one, we risk a complete car crash.
She pushed back hard. But with the other elected Ministers on my side, I won the argument [for buying 100 million doses].
‘I’m not happy with that meeting,’ Kate snapped afterwards. ‘Nor me,’ I replied.
‘We will create a guide for you to explain what we are doing – there are enormous risks with this,’ she said, as if I don’t spend all my time thinking about how to save lives.
Kate pressed on, claiming that the technology that underpins the vaccine Oxford is working on [Astra-Zeneca] ‘is neither proven nor scaled’, and that she has ‘an expert team who are working round the clock, pushing hard’.
I told her: ‘We need to have tried everything feasibly possible to accelerate delivery. I’ve been asking the same question over and over again and not yet had a satisfactory answer – hence my frustration.’
This only seemed to wind her up further, prompting a mini-lecture about the dangers of trying to go too far too fast.
‘The worse case is we kill people with an unsafe vaccine,’ she said. ‘We need to tone the comms to register the fact this is risky and unproven.‘
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being patronised.
On Wednesday, June 24, Hancock, riding high as the chap in charge of the nation’s health, appeared on Robert Peston’s ITV current affairs show:
July 2020
July 4 was Independence Day from coronavirus in England.
However, separate regulations applied in Leicester, which still had a high rate of infection. Even so, nothing was stopping them travelling elsewhere to socialise or shop:
On Sunday, July 5, Hancock expressed concern over high infection rates and overcrowded working conditions in certain factories in Leicester. It seems he was thinking of certain textile factories operating like sweatshops:
Monday, July 6:
The Vaccine Taskforce have consistently argued that we only need to back three [vaccine] brands. My view is that, to hedge our bets, we need more. Any one of the vaccines could fail in clinical trials.
Fortunately, Rishi and Steve Barclay at the Treasury are totally onside.
Wednesday, July 8:
Rishi’s announced a new Eat Out To Help Out initiative. I did my best to sound supportive, but in truth I’m worried that it might backfire and lead to a spike in cases.
In my box tonight was one particularly startling note relating to the way Covid has been getting into care homes. The main takeaway is that the virus is primarily being brought in by staff, not by elderly people who’ve been discharged from hospital.
This explains a lot, including why the rise in care home deaths came so much later than would have been the case if hospital discharges were the primary cause. We must ban staff movement between care homes, fast.
On Friday, July 17, news emerged that deaths from natural causes were being classified as coronavirus deaths because of a previous positive test. A retired journalist had the story:
He pointed out that Public Health England (PHE) never announced how they were tabulating deaths. Scotland, of course, tabulated theirs differently:
The question remains: how many ‘Covid’ deaths were true Covid deaths?
Saturday, July 25:
Anyone coming back from Spain from midnight tonight will have to self-quarantine for 14 days. This is very bad news for a lot of British holidaymakers.
Department for Transport officials kept pushing for 24 hours’ notice for the Spain decision, which I thought was curious – Grant Shapps is normally an ‘action this day’ Minister – until I discovered that Grant and his family had just flown there on holiday. The officials were trying, perhaps too hard, to protect their Minister.
In Cobra meetings, Nicola Sturgeon’s political games have become incredibly debilitating and significantly limit scope for open discussion. She sits like a statue, lips pursed like the top of a drawstring bag, only jolting into life when there’s an opportunity to say something to further the separatist cause.
The minute someone presses ‘End Meeting’, you can almost hear her running for a lectern so she can rush out an announcement before we make ours. We now chew over big decisions elsewhere and relegate formal meetings to rubber-stamping exercises.
Monday, July 27:
Downing Street is in a semi-panic about a second wave.
Tuesday, July 28:
Sturgeon is on manoeuvres again, trying to persuade us all to sign up to her impossible and anti- scientific zero-Covid plan.
Sure, we’d all love zero Covid, but that’s about as realistic as a bagpipe-playing unicorn.
She just wants to look and sound tough, then blame us when her policies don’t work.
I can hardly bear to watch her on TV any more.
Wednesday, July 29:
Testing is a continuing concern. We still haven’t sorted procurement for what Boris calls ‘Operation Moonshot’. The idea is to carry out literally millions of Covid tests a day to keep the economy going.
Officials say we mustn’t eliminate staff movement across care homes because it might lead to a shortage of staff. Yet research shows the risk of outbreaks in care homes doubles if carers are coming and going.
On Thursday, July 30, Bradford was experiencing a high rate of coronavirus. Hancock put restrictions in place.
This was Bradford Council’s message:
Hancock’s restrictions prohibited people meeting up at each other’s homes:
SkyNews had a report on the story:
Fortunately, for them, it might have felt like an eternity but it was temporary.
What wasn’t temporary was his announcement earlier that day that GP appointments would have to take place remotely. This is still in place today, causing untold distress to millions of Britons.
The Guardian reported:
All GP appointments should be done remotely by default unless a patient needs to be seen in person, Matt Hancock has said, prompting doctors to warn of the risk of abandoning face-to-face consultations.
In a speech setting out lessons for the NHS and care sector from the coronavirus pandemic, the health secretary claimed that while some errors were made, “so many things went right” in the response to Covid-19, and new ways of working should continue.
He said it was patronising to claim that older patients were not able to handle technology.
The plan for web-based GP appointments is set to become formal policy, and follows guidance already sent to GPs on having more online consultations.
But the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) hit back, saying it would oppose a predominantly online system on the grounds that both doctors and patients benefited from proper contact.
They don’t seem to think so now, do they?
The article continues:
Addressing the Royal College of Physicians in London, Hancock noted the huge increase in online consultations as much of the NHS closed its doors to focus on the crisis. In the four weeks to mid-April, 71% of routine GP appointments were done remotely against 25% in the same period a year before.
Outlining what he said were the ways the pandemic had demonstrated the need for greater uses of technology in healthcare, Hancock said that before the coronavirus, “there was a view advanced by some which held that anyone over the age of 25 simply could not cope with anything other than a face-to-face appointment”.
He said: “Of course there always has to be a system for people who can’t log on. But we shouldn’t patronise older people by saying they don’t do tech.”
The rise in online consultations had been welcome, he argued, especially in rural areas. “So from now on, all consultations should be tele-consultations unless there’s a compelling clinical reason not to,” Hancock said.
“Of course, if there’s an emergency, the NHS will be ready and waiting to see you in person – just as it always has been. But if they are able to, patients should get in contact first – via the web or by calling in advance.”
Sure, Matt.
What a disaster that policy has proven to be.
The month seemed to end on a positive note with regard to agency staff working in multiple care homes.
Good news on banning staff movement in care homes. After I blew my top, officials got the message.
August
By August, even though England was open and people were socialising again, rules were still in place. They caused a lot of confusion, including in Government. Only Boris had mastered them.
Monday, August 3:
To ram home his point about how complicated the Covid rules have got, Boris went round the [Cabinet] table asking everyone to set them out simply. We had endless different answers, and he got them all right.
‘I hope colleagues feel I have justified my general reputation for mastery of detail by being RIGHT this morning about the rules. It’s two households inside and six outside,’ he said triumphantly.
Boris was eager for people to get back to work. He saw self-administered tests — lateral flow tests — as the answer.
Friday, August 7:
Boris is having a sugar rush about DIY Covid testing, which he believes could lead us to what’s he’s dubbed – in emphatic capital letters – ‘COVID FREEDOM DAY’. I have no idea who he’s been talking to, but he’s very fired up.
He thinks rapid home tests are the way to ‘get Whitehall and the whole British army of bludgers and skivers’ back to the office and ‘douse all remaining embers of the disease’. Today, I’m on a short break in Hay-on-Wye. When we got to the pub, there was great excitement. I’m not used to people recognising me, so the universal recognition is a bit of a shock. Something I’ll have to get used to, I suppose.
The following year, everyone would know who he was — and not just in the UK. How happy I am that The Sun released that photo of him and his girlfriend. It went viral, worldwide.
Hancock announced the end of Public Health England, which, strangely enough, still seems to be around.
Tuesday, August 18:
[Hancock has announced plans to abolish Public Health England.] On reflection, I should have been more brutal earlier. It wasn’t fit for purpose, and I should have cleared out senior figures who blocked the expansion of testing, basically because they didn’t want the private sector involved.
In response, Angela Rayner [deputy Labour leader] has been tweeting the usual tripe about Tories wanting to privatise the NHS by stealth. Does anyone seriously listen to this c**p any more?
The truth is, we wouldn’t stand a chance of winning this fight against Covid if it wasn’t for support from business. From manufacturing tests to developing the vaccine, the private sector – alongside the NHS and academia – has been critical to the fight.
Friday, August 21:
Border enforcement is a mess. Everyone who flies in to the UK has to fill out a passenger locator form, which they’re supposed to hand to officials on arrival at the airport, but half the time the documents go straight in the bin.
We can blame compulsory masks for secondary school pupils on Nicola Sturgeon. The UK government fears the woman.
Tuesday, August 25:
Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms. In one of her most egregious attempts at oneupmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools.
Cue much tortured debate between myself, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and No 10 about how to respond.
Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is.
Amazing — and not in a good way.
Boris was worried about the British economy, and rightly so.
Wednesday, August 26:
I was minding my own business, when suddenly, ping! Ping! Boris sprang into life. It was 6.29am. He veered off the reservation, suddenly going off on one about how the virus isn’t really killing many people any more so ‘how can we possibly justify the continuing paralysis?’
He noted that an 80-year-old now has a six per cent chance of dying, which he didn’t think was enough to justify what we’re doing.
‘If I were an 80-year-old and I was told that the choice was between destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a 94 per cent chance of surviving, I know what I would prefer,’ he argued.
This exchange, which continued on WhatsApp pretty much all morning, was more than a little stressful, given that it represented a fundamental challenge to our entire pandemic response.
I’m not quite sure what he expected – that the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Adviser, Cummings and I would all suddenly throw our hands up and say: ‘You know what, you’re right, this whole thing has been a huge mistake. Let’s ditch everything we’re doing and pretend none of it ever happened’?
Fortunately, after a few hours he ran out of both statistics and steam. All the same, I sense a very definite shift in attitude. Something has unsettled him. Who has he been on holiday with?
By the next day, Boris had gone back to normal.
Thursday, August 27:
Overnight, Boris’s creeping suspicion that everything we’re doing has been a catastrophic over-reaction has evaporated as quickly as it appeared, to be replaced by annoyance at the discovery that there is a supply/demand gap for testing.
In fact, we are a victim of our own success. Our advertising campaign encouraging more people to come forward for tests has been a bit too effective, and now we’re overwhelmed.
Saturday, August 29:
Boris has started going on about ‘freedom passes’. I think he envisages some sort of app that would allow anyone who can prove they’re negative to get back to normal. I can see the appeal, but I can also see the likely furore over anything resembling ‘Papers, please’.
Covid cases are rocketing in France. ‘We need to draw lessons pronto,’ Boris said, asking if the French have tried local lockdowns or whether it is ‘a case of the whole frog getting slowly boiled?’
September 2020
Wednesday, September 2:
Test and Trace is now identifying more than half of new cases. ‘It’s like the system actually works!’ I messaged Dido Harding [head of Test and Trace] excitedly. ‘Who would have guessed!!’ she replied.
Hancock talked about a vaccine in a coronavirus briefing.
Tuesday, September 8:
I got a blast from No 10 about talking up the vaccine yesterday. Other than Boris, nobody there has ever really believed we can make it happen. In reality, their scepticism suits me, because it means they’re not meddling. The last thing I need is Cummings interfering or the project going through the Cabinet Office mincer.
Restriction tiers across England were looming. An example would be the aforementioned restrictions in Leicester and the north of England where coronavirus was prevalent.
Tuesday, September 15:
The PM is still dithering over restriction tiers, a classic Boris battle between head and heart.
Thursday, September 17:
Cases are growing. Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] thinks we need a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’. Boris seemed confused, doing that thing he does, emphatically verbalising the arguments for and against out loud – alarming everyone as they try to work out where he’s going to land.
Friday, September 18:
We are now at 6,000 new Covid infections a day in England alone, nearly double the figure last week.
By 10pm, No 10 had done a complete about-turn. They now want tougher local lockdowns and more warnings about what happens if people don’t follow the rules. Apparently the PM wants to explain that we have to balance Covid with other health and economic factors.
Well, no s***. What’s really infuriating is that the people who want action to control the virus didn’t insist on me being there [at meetings] to press the point.
Monday, September 21:
Boris is torn. Everyone’s getting heavy with him, from the Prof to Sage, who say there will be ‘catastrophic consequences’ if we don’t act now. They’ve proposed a two-week circuit-breaker.
Friday, September 25:
An alarming note from the modelling people who advise Sage. They say the epidemic is ‘close to breaching the agreed reasonable worst-case scenario’. Meanwhile, public finances are a horror show – from April to August, the figure borrowed was £173.7 billion.
Rishi has clearly been using these figures to freak out the PM. But the only sustainable way to get the economy back on track is to defeat the virus, not pretend it’s gone away.
Saturday, September 26:
We’ve spent millions promoting the [NHS Covid] app, including buying wraparound ads in loads of publications. Just as I was allowing myself a moment of satisfaction at a job well done – or at least not ballsed up – there came news of fresh horror. A major glitch has emerged: the app can’t take data from NHS Covid tests.
I sat very still, trying to absorb the full implications of the fact that we’ve just spent tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on an NHS app that… doesn’t link to the NHS. Which genius thought it would not need to do this, first and foremost? Which other genius signed it off on this basis?
Given the multiple overlapping responsibilities of the various quangos involved, Whitehall’s institutional buck-passing and the involvement of two mega tech companies (Google and Apple), we just didn’t know.
What I did know was the buck stopped with me, and it was probably time to adopt the brace position. I prayed that word of this hideous blunder would not reach Cummings, but that was of course too much to hope. Naturally he went nuts when he found out, and I can’t say I blame him.
I find this sort of screw-up personally mortifying. Should I have asked such a basic and obvious question? I took it for granted that we would link our own app up to our own tests. Never assume!
To be continued tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist 