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The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series revealed how professional-sounding WhatsApp messages descended into insecure infighting.
This became quite apparent when looking at Matt Hancock’s online exchanges: parts 1, 2 and 3.
The paper’s associate editor Camilla Tominey looked at this in ‘How sober, professional WhatsApp conversations descended into chaos’ (emphases mine):
… what is so striking about the March 2020 “countdown to disaster” is how considered the early conversations on Covid were compared to the cavalier nature of some of the later discussions that played out on the instant messenger app …
With positive cases spreading fast across China and the Pacific, Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, spent the last week of February working on an “action plan”, setting up a WhatsApp group for quick communication between the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), Number 10, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser.
What is obvious from the early messages is the level of deference afforded to the Government’s two top medical minds as Mr Johnson’s then right-hand man Dominic Cummings, official spokesman James Slack, communications chief Lee Cain and Sir Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary of DHSC, grappled with how best to prepare the public for what was coming.
We know from later messages that, far from following the science, Sir Chris and Sir Patrick would go on to be overruled at various junctures – including on the testing of people going into care homes, the 14-day isolation period and the efficacy of face masks …
In the beginning:
There was no scaremongering talk of “frightening the pants off” the public, nor any notion that they should blindly follow governmental diktats without being given all the available information.
That didn’t come until months later, when all the initial formality appeared to leave the online exchanges as the key protagonists seemingly grew rather too comfortable wielding untrammelled power over the lives and civil liberties of an entire nation.
By the time of the second and third lockdowns in late 2020 and early 2021, the decision-making was far less restrained as allegiances, obsessions and insecurities took over.
The need for evidential justification for the restrictions went by the wayside as choices were made for political expediency and public relations reasons rather than the sake of public health …
What the earliest WhatsApp messages show is that this was a group very much in thinking mode – until the groupthink set in.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, from SAGE to WHO
Yet, even in April 2020, cracks began to appear.
When the pandemic started, Sir Jeremy Farrar was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and director of Britain’s biggest medical research charity Wellcome Trust.
Today, Sir Jeremy is now chief scientist at the WHO, a post he took up at the beginning of March 2023.
‘How Matt Hancock plotted to have “useless loudmouth” Covid scientist sacked’ tells us a bit about how he moved onwards and upwards:
Ministers criticised by one of the world’s most eminent scientists tried to have him sacked from the Government’s Covid advisory committee, leaked messages reveal.
He:
was branded “worse than useless” by Matt Hancock who demanded of his permanent secretary: “Can we fire him?”
He also described Sir Jeremy … as “totally offside” and a “complete loudmouth” who “has little respect amongst the serious scientists”.
The rest of Hancock’s WhatsApp from April 20, 2020 reads:
He needs to be either inside the tent and onside, or outside and commentating. He adds no value internally
It appears that this was because Farrar spoke to the media without Hancock’s permission:
Mr Hancock was already angry that Sir Jeremy had done an interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky News in which he had said: “I hope we would have a vaccine towards the end of this year” but warned of the difficulty of making sure it was safe and then able to be manufactured in billions of doses around the world that “is truly effective”.
It is unclear what part of the Sky News interview so irritated Mr Hancock, but he sent a WhatsApp message to a special adviser at 9.18am on April 20, a day after the interview aired, questioning whether Sir Jeremy had been given permission to speak to the broadcaster.
It is unclear if there was any requirement of Sage members to do so.
Another sticking point at that time was testing:
On the day that he gave the Sky News interview, Lord Bethell told Hancock he had “after massive toing-and-froing” with Sir Jeremy and Professor John Newton, the Government’s testing tsar, agreed on proposals to conduct a survey to test the public on past and present Covid infections.
But Sir Jeremy had raised his concern that the antibody tests in April 2020 were unlikely to be accurate.
In a message circulated to Mr Hancock and Lord Bethell, Sir Jeremy wrote of the tests: “They should not be believed. I have seen no data that shows any currently available rapid test would be useful or informative. Some are frankly dangerous. I appreciate this is not a message that is popular. I wish this was not true. But the RDTs [rapid detection tests] are currently a distraction. In months to come there maybe good RDTs – there are none today in my view and reading of the data.”
Lord Bethell appeared to have been concerned at Sir Jeremy’s stance. “Farar is being a total spanner in the works,” he said in a message to Mr Hancock on April 19, adding: “But I think somehow he needs management. Either a Big Hug. Or a sharp talking to. But at the moment is q tricky.”
On May 29:
Allan Nixon, another of Mr Hancock’s advisers, messaged his boss on WhatsApp: “Jeremy Farrar going off the rails again”, to which the health secretary replied: “ He is definitely no10’s problem not ours”, before adding: “If asked about Farrar by No10, explain that we thought best to relieve him from his duties but were overruled…”
In August, Farrar:
had publicly questioned the Government’s decision to shut down Public Health England (PHE) in August 2020, about six months into the pandemic.
Sir Jeremy … had condemned the proposal to scrap PHE in favour of a new organisation run by Mr Hancock’s friend, Baroness Dido Harding, who had run the NHS Test and Trace programme …
He posted on Twitter early on August 19 2020: “Arbitrary sackings. Passing of blame. Ill thought through, short term, reactive reforms… Preempting inevitable public inquiry” and a link to a newspaper article reporting the axing of PHE.
He was also critical of Test and Trace.
Farrar, possibly unknowingly, managed to galvanise moves against him:
The social media post so infuriated ministers they orchestrated a ring round of Sir Jeremy’s colleagues, including even Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, the then chair of the Wellcome Trust and the former head of MI5.
Lord Bethell, the health minister and one of Mr Hancock’s closest friends, told Hancock: “He’ll now know I’ve done a comprehensive ring round. This will irritate him but also warn him. I wonder if there is some sort of official route to talking to him?”
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser and chairman of the Sage committee, also became embroiled in the row after Mr Hancock asked: “Does [Sir Jeremy] bring any value at all to SAGE? I’ve never once heard him say anything useful at all” …
That day, August 19 2020, Mr Hancock sent a message to Sir Chris Wormwald, the permanent secretary in the Department of Health.
“We have to do something about Farrar. Can we fire him? This is completely unacceptable,” wrote Hancock in a WhatsApp message. Sir Chris replied: “Would have to be Patrick V to fire him as it’s SAGE. “
The next day, Mr Hancock raised his concern with Emma Dean, a special adviser, asking her to speak to Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer (CMO).
“Can you talk to CMO and see what we can do,” asked Mr Hancock. Ms Dean replied: “Yes. What is your ask? Get rid or neutralise?” to which Mr Hancock responded: “Neutralise. Stop the defamation.”
Later, Mr Hancock, clearly still irritated, said: “Why don’t we kick him off SAGE? he brings nothing.” Ms Dean said removing Sir Jeremy “would make him a martyr and would dine out on it very noisily” and advised against it.
On August 21 the issue over Sir Jeremy is still rankling and Lord Bethell tells Mr Hancock he had spoken to an eminent scientist “about handling Farrar”.
Lord Bethell reports back to Mr Hancock he’s been advised “dont talk to Manning Buller – she’s ferocious and self-important, and would contrive to interpret a call as somehow interfering with Wellcome independence. He suggests I speak to Farrar directly, nicely explaining the challenge of outspoken external criticism when operating as a trusted advisor. I’ve put a call in, he didnt pick up. will update”.
Five days later, Lord Bethell messaged Mr Hancock telling him he had spoken to eminent scientists about Sir Jeremy.
He also spoke with Baroness Manningham Buller: “Manning Buller said she agreed with him 100% and defended his right to say whatever he liked.
“I’ve called and texted JF but he hasn’t replied. He’ll now know I’ve done a comprehensive ring round. This will irritate him but also warn him. I wonder if there is some sort of official route to talking to him?”
The article says:
Mr Hancock’s comments will raise serious concerns over the apparent attempts, behind the scenes, to undermine a senior scientist and member of Sage, the body that provided independent scientific advice on Covid to the Government.
It will also raise questions about ministers’ response to public criticism from eminent scientists who were concerned by the handling of the pandemic.
Sir Jeremy wrote a book, which was published in July 2021:
Sir Jeremy says of the then health secretary: “Matt Hancock shoulders a responsibility for the PPE shortages and testing fiasco, among other failings, that contributed to the dreadful epidemics in care homes and hospitals.”
In the book, Sir Jeremy also said Baroness Harding’s appointment as chair of Test and Trace was a “grave error” and that “even worse” than PHE “being thrown under the bus” was the decision to put Baroness Harding in charge of the new body.
Dame Kate Bingham, vaccine tsarina
Thanks to The Lockdown Files, we found out more about Dame Kate Bingham, the first head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce.
On March 5, The Telegraph published ‘The hidden tensions between Matt Hancock and Kate Bingham, his vaccines tsar’. I prefer to call her the vaccines tsarina.
Back then, she was Kate Bingham. Her damehood came afterwards:
But Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, clashed with her over the rollout, including Dame Kate’s refusal to back a plan to buy tens of millions of vaccines from India.
Advisers to Mr Hancock flagged up their concerns in Oct 2020 after Dame Kate gave an interview to the Financial Times in which she said that the vaccination of the entire population was “not going to happen”. She explained: “We just need to vaccinate everyone at risk.”
It is understood that she was following government policy at the time.
In leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole, Mr Hancock’s media special adviser, said: “This is unhelpful,” and included with it a link to the article.
Mr Hancock protested that he did not have a subscription and then said: “But is that Kate?… If so we absolutely need No10 to sit on her hard. She has view and a wacky way of expressing them & is totally unreliable. She regards anything that isn’t her idea as political interference” …
Dame Kate was appointed chairman of the Vaccine Taskforce by Boris Johnson, the former prime minister. She answered to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) …
Two days later, in a further sign of tensions, Mr Hancock and his advisers suspected Dame Kate of leaking vaccine rollout plans to The Economist magazine.
Mr Hancock asked Mr Poole on Oct 6 2020 if the leak was from the vaccines tsar. Mr Poole replied: “Well I don’t know that for sure but I have some evidence to suggest it might have been. I.e – the fact she had a meeting yesterday with the journalist who has the leak. But it’s an old NHS plan apparently, I’ve not seen the document yet.”
Then there were her PR consultants:
A month later, The Sunday Times reported that Dame Kate had spent £670,000 on public relations consultants.
In a WhatsApp message to Mr Poole on Nov 7 2020, Mr Hancock admitted to being aware of the use of consultants but said he had not realised they were being paid for by the taxpayer.
Mr Hancock said: “Who the hell signed this off? … I knew she had these consultants. I was cross about them and asked for it to stop. But I had absolutely no idea taxpayers were paying for them. Unreal.”
Mr Poole said the use of advisers was “bonkers” and “pretty appalling”. At the time, BEIS said “specialist communications support was contracted by the Vaccine Taskforce for a time-limited period” and “in line with existing public sector recruitment practices”.
It is understood that the communication consultants were contracted by BEIS to create a registry on the NHS website to recruit people onto clinical trials to test the vaccines.
Having previously agreed only to a short-term contract, Kate Bingham left in December 2020. By then, she and her team had been able to secure enough vaccine doses for the UK, so her job was finished.
Her deputy, Clive Dix, replaced her for a short time. I wrote about Dix on March 23, quoting his first-person article for The Telegraph where he said that Hancock was ‘a headless chicken’. Dix left because of a problem in the manufacture of the required doses, and he did not wish to source vaccines from India as a substitute.
Returning to this article about Kate Bingham, however, we learn more about Hancock’s view of Dix:
In Feb 2021 – at a time when the Government had earned plaudits over the vaccine rollout – Mr Hancock asked Nadhim Zahawi, then the vaccines minister, to arrange a meeting to explain to Dr Dix that “he knows to expect that I’m not going to give him executive authority but DO think he has a huge role”.
Mr Zahawi reported back that Dr Dix is “all sorted”. But two days later, on Feb 18 2021, the taskforce chairman told the minister he wanted to make a “personal decision” on whether the UK had enough vaccine doses or needed to procure more from India.
That prompted Mr Hancock to question whether Dr Dix might quit.
“He can’t threaten to reisgn and continue in post. Either you accept the principle of ministerial decisions making, or you don’t,” Mr Hancock said in a message to Mr Zahawi.
Later that day, just after 11pm, Mr Hancock sent Mr Johnson a message accusing Dame Kate and Dr Dix of blocking the purchase of vaccines from the Serum Institute of India (SII) four months earlier in Oct 2020.
“Nadhim & I have got to the bottom of why we didn’t get the SII doses when they were first offered in October,” Mr Hancock told then prime minister.
“Turns out it was blocked by Kate & Clive Dix. That’s why we kept getting b——t excuses. Thankfully it is nearly over the line now – but they’ve cost us six months on this one and the comms will need handling.”
Boris messaged back:
Aha. I do remember asking Kate ages ago
I think she said it was all because the mhra [Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency] wouldn’t approve it fast enough
And by the time mhra had approved it we wouldn’t need it
Hancock replied:
Yes. And it turns out it’s because she and Dix didn’t want to
The Telegraph spoke with Dame Kate, who said:
I stood down as chair of the VTF in December 2020 after serving for seven months having initially agreed to do it for six months. I left after deals had been made to secure vaccines, two of which were approved by then with one of these (Pfizer) being administered.
Before I left, the VTF had discussed buying vaccines from India but was persuaded against doing so as the VTF did not think the MHRA would be able to approve vaccines from India on the required timescale.
These vaccines had been funded by international organisations to provide vaccines to low-income countries, including India itself. The vaccines from India were originally intended for developing countries. The second half of the vaccine order from India that was placed in 2021 (after I left the VTF) was halted by the Indian government.
When it came to who to vaccinate, the advice was always determined by the JCVI and the vaccination policy that Matt Hancock and the Government were committed to at the time. I never questioned these – I only ever repeated government policy at the time in 2020. My role was to follow government policy not to create it. The VTF sought to procure vaccines based on the number of people that the JCVI and the Government advised should be vaccinated at that time in 2020.
BEIS contracted communications support to launch and drive sign-up to the NHS registry of clinical trials volunteers. 500,000 people signed up. This was critical to establishing that Covid-19 vaccines worked and were safe. I also participated in Covid 19 vaccine trials through this registry.
These WhatsApps suggest that Matt Hancock was not aware of the published and agreed government vaccine procurement policy, did not read the reports by and about the work of the Vaccine Taskforce, and did not understand the difference between complex biological manufacturing and PPE procurement.
When I stood down as chair, the VTF shared recommendations for the Government – one of which was that Government needs a pandemic adviser who understands the pandemic threat, science when it comes to viruses, bioengineering – what is involved in the development and manufacture of vaccines – and has relationships with industry to be called upon when needed. I have continued to call for this ever since. These WhatsApps starkly reveal the need for this.
The vaccine conspiracy theory
Remember back in 2020 when people said that Bill Gates was planning to put nanochips in the vaccines that would track everyone who had them?
The Lockdown Files had an article about that, too: ‘Matt Hancock cracks joke about Bill Gates Covid conspiracy’:
Matt Hancock joked that Bill Gates “owes me one” considering “how many people I’m getting his chips injected into”.
The then health secretary was hoping to get Microsoft billionaire Mr Gates’s help in promoting an offer of UK expertise in identifying coronavirus variants when he made the quip in January 2021 …
On Jan 25, 2021 Damon Poole, Mr Hancock’s media adviser, sent him a WhatsApp message asking him if he had spoken to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organisation, about the New Variant Assessment Platform (NVAP), which offered other countries UK expertise to detect and assess new variants around the world …
The European Union even issued lengthy advice on how to persuade people that the microchip plot was fiction …
Mr Gates did not, in the event, endorse the NVAP.
Dominic Cummings sets cat among pigeons
In 2021, Boris’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, who left Downing Street late in 2020, appeared before two parliamentary Select Committees. In his March appearance, he called Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care a ‘smoking ruin’. In May, he accused Hancock of a number of failures as Health and Social Care Secretary.
In 2020, Hancock and other Cabinet members defended Cummings, who had broken lockdown rules by taking his wife and young child from London to Barnard Castle in County Durham and back. Cummings said that he had had problems with his eyesight on the day they came back.
‘What Sunak and Hancock really thought of Dominic Cummings’ tells us about the reaction to Cummings’s appearance before the select committees.
On March 17, 2021, after Cummings first appeared before the select committees, Hancock WhatsApped his Spad (special adviser) Jamie Njoku-Goodwin:
How would you deal with this Cummings crap?
The Spad responded with some colourful language then ended his message with:
You went out and backed him over Barnard Castle, and he responds by briefing against you relentlessly, in private and now in public. He’s a psychotherapist
*pyschopath [sic]
Hancock responded that he, not Cummings, called for the creation of the Vaccine Taskforce and appointed Kate Bingham, then ended with:
The vaccines have only been such a success because we kept Dom out of it while he caused chaos in Testing!
The Spad responded:
But best to rise above it
Hancock, still perturbed, messaged back, in part:
Why should I take this crap lying down
The Spad responded:
I suppose because until 6 months ago he could get you sacked
Hancock replied:
But he can’t now
On May 26, after Cummings’s appearance before the second select committee in May, in an exchange with Rishi Sunak, still Chancellor then, Hancock posited that Cummings wanted a job in ‘the future Sunak administration’, which was interesting.
Sunak replied:
Ha! Ironic given I haven’t spoken to him since he left!
Hancock messaged:
It’s just awful & stark reminder of how hard governing was
Sunak replied:
Yup. It was such a difficult time for all of us. A nightmare I hope we never ever have to repeat.
That day:
In a reference to Mr Cummings’ widely ridiculed claim he had driven to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight, Mr Hancock WhatsApped an aide:
His insight is no better than his eyesight.
Rishi’s Eat Out To Help Out scheme
Although I thought then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out To Help Out was a great plan in the summer of 2020, a lot of people disapproved of it, including those in Government.
Those who disapproved of helping out the hospitality sector, which, by that time, was on its knees, said that Rishi’s plan would only drive up Covid cases.
Perhaps it did.
On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak urged to “come clean” over flagship Eat Out To Help Out scheme’:
Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his flagship Eat Out To Help Out scheme amid claims of a “cover up”.
The Lockdown Files show Matt Hancock’s disdain for the initiative and worry that it was contributing to the spread of the virus.
The scheme, which was aimed at encouraging the public to return to restaurants, formed part of a package of measures launched by Mr Sunak, the then chancellor, in the summer of 2020.
In August 2020, while the scheme was still operating, Mr Hancock mentioned his concerns about it in messages to Simon Case, the then Downing Street permanent secretary in charge of the Civil Service response to Covid.
Mr Hancock told Mr Case that the scheme was driving up Covid cases in some of the worst hit areas and that the problems it was causing were “serious”. But he added that he had “kept it out of the news”.
The then health secretary said the Treasury had been informed about the “problems” the scheme was causing in Covid “intervention areas”.
“We’ve been protecting them in the comms,” he said, adding that “thankfully” it has not yet “bubbled up”.
Eat Out to Help Out offered diners 50 per cent off food and non-alcoholic drinks on Mondays to Wednesdays in August, capped at £10 per head. The final total cost to the taxpayer was £849 million – far in excess of the £500 million original forecast by the Treasury.
The Prime Minister has now been urged to “come clean” about what he knew about the risks of the scheme and explain why “warnings were apparently ignored and evidence concealed” …
A study by Warwick University, published in October 2020, concluded that the scheme had “caused a significant rise in new infections… accelerating the pandemic into its current second wave”.
Academics claimed the scheme contributed between eight and 17 per cent of new Covid infections at the time …
A Government source said: “Many European countries experienced an uptick in transmission at the same time as the UK, including those without similar schemes.”
The Guardian has more on the Warwick study:
A working paper published by Thiemo Fetzer, an economics professor at Warwick University, found the initiative was closely linked to an increase in new cases during August and into early September. The paper found the virus spread more rapidly in areas with lots of participating restaurants and said the scheme might have “public health costs that vastly outstrip its short-term economic benefits”.
Fetzer said on Saturday he had made a submission to the Covid-19 public inquiry and he considered the scheme should now be examined as part of the hearings. He said: “The second wave of the pandemic was seeded in the summer and eat out to help out contributed to that.
“It was only available on Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesday, so people shifted their dining patterns. It created crowded spaces.”
He said the Treasury had dismissed his work, but had not provided any substantial evidence that the scheme did not cause a rise in infections. “They did not do a rigorous analysis,” he said. In January 2021, the Treasury said its own analysis had shown that areas with a high take-up of the scheme had low subsequent Covid-19 cases. The Institute for Government said that analysis was “pretty thin” and did not engage properly with criticisms of the scheme.
Although this post finishes the WhatsApp revelations, I will follow up next week with reaction to The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files.
Matt Hancock looms large in The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series which ended earlier this month.
For more background, see parts 1 and 2.
Matt Hancock latest
The series continues after an update on latest news about the UK’s former Health and Social Care Secretary.
On Saturday, March 25, 2023, The Guardian reported that Hancock had been one of a handful of Conservative MPs caught in a prank set up by the left-wing activist group Led By Donkeys, ‘Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company’ (emphases mine):
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling” …
The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday, with recorded undercover footage …
The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs.
Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.
It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window …
In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.
“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
… Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.
Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents …
Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.
A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”
Furthermore, Matt will be looking for a new job as he will not be standing again as an MP come the next general election.
Although I am not a defender of Hancock, former BBC presenter Jon Sopel is hardly in a position to take pot shots at him, considering that he, too, fancies filthy lucre, as Guido Fawkes revealed on Monday, March 27:
Days earlier, on March 18, The Mail‘s Richard Eden reported that Hancock’s girlfriend and her estranged husband sold their South London house to Gordon Ramsay for several million pounds:
Should she ever tire of turning her boyfriend, Matt Hancock, into a TV star, Gina Coladangelo has a lucrative alternative career as a property tycoon.
I can disclose that she and her estranged husband, Oliver Tress, managed to sell their marital home to fiery TV chef Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, for a staggering £7.5 million.
It’s an astonishing price for the area of South London. Not only is it almost double the £3.8million that Gina and Tress paid in 2015, but it’s £2.5 million more than the top price paid previously for any property in their street.
Zoopla had estimated its value as between £3.8 million and £4.6 million …
The sale, which Land Registry documents confirm went through in January, is all the more impressive as it comes when British property prices are predicted to plunge by ten per cent.
The five-bedroom Edwardian house is in one of London’s most desirable areas. Ramsay, 56, and his wife, 48, bought it in their joint names from Gina and Tress, the founder of upmarket homeware and clothing chain Oliver Bonas.
Gina, 45, left Tress, 55, with whom she has three children, for former health secretary Hancock, 44, who competed in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!.
Ramsay, who has an estimated fortune of £175 million, already owns a huge house, said to be worth £7 million, less than a mile away …
Last year, he, Tana and their five children were reported to have temporarily moved out after work began on a super-basement …
Tatler adds:
It is easy to see why Ramsay might need a new home. The chef announced at the start of the year that he and wife Tana are expecting their sixth child. On the Heart Breakfast show, the chef said that ‘there’s one more on the way’ to join their five children: Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Oscar, three. Holly recently featured as one of the most eligible singles at Tatler’s Little Black Book party. According to Hello! magazine, the Ramsays are believed to have paid in cash for their new luxury pad; they also own a £6 million house in Cornwall and a mansion in Los Angeles. Gordon and Tana marked their 26th wedding anniversary very recently, having married in Chelsea in 1996.
On March 6, as The Lockdown Files were drawing to a close, The Telegraph reported, ‘Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps “upset” travel industry’:
A major international travel conference has axed Matt Hancock from its programme after The Telegraph revealed he had been highly critical of the travel sector during the pandemic.
The Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT) confirmed that Mr Hancock will no longer be speaking at its annual conference in Doha, Qatar, saying that the messages uncovered by The Telegraph had caused upset to many in the travel industry.
Last week, as part of its Lockdown Files series, The Telegraph revealed that Mr Hancock and Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, shared jokes about those being forced to stay in quarantine hotel rooms during the pandemic …
The former health secretary was also highly critical of the airline and airports industry, describing them as being “totally offside” and “unhelpful”, while Mr Case [top civil servant Simon Case] labelled them as “horribly self-serving” ...
In a statement to The Telegraph, Steven Freudman, chairman of the ITT, said that Mr Hancock had become a “major distraction”.
He added: “We have over 25 distinguished speakers and it would have been unfair on them for the focus to have been solely on Matt Hancock.”
The ITT annual conference is regarded as one of the sector’s key annual events, with thousands of travel professionals and high-profile speakers from across the globe attending.
The initial decision to invite Mr Hancock as a speaker at the conference was widely criticised by sector figures even before The Lockdown Files revelations were published.
Industry figures told The Independent that they wanted the ITT to reconsider its decision, accusing Mr Hancock’s policies of “destroying the sector” and resulting in thousands of travel jobs being lost …
Dr Freudman said: “The original invitation was issued in the hope that Matt Hancock would recognise the damage that he and his government caused the travel industry with its handling of the pandemic.
“We were also hoping that he might confirm that lessons had been learnt and that any future crises would be handled differently.
“However, his WhatsApp messages have upset many of us in the travel industry and his presence would clearly have been a major distraction.”
The Telegraph has contacted Mr Hancock for comment.
That day, Hancock’s lawyer appeared on GB News and was introduced as such. He responded vehemently that he did not want that detail mentioned. The presenter calmly read out the lawyer’s email to GB News stating that he permitted them to describe him as Hancock’s lawyer. The lawyer sheepishly responded that he forgot to type ‘not’. Comedy gold:
Isabel Oakeshott describes The Telegraph ‘bunker’
Hancock gave Oakeshott access to the 100,000 WhatsApp messages because she co-authored his book, Pandemic Diaries.
On Friday, March 24, she wrote an article for Tatler describing what working in seclusion with The Lockdown Files reporters was like at the beginning of 2023:
… The Daily Telegraph was the only newspaper that consistently challenged the lockdown agenda and had a track record of managing huge investigations in the public interest – famously exposing the MPs’ expenses claims in a scandal that rocked Westminster in 2009. They immediately agreed to put a full team of top journalists on the project: The Lockdown Files.
In a secure bunker, well away from the main newsroom, I worked alongside their reporters, filleting the messages: a team of eight or so, full time, for eight weeks. To avoid hackers, our computers were not connected to the internet. We worked from hard drives stored overnight in a safe. Anything printed was swiftly shredded. Nobody else came into the bunker, which, as the weeks went by, became increasingly unhygienic. Discarded takeaway containers, half-eaten packets of Colin the Caterpillar sweets, mouldy mugs and other detritus were strewn over every grubby surface. Hunched over our computers in a room with no windows, we were like lab rats in some dubious experiment, wracked by colds, coughs and – oh, the irony – Covid. By the week of publication, our core team had swelled to some 25 writers and digital news experts. The Daily Telegraph’s newsroom was emptying out – leaving those who remained wondering where all their colleagues had gone.
There was a curious voyeuristic pleasure in reading the banter between Government ministers and their aides – including some very flirty exchanges between two household names. Who was sending who the heart emojis and who was complimenting who on their sexy outfits? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t be too happy if that news was in the public domain.
On Sunday, March 26, we got an answer about the heart emojis. Michael Gove sent them to Hancock:
Hancock responded, ‘You have been true throughout’.
Gove explained to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that he agreed, particularly on that day, with Hancock’s course of action. No surprise there. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Guido Fawkes has the interview:
Oakeshott’s article continues:
The WhatsApp from Matt Hancock came through at 1.20am: ‘You have made a big mistake,’ it said darkly – leaving me to imagine what punishment he had in mind. The following day, he released a furious statement, accusing me of ‘massive betrayal’. Fair enough – I had breached his trust and would face plenty of questions about that decision. But did anyone outside the media bubble seriously doubt it was for the public good? The torrent of grateful messages from ordinary people, often with harrowing personal stories about their own suffering during lockdown, was answer enough for me … Dining in a mountain restaurant in the French Alps, my partner, Richard Tice [leader of the Reform Party], was surprised – and touched – to be passed a note by the waiter from a fellow diner who had recognised him. On the crumpled piece of paper were the words ‘please thank Isabel’.
Lord Sumption on Hancock: ‘a fanatic’
On March 10, after The Lockdown Files came to an end, Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and guardian of civil liberties, wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘Matt Hancock was never a policy maker — he was a fanatic’:
The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself.
Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out …
Nevertheless, Hancock’s WhatsApp messages offer an ugly insight into the workings of government at a time when it aspired to micromanage every aspect of our lives. They reveal the chaos and incoherence at the heart of government, as decisions were made on the hoof. They expose the fallacy that ministers were better able to judge our vulnerabilities than we were ourselves. They throw a harsh light on those involved: their narcissism, their superficiality, their hypocrisies great and small. Above all, they show in embarrassing detail how completely power corrupts those who have it.
… Even the most ardent lockdown sceptics accept that in extreme cases drastic measures may be required. But Covid-19 was not an extreme case …
No government, anywhere, had previously sought to deal with epidemic disease by closing down much of society. No society has ever improved public health by making itself poorer …
The fateful moment came when the government chose to go for coercion. This ruled out any distinction between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, because it would have been too difficult to police. It also meant that ministers began to manipulate public opinion, exaggerating the risks in order to justify their decision and scare people into compliance. So we had the theatrical announcement of the latest death toll at daily press conferences from Downing Street. Shocking posters appeared on our streets (“Look him in the eyes”, etc). Matt Hancock announced that “if you go out, people will die”.
The scare campaign created a perfect storm, for it made it more difficult to lift the lockdown …
Hancock was the chief peddler of the idea that everyone was equally at risk from Covid-19. This proposition was patently untrue, but it was useful because it frightened people. “It’s not unhelpful having people think they could be next,” wrote his special adviser, who knew his master’s mind well. Other countries did not behave like this. In Sweden state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was able to reassure his public that a lockdown was neither necessary nor helpful. Events have proved him right.
… Matt Hancock insisted on schoolchildren wearing masks in class in spite of scientific advice that it made little difference, because it was necessary to keep up with Nicola Sturgeon. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to suggest that once the vaccine rollout started the lockdown should be relaxed, Hancock resisted. “This is not a SAGE call,” he said, “it’s a political call.”
Once ministers had started on this course, there was no turning back. It is hard to admit that you have inflicted untold damage on a whole society by mistake. Hancock resisted shortening the 14-day quarantine period in spite of scientific advice that five days was enough, because he did not want to admit that the original policy had been wrong. Relevant evidence was simply shut out. His response to the success of Sweden’s policies was not to learn from it but to dismiss it as the “f—ing Swedish argument”. Having no grounds for rejecting the Swedish argument, he had to ask his advisers to find him some. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he barked.
The adrenalin of power is corrosive. It was largely responsible for the sheer nastiness of the Government’s response to criticism. Hancock lashed out at the least signs of resistance or dissent. He wanted internal critics sacked or moved. He suggested the cancellation of a learning disability hub in the constituency of an MP who intended to vote against the tier system. Ministers “got heavy” with the police to make them tougher on the public …
I’ll get to the learning disability hub in a moment. Shameful, just shameful.
Lord Sumption’s editorial continues:
There is no sign that Hancock either thought or cared about the wider consequences of his measures. He seems to have believed that there was no limit to the amount of human misery and economic destruction that was worth enduring in order to keep the Covid numbers down. Rishi Sunak is on record as saying that any discussion of the wider problems was ruled out in advance, and this is fully borne out by the WhatsApp messages. Any hint from Sunak or business secretary Alok Sharma that the cure might be worse than the disease provoked an explosion of bile but no actual answers.
Hancock fought tooth and nail to close schools and keep them closed. Deprived of many months of education, cooped up indoors and terrified by government warnings that they would kill their grandparents by hugging them, children suffered a sharp rise in mental illness and self-harm although they were themselves at no risk from Covid-19. Cancer patients were left undiagnosed and untreated. Old people, deprived of stimulation, succumbed to dementia in large numbers. Small businesses were destroyed which had taken a lifetime to build up. A joyless puritanism infected government policy. No travel. No wedding parties or funeral wakes. No hugs. Anyone who spoke up for a measure of decency or moderation in this surreal world was promptly slapped down as a “w—er”.
Real policy-making is never black and white like this. It is always a matter of judgment, of weighing up pros and cons. In that sense, Matt Hancock was never a policy-maker. He was a fanatic.
Why did hitherto decent people behave like this? In Hancock’s case, at least part of the answer is vanity. The crisis was good for his profile. He saw himself as the man of action, the Churchill of public health, the saviour of his people, earning the plaudits of a grateful nation. As early as January 2020, he was sharing a message from a sycophantic “wise friend” assuring him that a “well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league”. He fussed over his tweets. He pushed his way in front of every press camera. He tried to divert the credit for the vaccines from Kate Bingham to himself. “I think I look great” is one of his more memorable messages.
Sumption says that Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisers could not have restrained Hancock. Boris had no strategy, and the others were lacklustre:
Apart from Sunak and Gove, his Cabinet was probably the most mediocre band of British ministers for nearly a century. Collectively, they proved unable to look at the whole problem in the round. Their eyes were never on the ball. They were not even on the field. These are the lessons of this sorry business.
Blocking disability hub
Hancock did not tolerate Conservative MPs voting against his health policies during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, March 7, The Telegraph led with a story about James Daly MP from Bury North:
‘Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown’ tells us:
Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, The Lockdown Files show.
WhatsApp messages between Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, and his political aide show they discussed taking a plan for a learning disability hub in Bury, Greater Manchester, “off the table” if James Daly, the Bury North MP, sided against the Government in a key vote.
It came ahead of the vote on Dec 1, 2020 on the introduction of a toughened new local tiers system of restrictions for England.
The Telegraph has also obtained a WhatsApp message with an attached list of 95 Conservative MPs planning to vote against the tier system and detailing their concerns about it.
The article has that list.
On November 20, 2020, Allan Nixon, one of Hancock’s Spads (special advisers) WhatsApped his boss:
… Thoughts on me suggesting to Chief’s spads that they give us a list of the 2019 intakes thinking of rebelling. Eg James wants his Learning Disability Hub in Bury – whips call him up and say Health team want to work with him to deliver this but that’ll be off the table if he rebels
These guys’ re-election hinges on us in a lot of instances, and we know what they want. We should seriously consider using it IMO
Hancock replied:
yes, 100%
James Daly only found out about this through The Lockdown Files:
Mr Daly – whose constituency is the most marginal in the UK mainland with a majority of just 105 – told The Telegraph he was “appalled” and “disgusted” that the disability hub, for which he had been campaigning, had been discussed as a way of coercing him into voting with the Government.
He said he had never been contacted by the Whips’ Office and no threat to block the scheme had been made.
The conversation between Nixon and Hancock continued on December 1, 2020:
On the morning of the vote, Mr Hancock messaged his adviser to say: “James Daly is with us”, but Mr Nixon responded with the caveat: “If extra hospitality support is forthcoming.”
Later that day, Mr Nixon also forwarded his boss a new list of MPs who were undecided on the vote. In the event, Mr Daly voted against the Government, according to the parliamentary record.
In total, 55 Conservative MPs opposed the tiers system, forcing Mr Johnson to rely on Labour abstaining to get the measures through. It was, at the time, the biggest rebellion of the Johnson administration.
After revealing that he had not been contacted by the Whips’ Office, Mr Daly said: “It sounds like the whips didn’t bother.”
The Bury North MP said he was surprised that the hub, which would allow specialists to coordinate activity under one roof, was even being threatened because “it never got dangled in the first place”.
He added: “They were never proposing to give it to me. I still don’t have it. Even though I have repeatedly campaigned for it, Hancock never showed the slightest bit of interest in supporting it. I had a number of conversations with Hancock at that time, but I can definitively say the hub was never mentioned.
“I think it is appalling. The fact that they would only give a much needed support for disabled people if I voted for this was absolutely disgusting.”
Mr Daly had discussed the need for the centre with Mr Hancock in January 2020. In a post on his website about “how we improve health outcomes for all Bury North residents”, he published a photograph of himself with the then health secretary. The hub, he said, would benefit “the most vulnerable in our community”.
That afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak rebukes Matt Hancock over plot to block disability funding’:
Downing Street has rebuked Matt Hancock after it emerged that he had discussed a plan to block funding for a new disabled centre to pressure a Tory MP to back lockdown restrictions …
Asked whether this was not the way Rishi Sunak would like his ministers to operate, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Of course. There are rules and guidelines which apply.
“I can’t speak for the actions of a former government. I think you heard from the Prime Minister, who said it’s important that the inquiry looks at all the issues in a complete way rather than relying on piecemeal bits of information.
“You will know that funding decisions are taken in line with strict guidelines to ensure value for money set out in the spending framework, and ministers’ departments are held accountable for their decisions.”
Allison Pearson: Hancock ‘should be arrested’
After The Telegraph published No. 10’s rebuke to Hancock, one of the paper’s columnists, Allison Pearson, weighed in with ‘Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office’:
… Dismayingly, if not entirely unpredictably, it was the very restrictions Matt Hancock and his lockdown zealots told us were necessary to save the health service which have very nearly finished it off. “The NHS has collapsed anyway as a direct result of the lockdowns and the vast backlog they caused,” says my source. Ironies don’t come much more bitter than that …
Just when you think he has sunk as low as is humanly possible, he ponders using children with special educational needs as leverage (“yes 100%,” enthused Hancock). By unhappy coincidence, I have just had an email from Rob, a father with an autistic son. This is what Rob wrote: “Lockdown sent him from a happy 14-year-old into a complete psychological breakdown. The fear of why everyone was wearing masks, the breaking of routine (so important for SEN children) and closing of schools. He was utterly terrified. The knock-on-effect for our family has been devastating. Thanks to anti-psych meds he’s slowly getting there, but from the second lockdown onwards it’s destroyed the fabric of our family to say nothing of our life savings being lost (self-employed). To read the WhatsApps in The Telegraph makes me so angry. Having the heartbreak of a disabled child made worse by self-aggrandising fools is almost too much to take. Administering psychiatric medicines to your child tends to focus the mind as to where the blame lies and it isn’t with Isabel Oakeshott.”
Well, there’s another Hancock Triumph. A 14-year-old boy who successfully had the pants frightened off him. (Hope you feel proud of yourself, Matt.) Are Members of Parliament seriously not going to debate what we suspected, but now know for sure, was done quite deliberately to Rob’s son and thousands of other vulnerable children, some of them no longer with us because they were scared into taking their own lives? …
As for Matt Hancock, he has lost the Whip and, unfortunately, can no longer be disciplined by the Conservative party. The slithy tove can – and must – be dragged before a Select Committee. Personally, I would like to see him in jail for the vast hurt he has caused.
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”? …
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
Also of interest is ‘Dominic Cummings takes “nightmare” swipe at Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock’.
I hope to wrap up the rest of my review of The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
Those who missed my first post on Red Wall MP Miriam Cates can find it here.
Today’s post continues a profile of the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire.
Levelling up
Miriam Cates is interested in giving the more rural parts of Britain the same advantages as the more urban areas. This is what levelling up means.
On Wednesday, November 9, 2022, she spoke in the Levelling Up Rural Britain debate with a focus on public transport. An excerpt follows, emphases mine:
My constituents share many of the challenges of urban areas, such as the rising cost of living and access to affordable family housing, but we also face some unique disadvantages that highlight the pressing need to include rural Britain in the levelling-up agenda. To state the obvious, and as other Members have said, the lower population density of rural places means that service models that work in urban areas are much less viable in our communities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) put this eloquently. The metrics that are used to describe the viability of urban services just do not work in rural areas; they have to have special cases.
I want to speak particularly about bus services, which over recent months have declined significantly in my constituency. Residents of Stocksbridge, Grenoside, Chapeltown, High Green, Ecclesfield, Wharncliffe Side, Oughtibridge and other villages have seen services reduced or even disappearing altogether, cutting people off from jobs, education, training, healthcare and leisure.
The impact on everyday life cannot be overstated. The old are left stranded at bus stops, the young arrive late for school and workers are forced to pay for taxis to get to work. Local employers offering good jobs have told me of their difficulty in recruiting because their premises are no longer served by bus. The vision of levelling up is to spread opportunity evenly around the country, but it really does not matter how much opportunity there is if people cannot get to it.
What has gone wrong in South Yorkshire, particularly rural South Yorkshire, and how can we fix it? Services were struggling even before covid, but the post-pandemic environment has been a perfect storm for rural bus services in South Yorkshire. From my meetings with Stagecoach and First Bus, it is clear that patronage has fallen sharply at the same time as fuel costs have increased.
I was pleased to be successful over the summer in persuading the Government to release a third round of the covid bus recovery grant. But, crucially, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority’s bus service improvement plan bid failed completely, which resulted in our region’s receiving not a single penny while neighbouring authorities in Manchester, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire received tens of millions of pounds.
I am grateful to the Bus Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden), for meeting me this morning to discuss the issue, but I urge the Minister responding to this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), to press this matter with his Government colleagues. My constituents pay the same taxes as everybody else. It is not their fault that our combined authority’s bid did not meet an acceptable standard.
Things may look bleak, but I believe there are some glimmers of hope. We have had local successes with the new No. 25 and No. 26 routes around Penistone and a new service connecting Northern College with Barnsley. Those services have reconnected isolated villages and are based on an innovative small bus model pioneered by the excellent South Pennine Community Transport.
In Stocksbridge and Deepcar, we have plans to use our towns fund to commission new buses to help residents to travel around our towns—for anyone who has not been there, Stocksbridge is incredibly steep and people absolutely need a bus to get back up the hill. We are also progressing with plans to restore a passenger rail service along the Upper Don valley and we have a levelling-up fund bid to improve the Penistone line.
However, we need to accept that a one-size-fits-all approach to public transport just does not work. Rural services will never be as profitable as urban routes, but, if they are designed sensibly around what communities actually want, if they are regular and reliable with easy-to-understand timetables, they can be self-sustaining, as we have seen with our new routes. Ultimately, levelling up rural transport requires a localism agenda, putting commissioning in the hands of local people—our town, parish and local councils—and with a funding model that recognises the unique challenges of rural life.
Considering that levelling up was in the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto, Lee Rowley, representing the Government, provided a somewhat disappointing response at the end of the debate:
… My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), along with my hon. Friends the Members for Witney (Robert Courts), for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates), for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond), among others, raised the point about connectivity, be it of the physical kind, in terms of buses and public transport, or the virtual kind, in terms of broadband. They are absolutely right to advocate on the challenges that this brings. We all know that there have been challenges associated with buses in the past few years. When the level of decrease of passenger use is so profound as it has been with covid, of course we want to try to work through how we can support rural communities. That is no different in my constituency. We have to try to look at the innovative solutions that my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch highlighted with regards to a demand response to travel, while also ensuring that people have good quality bus services over the long term …
Sex education
Lately, Miriam Cates has been outspoken about sex education in English schools. She has put up with a lot for rightly pointing out that children are learning things at school that should be off limits.
On Thursday, June 30, she was granted a backbench business debate on relationship and sex education [RSE] materials in schools:
I beg to move,
That this House has considered relationship and sex education materials in schools …
Let me start with a health warning: my speech is not suitable for children. That is sadly ironic, given that all of the extreme and inappropriate material I am about to share has already been shared with children in our schools. As a former biology teacher, I have delivered my fair share of sex education. Teaching the facts of life often comes with more than a little embarrassment for teachers and pupils alike. I remember teaching about reproduction when I was about 30 weeks pregnant with my first baby. One child asked me if my husband knew I was pregnant. Another, having watched a video on labour and birth, commented, “Miss, that’s really gonna hurt, you know.”
Just as children do not know about photosynthesis or the digestive system without being taught, neither do they know the facts of reproduction. Thus, it is important that children are taught clearly and truthfully about sex. Of course, there is a lot more to sexual relationships than just anatomy. Many people believe that parents should take the leading role in teaching children about relationships, since one of the main duties of parenting is to pass on wisdom and values to children. Nevertheless, in some families parents cannot or do not teach children about relationships, and it is also sadly the case that the internet now presents children with a vast array of false and damaging information about sex.
There is widespread consensus that schools do have a role to play in relationships and sex education. That is why the Government chose to make the teaching of relationships and sex education compulsory in all secondary schools from September 2020. According to the guidance, the aim was to help children
“manage their academic, personal and social lives in a positive way.”
Less than two years later, my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary has written to the Children’s Commissioner asking her for help in supporting schools to teach RSE because we know that the quality of RSE is inconsistent.
The Education Secretary is right that the teaching of sex education is inconsistent. Unlike maths, science or history, there are no widely adopted schemes of work or examinations, so the subject matter and materials vary widely between schools. However, inconsistency should be the least of the Education Secretary’s concerns when we look at the reality of what is being taught. Despite its good intentions, the new RSE framework has opened the floodgates to a whole host of external providers who offer sex education materials to schools. Now, children across the country are being exposed to a plethora of deeply inappropriate, wildly inaccurate, sexually explicit and damaging materials in the name of sex education. That is extremely concerning for a number of reasons.
First, if we fail to teach children clearly and factually about relationships, sex and the law they will be exposed to all sorts of risks. For example, if sex is defined as, “anything that makes you horny or aroused”—the definition offered by the sex education provider, School of Sexuality Education—how does a child understand the link between sex and pregnancy? Sex Education Forum tells children they fall into one of two groups: menstruators or non-menstruators. If a teenage girl’s periods do not start, what will she think? How does she know that is not normal? How does she know to consult a doctor? How will she know she is not pregnant? Will she just assume she is one of the non-menstruators?
The book for teachers, “Great Relationships and Sex Education”, suggests an activity for 15-year-olds in which children are given prompt cards and have to say whether they think certain types of sexual acts are good or bad. How do the children know what acts come with health risks, or the risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections? If we tell children that, “love has no age”—the slogan used in a Diversity Role Models resource—do we undermine their understanding of the legal age of consent? Sex education provider Bish Training informs children that:
“Most people would say that they had a penis and testicles or a clitoris and vagina, however many people are in the middle of this spectrum with how their bodies are configured.”
As a former biology teacher, I do not even know where to start with that one.
As adults, we often fail to remember what it is like to be a child and we make the mistake of assuming that children know more than they do. Children have all sorts of misconceptions. That is why it is our responsibility to teach them factually, truthfully and in age-appropriate ways, so that they can make informed decisions.
Another concern relates to the teaching of consent. Of course it is vital to teach about consent. The Everyone’s Invited revelations make that abundantly clear. But we must remember that, under the law, children cannot consent to sex. Sex education classes conducted by the group It Happens Education told boys of 13 and 14 that the law
“is not there to…punish young people for having consensual sex”
and said:
“It’s just two 14 year olds who want to have sex with each other who are consensually having sex.”
It is not hard to see the risks of this approach, which normalises and legitimises under-age sex. Not only are children legally not able to consent; they also do not have the developmental maturity or capacity to consent to sexual activity—that is the point of the age of consent.
The introduction of graphic or extreme sexual material in sex education lessons also reinforces the porn culture that is damaging our children in such a devastating way. Of course it is not the fault of schools that half of all 14-year-olds have seen pornography online—much of it violent and degrading—but some RSE lessons are actively contributing to the sexualisation and adultification of children. The Proud Trust has produced a dice game encouraging children to discuss explicit sexual acts, based on the roll of a dice. The six sides of the dice name different body parts—such as anus, vulva, penis and mouth—and objects. Two dice are thrown and children must name a pleasurable sexual act that can take place between the two body parts. The game is aimed at children of 13 and over.
Sexwise is a website run and funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and recommended in the Department for Education’s RSE guidance. The website is promoted in schools and contains the following advice:
“Maybe you read a really hot bit of erotica while looking up Dominance and Submission…Remember, sharing is caring”.
Sex education materials produced by Bish Training involve discussion of a wide range of sexual practices—some of them violent. This includes rough sex, spanking, choking, BDSM and kink. Bish is aimed at young people of 14 and over and provides training materials for teachers.
Even when materials are not extreme, we must still be careful not to sexualise children prematurely. I spoke to a mother who told me how her 11-year-old son had been shown a PowerPoint presentation in a lesson on sexuality. It was setting out characteristics and behaviours and asking children to read through the lists and decide whether they were straight, gay or bisexual. Pre-pubescent 11-year-olds are not straight, gay or bisexual—they are children.
Even School Diversity Week, a celebration of LGBTQIA+ promoted by the Just Like Us group, leads to the sexualisation of children. Of course schools should celebrate diversity and promote tolerance, but why are we doing that by asking pre-sexual children to align themselves with adult sexual liberation campaigns? Let us not forget that the + includes kink, BDSM and fetish …
Even primary schools are not immune from using inappropriate materials. An “All About Me” programme developed by Warwickshire County Council’s Respect Yourself team introduces six and seven-year-olds to “rules about touching yourself”. I recently spoke to a mother in my constituency who was distraught that her six-year-old had been taught in school about masturbation. Sexualising children and encouraging them to talk about intimate details with adults breaks down important boundaries and makes them more susceptible and available to sexual predators, both on and offline.
Another significant concern is the use of RSE to push extreme gender ideology. Gender ideology is a belief system that claims that we all have an innate gender, which may or may not align with our biological sex. Gender ideology claims that, rather than sex being determined at conception and observed at birth, it is assigned at birth, and that doctors sometimes get it wrong.
Gender theory sadly has sexist and homophobic undertones, pushing outdated gender stereotypes and suggesting to same-sex-attracted adolescents that, instead of being gay or lesbian, they may in fact be the opposite sex. Gender theory says that if someone feels like a woman, they are a woman, regardless of their chromosomes, their genitals, or, in fact, reality.
Gender ideology is highly contested. It does not have a basis in science, and no one had heard of it in this country just 10 years ago. Yet, it is being pushed on children in some schools under the guise of RSE, with what can only be described as a religious fervour. Department for Education guidance states that schools should
“not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender”,
and that:
“Resources used in teaching about this topic must…be…evidence based.”
Yet a video produced by AMAZE and used in schools suggests that boys who wear nail varnish or girls who like weight lifting might actually be the opposite sex. Resources by Brook claim:
“‘man’ and ‘woman’ are genders. They are social ideas about how people who have vulvas and vaginas, and people who have penises and testicles should behave”.
Split Banana offers workshops to schools where children learn ideas of how gender is socially constructed and explore links between the gender binary and colonialism. A Gendered Intelligence workshop tells children that:
“A woman is still a woman, even if she enjoys getting blow jobs.”
Just Like Us tells children that their biological sex can be changed. PSHE Association resources inform children that people whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth are described as cisgender.
Gender theory is even being taught to our very youngest children. Pop’n’Olly tells children that gender is male, female, both or neither. The Introducing Teddy book, aimed at primary school children, tells the story of Teddy, who changes sex, illustrated by the transformation of his bow tie into a hair bow. The Diversity Role Models primary training workshop uses the “Gender Unicorn”, a cartoon unicorn who explains that there is an additional biological sex category called “other”.
Numerous resources from numerous sex education providers present gender theory as fact, contrary to DFE guidance. However, it is not just factually incorrect resources that are making their ways into schools; visitors from external agencies are invited in to talk to children about sex and relationships, sometimes even without a teacher present in the room.
Guidance says that, when using external agencies, schools should check their material in advance and
“conduct a basic online search”.
However, a social media search of organisations such as Diversity Role Models reveals links to drag queens with highly sexualised, porn-inspired names, or in the case of Mermaids, the promotion of political activism, which breaches political impartiality guidelines.
In some cases, children are disadvantaged when they show signs of dissent from gender ideology, as we saw in the recent case, reported in the press, of a girl who was bullied out of school for questioning gender theory. I have spoken to parents of children who have been threatened with detention if they misgender a trans-identifying child or complain about a child of the opposite sex in their changing rooms. I have heard from parents whose child’s RSE homework was marked down for not adhering to this new creed.
Children believe what adults tell them. They are biologically programmed to do so; how else does a child learn the knowledge and skills they need to grow, develop and be prepared for adult life? It is therefore the duty of those responsible for raising children—particularly parents and teachers—to tell them the truth. Those who teach a child that there are 64 different genders, that they may actually be a different gender to their birth sex, or that they may have been born in the wrong body, are not telling the truth. It is a tragedy that the RSE curriculum, which should help children to develop confidence and self-respect, is instead being used to undermine reality and ultimately put children in danger.
Some may ask what harm is being done by presenting those ideas to children, and, of course, it is right to teach children to be tolerant, kind and accepting of others. However, it is not compassionate, wise, or legal to teach children that contested ideologies are facts. That is indoctrination, and it is becoming evident that that has some concerning consequences …
There has been a more than 4,000% rise in the referrals of girls to gender services over the last decade, and a recent poll of teachers suggests that at least 79% of schools now have trans-identifying children. That is not a biological phenomenon. It is social contagion, driven by the internet and reinforced in schools.
The Bayswater Support Group, which provides advice and support for parents of trans-identifying children, reports a surge of parents contacting them after their children are exposed to gender content in RSE lessons and in assemblies. A large proportion of parents say their child showed no sign of gender distress until either a school assembly or RSE lessons on those topics. Children who are autistic, who are same-sex attracted, who do not conform to traditional gender stereotypes, or who have mental health conditions are disproportionately likely to identify as trans or non-binary.
In fact, children who tell a teacher at school that they are suffering from gender distress are then often excluded from normal safeguarding procedures. Instead of involving parents and considering wider causes for what the child is feeling and the best course of action, some schools actively hide the information from parents, secretly changing a child’s name and pronouns in school, but using birth names and pronouns in communications with parents.
One parent of a 15-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome said she discovered that without her knowledge, her daughter’s school had started the process of socially transitioning her child, and has continued to do so despite the mother’s objections. Another mother said:
“It’s all happened very quickly and very unexpectedly after teaching at school during year seven and eight. As far as I can understand the children were encouraged to question the boundaries of their sexual identity as well as their gender identity. Her friendship group of eight girls all adopted some form of LGBTQ identity—either sexual identity or gender identity. My daughter’s mental health has deteriorated so quickly, to the point of self harm and some of the blame is put on me for not being encouraging enough of my daughter’s desire to flatten her breasts and for puberty blockers.”
As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, some parents have been referred to social services when they have questioned the wisdom of treating their son as a girl or their daughter as a boy.
Socially transitioning a child—changing their name and pronouns, and treating them in public as a member of the opposite sex—is not a neutral act. In her interim report on gender services for children, paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass remarks that although social transition
“may not be thought of as an intervention or treatment,”
it is
“an active intervention because it may have significant effects on a child or young person’s psychological functioning.”
The majority of adolescents who suffer from gender dysphoria grow out of it, but instead of safeguarding vulnerable children, schools are actively leading children down a path of transition. If a child presented with anorexia and a teacher’s response was to hide that from parents, celebrate the body dysmorphia and encourage the child to stop eating, that would be a gross safeguarding failure. For a non-medical professional to make a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, exclude the child’s parents and encourage the child to transition is just such a failure.
In some schools, children are not only taught about the concept of gender theory but signposted to information about physical interventions. Last year, sixth-formers at a grammar school sent a newsletter to girls as young as 11, detailing how to bind their breasts to “look more masculine” and outlining how surgery can remove tissue if it hurts too much. Also, schools have played a major role in referrals to gender identity clinics, where children are sometimes set on a path to medical and surgical transition.
I was really pleased to see the Health Secretary announce today that he is commissioning a more robust study of whether treatment at such clinics improves children’s lives or leads to later problems or regret, because schools may think that they are being kind, but the consequences of full transition—permanent infertility, loss of sexual function and lifelong health problems—are devastating, as has become clear following the case of Keira Bell.
Anyone hearing for the first time what is going on in schools might reasonably ask, “How can this be allowed?” The answer is that it is not allowed. DFE guidance tells schools:
“Resources used in teaching about this topic must always be age-appropriate and evidence-based. Materials which suggest that non-conformity to gender stereotypes should be seen as synonymous with having a different gender identity should not be used and you should not work with external agencies or organisations that produce such material.”
However, many teachers just do not have the time to look into the background of every group that provides sex education resources, and when faced with teaching such difficult and sensitive topics, they understandably reach for ready-made materials, without investigating their source.
Furthermore, those teachers who are aware of the harms are sometimes afraid to share their concerns. A lot of teachers have written to me about this situation, with one writing:
“I left my job in a Primary School after we were asked to be complicit in the ‘social transitioning’ of a 7 year old boy. This was after Gendered Intelligence came into the school and delivered training.”
Relationship and sex education in this country has become a Wild West. Anyone can set themselves up as a sex education provider and offer resources and advice to schools. Imagine if someone with no qualifications could set themselves up as a geography resource provider, insert their own political beliefs on to a map of the world—perhaps they would put Ukraine inside the Russian border—and then sell those materials for use in schools. I do not believe that some of these sex education groups should have any place in our educational system.
Indeed, the guidance says that schools should exercise extreme caution when working with external agencies:
“Schools should not under any circumstances work with external agencies that take or promote extreme political positions or use materials produced by such agencies.”
Yet all the organisations that I have mentioned today, and many others, fall foul of the guidance. What is more, the Government are actually funding some of these organisations with taxpayers’ money. For example, The Proud Trust received money from the tampon tax, and EqualiTeach and Diversity Role Models have received money from the DFE as part of anti-bullying schemes. We have created the perfect conditions for a safeguarding disaster, whereby anyone can set up as an RSE provider and be given access to children, either through lesson materials or through direct access to classrooms.
Yet parents—those who love a child most and who are most invested in their welfare—are being cut out. In many cases, parents are refused access to the teaching materials being used by their children in school. This was highlighted by the case of Clare Page, which was reported at the weekend. She complained about sex education lessons that were being taught in her child’s school by an organisation called the School of Sexuality Education. Until this year, that organisation’s website linked to a commercial website that promoted pornography. Mrs Page’s daughter’s school refused to allow the family to have a copy of the material provided in lessons, saying it was commercially sensitive.
Schools are in loco parentis. Their authority to teach children comes not from the state and not from the teaching unions, but from parents. Parents should have full access to the RSE materials being used by their children. We have created this safeguarding disaster and we will have to find the courage to deal with it for the sake of our children …
… there are strong parallels here with grooming practices, and I have no doubt that children will be more susceptible to being groomed as a result of the materials they are being exposed to.
How have we gone so wrong? We seem to have abandoned childhood. Just as in the covid pandemic when we sacrificed young for old, our approach to sex education is sacrificing the welfare and innocence of children in the interests of adults’ sexual liberation. In 2022, our children are physically overprotected. They have too little opportunity to play unsupervised, to take responsibility and to mature and grow wise, yet at the same time they are being exposed to adult ideologies, being used as pawns in adults’ political agendas and at risk of permanent harm. What kind of society have we created where teachers need to undertake a risk assessment to take pupils to a local park, but a drag queen wearing a dildo is invited into a library to teach pre-school children?
Parents do not know where to turn, and many I have spoken to tell me how they complain to schools and get nowhere. Even the response from the DFE comes back the same every time telling parents that, “Where an individual has concerns, the quickest and most effective route to take is to raise the issue directly with the school.” The complaints system is circular and schools are left to mark their own homework.
Ofsted does not seem willing or able to uphold the DFE’s guidance. Indeed, it may be contributing to the problem. It was reported last week that Ofsted cites lack of gender identity teaching in primary schools as a factor in whether schools are downgraded. There is a statutory duty on the Department to review the RSE curriculum every three years, so the first review is due next year. I urge the Minister to bring forward that review and conduct it urgently. I understand that the Department is in the process of producing guidance for schools on sex and gender, so will Minister tell us when that will be available? …
The DFE should consider creating a set of accredited resources, with regulatory oversight by Ofqual, and mandating that RSE be taught only by subject specialists. The Department has previously said in correspondence that it is
“investing in a central package to help all schools to increase the confidence and quality of their teaching practice in these subjects, including guidance and training resources to provide comprehensive teaching in these areas in an age-appropriate way.”
Can the Minister say when that package will be ready?
In the light of the Cass review interim report, the Department must write to schools with clear guidance about socially transitioning children, the law on single-sex facilities and the imperative to include parents in issues of safeguarding. The Department should also conduct a deep dive into the materials being used in schools, the groups that provide such materials and their funding sources …
… it is the Department for Education that imposed the mandatory requirement for schools to deliver RSE, so it is fundamentally the responsibility of the Department to ensure that schools are equipped and held accountable to deliver it well.
I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Department plans to clean up this mess and give our children the protection they deserve.
Afterwards, Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton Kemptown) spoke. Keep his name in mind, because this was the start of an unheard-of incident in another debate in January 2023:
… Where I disagree, I am afraid, is on some of the hon. Member’s examples. I did not plan to say this, but during the pandemic, my second cousin—a 15-year-old boy—died in a tragic accident of auto-asphyxiation. It devastated the family, as can be imagined, and happened in the pandemic when we were only allowed six people at the funeral. If he had been taught about risky sex acts—he was 15, not a pre-pubescent child—and how to make sure he did things safely, rather than just learning something from the internet that then led to the end of his life, he might still be around and his family might not be devastated. So, actually, because of that personal experience I do have a problem with saying that we should not teach any of this to our children.
The hon. Member picks out examples of the dice or whatever that might sound frivolous, and I cannot judge how exactly things played out in those schools—she might well be right that it was played out by some teachers incorrectly—but the principle of learning about things before people are legally able to do them but when they are physically able to engage in them, which 15-year-olds are, I am afraid, could have been lifesaving.
My sister, who is a teacher in Essex, has worked hard to try and incorporate some of those teaching methods into the school’s RSHE, focused on an age-specific approach and on stories of people such as my cousin and others, so we can talk about the dangers of some of these things. We cannot know about the dangers of things if we do not talk about them, or if we say that they are just things that families need to talk about. I am afraid most families will not do that because those kinds of things are darn embarrassing to talk about—but also because you never think your child will do something like that. I disagree with that element of what we heard today. I do agree that there needs to be oversight and I do agree that there need to be checks to make sure that we are not just promoting risky activities; we need to be talking about the risks of risky activities. Then, when people are of age, they can make their own choices.
I want to reflect on the things I was planning to say in this debate in the last few seconds I have. The UK Youth Parliament ran a campaign for years to try to get RSHE better taught. Elements of the campaign were about emotions and relationships, and it was also about LGBT inclusive education—and that does include T. We have seen the Fédération Internationale de Natation ruling that competitors will not be able to swim unless they transitioned before they were 12, so we are in a difficult and complex world that we have to navigate. Broad-brush bans from the Department are unhelpful; we need to be content specific and school specific. The Department needs to show more leadership, but we cannot exclude talking about trans people or these complex issues in schools because that, I am afraid, would be very dangerous.
Later on, Northern Ireland’s Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party, Strangford) sided with Miriam Cates:
… Relationships and sex education is an essential issue, and a crucial topic for young people to understand. We must all realise that there is a time and a place for relationships and sex education in schools. However, underpinning that is the right of a family to pass on their morals and values, and not to be undermined by teachers who do not know individual children and cannot understand the family dynamic.
I am clear about what I want to see when it comes to sex education: no young person should be unaware of how their body works, but similarly, no teacher nor programme should seek to circumnavigate the right of a family to sow into their child’s life what they see is needed. That is especially the case in primary school children—I think of innocence lost …
… a worrying number of schools across the United Kingdom have felt it necessary to teach children not only about sex, but about gender identity and trans issues. Conservatives for Women has said that children are being encouraged from as young as primary school to consider whether they have gender identity issues that differ from their biology—being male or female—as the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge outlined. That leaves children confused for no other reason than the misunderstanding, and it makes them believe that they should be looking at their own gender issues. My humble opinion—I am putting it clearly on the record—is that children in primary schools are too young to be taught sex education at that level …
It is crucial that we do not unduly influence young people or pupils’ innocent minds by teaching extreme sex and gender legislation. I have seen some material taught in Northern Ireland, such an English book that refers to glory holes, sexual abuse of animals and oral sex. That book was taught to a 13-year-old boy, whose parents were mortified whenever they saw it, and the young boy had little to no understanding of what was going on. I wrote to the Education Minister in Northern Ireland, asking how that book could ever be on a curriculum and what possible literary benefit—there is none—could ever outweigh the introduction of such concepts.
There needs to be a greater emphasis on the line between what is appropriate to be taught at school and at home, and a greater respect for parents and what they want their children to be taught. Family values should be at the core of a child’s adolescence education, as it is of a sensitive nature and needs to be treated carefully, with respect and compassion.
Robin Walker replied for the Government:
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates), along with my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), on securing today’s debate …
I have listened carefully to some of the examples that have been given by Conservative and Opposition Members, in particular those cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge. There is no doubt that some of those things are totally unsuitable for school-age children: “age is only a number” is clearly an unsuitable phrase to be used in the context of consent, and the Department has been clear that the Proud Trust’s dice game is unacceptable for use as a school resource. I have to say that, despite a lot of coverage of that particular issue, we are unaware of any individual cases in which that game has been used in schools.
… To support teachers to deliver in the classroom, we have run expert-led teacher training webinars that covered pornography, domestic abuse and sexual exploitation—topics that teachers told us they find difficult to teach. We also published additional guidance to schools on tackling abuse, harassment, and other sensitive topics.
It has been almost three years since the Department published statutory guidance on relationship, sex and health education, and almost two years since relationship education became a compulsory subject for all schools and relationship and sex education became a compulsory subject for all secondary schools. As has been acknowledged, primary schools can choose to teach sex education in order to meet the needs of their pupils, but if they do so, they must consult with parents on their policy and grant parents an automatic right to withdraw their child from sex education lessons …
At the heart of RSHE is the need to keep children healthy, happy and safe. The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) gave a very powerful example of where more education could make a difference in terms of safety. I sympathise with his deep hurt …
The Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges found that online forms of sexual abuse are increasingly prevalent, with 88% of girls and 49% of boys reporting being sent unwanted sexual images and 80% of girls and 40% of boys pressured to provide sexual images of themselves. The review also showed that children, even in primary schools, are accessing pornography and sharing nude images. We want to make sure that children receive appropriate teaching in schools on topics that are relevant to their lived experience, rather than going online to educate themselves. Through the RSHE curriculum, pupils will be taught about online relationships, the implications of sharing private or personal data—including images—online, harmful content and contact, cyber bullying, an overreliance on social media and where to get help and support for issues that unfortunately occur online. Through the topic of internet safety and harms, pupils will be taught to become discerning customers of information and to understand how comparing oneself with others online can have an impact on one’s own body image. The Department is reviewing its guidance on teaching online safety in schools, which supports teachers to embed teaching about online safety into subjects such as computing, RSHE and citizenship. The guidance will be published in the autumn of this year. The Online Safety Bill will also ensure that children are better protected from pornographic content, wherever it appears online.
The statutory RSHE guidance sets out the content that we expect children to know before they complete each phase of education. We have, however, been clear that our guiding principles for the development of the statutory guidance were that all the compulsory subject content must be age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate. It must be taught sensitively and inclusively, with respect for the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils and parents, while always with the aim of providing pupils with the knowledge they need. Given the need for a differentiated approach and the sensitive and personal nature of many of the topics within the RSHE curriculum, it is important that schools have the flexibility to design their own curricula, so that it is relevant and appropriate to the context of their pupils. The Department’s policy, therefore, has been to trust the expertise of schools to decide the detail of the content that they teach and what resources they use.
As mentioned previously, we have made a commitment in the White Paper to strengthen our guidance in this respect. We will also review and update that guidance regularly—at least every three years. We are confident that the majority of schools are capable of doing this well and have been successful in developing a high-quality RSHE curriculum that is appropriate to the needs of their pupils, but, in the context of this debate, it is clear that that is not always the case and that there are genuine concerns about many of the materials that have been used.
I stress that allowing schools the flexibility to make their own decisions about their curricula does not mean that they should be unaccountable for what they teach. Schools are required by law to publish their RSHE policies and to consult parents on them. As their children’s primary educators, parents should be given every opportunity to understand the purpose and content of what their children are being taught. In the RSHE statutory guidance, which all schools must have regard to, we have set out a clear expectation for schools to share examples of resources with parents. Schools are also bound by other legal duties with regard to the delivery of the wider curriculum. All local authority maintained schools are required to publish the content of their school curriculum, including the details of how parents or other members of the public can find out more about the curriculum that the school is following. There is a parallel requirement in academy trust model funding agreements for each academy to publish the same information on its website. It is our intention that that should form part of the new standards for academies.
… We are clear that schools can show parents curriculum materials, including resources provided by external organisations, without infringing an external provider’s copyright in the resource. For example, it is perfectly possible for a school to invite parents into the school to view materials on the premises. Although of course we have to be mindful of not overburdening schools with repeated requests, we do expect schools to respond positively to all reasonable requests from parents to share curriculum material. We therefore expect schools to share RSHE content and materials with parents openly and transparently, where requested. We are clear that they should not enter into any contracts with third parties that seek to restrict them from sharing RSHE resources with parents.
… To help schools to make the best choices, the Department published the non-statutory guidance, “Plan your relationships, sex and health curriculum”. That sets out practical advice for schools on a number of topics, including using externally produced resources. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge quoted from it.
… We are working with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure that we are giving the clearest possible guidance to schools on transgender issues. We will hold a full public consultation on the draft guidance later this year. Given the complexity of the subject, we need to get this right and we want to take full account of the review being conducted by Dr Hilary Cass.
I realise that my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge will need time to respond, so I conclude by saying that I hear very clearly the concerns that have been expressed. As a parent of both a girl and a boy, I know that we need to address these issues and to do so in a way that can reassure parents but continue to deliver high-quality relationships, sex and health education.
Miriam Cates concluded:
I thank the Minister for his response. I am looking forward to seeing the consultation on the guidance. I thank everybody who contributed today. This has been a very good debate. We have had some surprising areas of agreement. I think that most of us have agreed that this is a very important topic. The key phrase that has come out is “age appropriate”. I personally do not think that it should be up to schools, teachers or, potentially, parents to have to decide that. I think that we need child development experts on the case to determine which materials are suitable for which time.
I will conclude by reflecting on the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price). Family is key to this, and parents’ values and parents’ choice are so important. We must never teach relationships and sex education in schools outside the context of respecting parents’ choice and parents’ values. Parents are the people who love and are most invested in children, and theirs are the views that we should most take into account.
I saw that debate on BBC Parliament. My shock at the time has not diminished, even when sharing the Hansard transcript with you.
As for Lloyd Russell-Moyle, things came to a head between him and Miriam Cates in January. More on that next week.
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.
Yesterday’s post on The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series focused on top civil servant Simon Case and how Government ministers and advisers brought about the first lockdown in 2020 after pressure from the media.
Today’s post looks at The Telegraph‘s revelations about the then-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock.
He had a deep hunger for absolute control and brooked little opposition.
Grudge against NHS chief Simon Stevens
It is unclear exactly why Hancock bore a grudge against Simon Stevens, who headed the NHS at the time of pandemic and resigned in 2021. Stevens was later elevated to the Lords.
On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘Matt Hancock’s campaign to remove NHS chief revealed’ (emphases mine):
Ministers tried to remove the head of the NHS just five days after the first Covid-19 case was detected in the UK.
The Lockdown Files reveal the animosity shown towards Lord Stevens of Birmingham, the chief executive of NHS England.
Six months into the pandemic, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, declared “removing SS [Simon Stevens] will be a massive improvement”.
On another occasion, Mr Hancock was so visibly angered by the NHS chief that his own advisers warned him: “Simon needs a kick… don’t make yourself look bad in the process”.
The messages between ministers and officials disclose the lack of regard both in Downing Street and the Department of Health for Lord Stevens, despite widespread praise of his stewardship of the NHS for seven years.
The private messages also appear at odds with the Government’s support for the NHS during Covid, while belittling its boss behind the scenes.
Lord Stevens finally retired from the post in July 2021 and was made a life peer in recognition of his services to the NHS.
But the messages reveal that Mr Hancock and Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, were conspiring to get rid of him for at least 18 months before he finally stepped down.
Nine days after Chinese authorities first shared the genetic sequence of Covid-19, Mr Hancock messaged Mr Cummings explaining he was approaching Lord Ara Darzi, an eminent professor of surgery, to “persuade” Lord Stevens to quit.
The article has screenshots of various WhatsApp conversations, excerpted below.
On February 3, 2020, Dominic Cummings was eager for Stevens to leave and messaged Hancock:
We must get on with it now. Announce next week as part of reshuffle frenzy and it will all get lost in that
Cummings was out of luck. It did not happen.
In the early weeks of the pandemic in April 2020, Hancock seemed to be overly exercised by Stevens:
Mr Hancock criticised Lord Stevens in a Downing Street meeting, during which he was so visibly angered that his special adviser Allan Nixon remarked by WhatsApp: “You look like you’re losing grip in front of No 10 by having a go at Simon like that. Simon needs a kick but don’t make yourself look bad in the process.”
Mr Hancock responded: “It’s ok – he needs to know he is massively f——g up. And I’ll tell the room what happened once the video is off.”
Mr Nixon replied: “Ok but be aware from afar it looks like you’re cracking under pressure.”
The article states:
It’s unclear precisely why Lord Stevens irritated Mr Hancock so much, but when he quit, NHS sources said his successor was likely to be someone “less outspoken and less willing to challenge Government”.
Lord Stevens had clashed with successive Tory administrations over NHS funding, and The Lockdown Files also show clashes over tackling the virus and the rolling out of the vaccines.
Dentistry became an issue in May 2020:
Mr Hancock was again furious with Lord Stevens, this time over the NHS chief executive’s issuing of guidance allowing dentists to reopen in June. Mr Johnson complained he had not been aware of the guidance being changed.
Boris WhatsApped Hancock:
I told Simon Stevens he should have warned us and he grovelled
Hancock replied:
I hit the roof with him. Unbelievable. Have you read the letter I’ve sent about the future of the NHS? We need to get cracking…
Their disagreement continued:
The files also contain text messages between Mr Hancock and Lord Stevens, in which they argue over whether the NHS chief executive had permission to make the announcement on dentists reopening, which the Government had wanted held back for its televised press conference.
In August, Hancock sent a message to Cummings about possible new legislation which would give government ministers more control over the NHS. It ended with this:
Removing SS will be a massive improvement — but we still need a Bill to do it properly.
In December 2020, Hancock and Stevens disagreed about the vaccine rollout:
Lord Stevens was angered in December 2020 about a claim being briefed to the media that millions of people were due to receive the jab by Christmas.
On December 13, he WhatsApped Hancock and a group of senior health officials and advisers:
There is no version of reality whereby “several million people will receive the vaccine before Christmas” so whoever briefed that might want to urgently undertake some course correction before that inevitably becomes clear
When Stevens announced his resignation in 2021, public pronouncements differed considerably from private conversations:
Even after Lord Stevens announced that he was stepping down, Mr Hancock continued to be irked by him.
The three health secretaries he had served alongside – Mr Hancock, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid – had jointly signed a letter praising Lord Stevens.
The letter included a statement saying his “tireless efforts to improve patient safety, and secure access to innovative medicines like Orkambi, have had a huge impact on the lives of so many”.
But after he was shown the letter, Mr Hancock – who had by then been forced to resign over an affair in his office – asked for the reference to the drug Orkambi to be removed.
The NHS uses Orkambi in treating cystic fibrosis.
Hancock complained in a message to his Spad (special adviser) Allan Nixon. Nixon asked what he should say to Sajid Javid, Hancock’s successor at Health and Social Care.
Hancock replied:
Because it was really you and me
He did make the move on opening up to more meds, but only did this one with huge arm twisting
How petty.
Hancock chose to save reputation over cutting quarantine
This was The Telegraph‘s front page on Monday, March 6, 2023:
He did not want to cut self-isolation time because it would:
imply we’ve been getting it wrong.
Clearly they had got it wrong.
Doesn’t admitting a mistake show the measure of a person or an organisation, including a government? Personally, I respect that.
It would have been easy enough to rationalise, too. Hancock could have said that medical experts now know more about the virus, which the data from Test and Trace supported.
But no.
Hancock was too weak — and power-hungry — a man to admit a mistake.
Excerpts follow from that day’s lead article, ‘The leaked messages that reveal how Matt Hancock chose saving face over cutting Covid quarantine’, which concerns England:
At points during the pandemic, more than 600,000 people a week who had been in close proximity to a Covid case were told to quarantine for 10 days.
In total, the policy resulted in more than 20 million people – a third of the entire population – being told to self-isolate, regardless of whether they had symptoms.
Now, WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show that a proposal to replace that with five days of testing had been discussed as early as November 2020 – but was not put in place.
The Lockdown Files show that Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, was told by England’s Chief Medical Officer [Chris Whitty] that they could change the policy in “favour of testing for 5 days in lieu of isolation”. At that stage, the self-isolation period was 14 days.
But instead of taking Prof Sir Chris Whitty’s advice, Mr Hancock rejected the idea – fearing that it would “imply we’d been getting it wrong”.
Switching to a five-day testing regime would have transformed the way the country was able to operate during the pandemic.
A month after Sir Chris gave his advice, isolation was reduced to 10 days – a length which continued to wreak havoc on businesses and services.
Having heard every coronavirus briefing, I suspected this all along. It is good to see confirmation of it now.
Things got worse in 2021 with the ‘pingdemic’. You couldn’t make this up:
By the summer of 2021, so many people were sent automated “pings” by the NHS Test and Trace app telling them to stay at home that restaurants and other businesses were forced to close through lack of staff.
The app proved to be so sensitive that neighbours were being pinged through walls, causing large numbers of people to delete the app in frustration. The Government ended up having to exempt some key workers from self-isolating to prevent the NHS and critical food supply chains from collapsing.
Some relief came in August that year:
those who were under the age of 18 years and six months and those who were fully vaccinated no longer had to isolate if they were a close contact.
Self-isolation policies lasted nearly two years:
… it took until Feb 2022 for self-isolation guidance for contacts of positive Covid cases to be scrapped altogether, by which time NHS Test and Trace had cost the taxpayer around £26 billion.
Discriminatory quarantine exemptions proposed
In August 2020, a 14-day quarantine period was in place for Covid case contacts and travellers returning to the UK from abroad:
The policy caused havoc for holidaymakers and split up families for months, with most people unable to take an extra fortnight off work to quarantine on return.
On Aug 5, messages from the then health secretary to the “MH Top Team” WhatsApp group appear primarily concerned with the self-isolation restrictions placed on people returning to the UK from abroad, rather than those on close contacts of people infected with the virus. The group included his aides and officials from his private office.
Mr Hancock asked: “Where are we up to on test & release and also high net worth quarantine exemptions?”
Replying to this point, a senior civil servant said: “On test and release expecting update today – on high net worth BEIS [Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] lead but we’ve asked for it.”
When Mr Hancock returned to the issue two weeks later, this time he asked only about the policy that applied to “high net worth” business people …
At this point Emma Dean, one of his aides, interjected to ask Mr Hancock to “clear” a quote on Leicester, which was only just being released from lockdown because of higher rates of the virus in the area …
Having approved the statement, Mr Hancock returned to the issue at hand – lifting travel restrictions for “high net worth individuals”. The former health secretary appeared surprised to hear that the policy had not been given the green light by the business department …
Ms Dean’s concern that there might be a “comms risk” associated with the policy to release only wealthy business travellers from self-isolation proved to be correct.
When news leaked in November 2020 that the Government planned to exempt City dealmakers, hedge fund managers and company bosses flying to the UK from the 14-day quarantine rule, the public was furious …
… on Nov 17 2020, Mr Hancock did receive some scientific advice in favour of loosening restrictions on self-isolation for people contacted by NHS Test and Trace.
Mr Hancock, however, was worried about how the move would play out with the public.
I wonder. By then, he was clearly enjoying his control over the public.
On a related topic, another Telegraph article, ‘Ministers feared “racist” label if they spoke about Covid spread’, discusses the problem with locking down cities such as Leicester and some in the north of England. To make it look more equitable, nearby areas with low rates of infection were also locked down, which brought complaints from several MPs. The Government also worried about getting their messages across to areas with high minority populations.
Pingdemic ‘crippled’ economy
Also in March 6’s Telegraph was an article by one of their business columnists, Matthew Lynn: ‘Hancock’s overzealous “pingdemic” crippled Britain’s economy — and we’re still paying the price’.
Hancock was not alone in developing policy, however, his was the face we saw most often, whether on television or at the despatch box. He had a huge role to play in the parlous state of the economy during and after the pandemic:
It was, for several months at least, the most dreaded sound in any factory, warehouse, shop or cafe. Ping. The NHS app notifying a colleague they had been in contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19. In a flash, workers would depart, and schedules would have to be hastily re-organised.
For months, businesses were barely able to operate normally, output collapsed, and a culture of absenteeism was created that the UK is still struggling with three years later.
And yet, it now appears the isolation rules were for some time far stricter than they needed to be. The “pingdemic” may have been unnecessary – and so too the damage to businesses that it caused …
In November 2020, during the second lockdown, the Chief Medical Officer advised first that 14 days of isolation was only marginally safer than 10 days, and that even that could be replaced with five days of daily testing. It was rejected by Matt Hancock, the then health secretary.
In fairness, tweaks to the rules were made. In mid-December 2020, the 14-day rule was cut to 10. Then in August 2021, after the ‘pingdemic’ reached its height, the isolation rule was lifted if you were under 18 or fully vaccinated.
However, the important point is this: for a long stretch of 2021 we may not have needed such rigid isolation rules for contacts of those with Covid.
And yet at that time, it was already clear to everyone that isolation was having a devastating impact on the economy. It was hard enough for anyone to operate any kind of a business during the chaos of lockdown, with its bewildering mess of constantly changing rules on what you could and couldn’t sell, to whom, and under what conditions.
To make a bad situation even worse, however, the pingdemic meant any kind of commercial operation was constantly crippled by staff shortages.
Looking back at the news stories from the time, businesses were pleading for something to be done …
… very big companies could shift staff around so that at least their most crucial operations could continue.
Yet small companies didn’t have that option, and with 20 per cent or more of their employees pinged, they often had no choice but to close down completely.
Isolation hit the productive heartlands of the economy – manufacturing, construction and distribution – hardest of all. And the smaller the business, the more it suffered …
First, the UK lost a huge amount of output. The near 10 per cent drop in GDP during the pandemic was the worst in British economic history.
… even if it was only a couple of percentage points that could have been saved, that would have made a huge difference to the final cost of Covid-19.
Next, it created a culture of absenteeism. If you wanted to take a few days off work, there was never an easier time. Simply report that you had been pinged and few questions would ever be asked.
That has carried on, even after the virus has disappeared. The Office for National Statistics reports that days off for sickness are running at the highest level for more than a decade, while a more recent survey by Fruitful Research found a 29 per cent increase in absenteeism since the pandemic ended.
The UK already had a dreadful record on productivity, but the pandemic made it a whole lot worse.
Finally, we have been left with a legacy of debt. Companies had to borrow money or dip into their reserves to cope with closures, while the Government was forced to borrow far more to deal with higher costs on the back of lower tax revenues. It will take generations to pay all that back.
… We could have cut the time much earlier than we did and saved the economy a huge amount of pain.
I couldn’t agree more.
I have been writing about the pandemic for three years now. You can read every entry on my Marxism/Communism page under Coronavirus. With each new post on the subject, I experience the same thoughts and emotions about how much the policies devised to notionally combat this virus caused havoc not only in the UK, but also other Western nations.
I will have more on Matt Hancock tomorrow. Some will wonder how much more there is to write about him. There is still more, so much more.
The Telegraph stopped publishing their Lockdown Files series earlier this month.
However, I still have quite a few bookmarks to get through from the series.
Simon Case: ‘Mr Killjoy’
On March 10, I left off with the top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, rumoured to be considering his career options, more about which below:
Guido Fawkes points out that Case strangely never got a fine (fixed penalty notice) for No. 10 get-togethers during lockdown, even though a Prime Minister (Boris) and a Chancellor (Rishi) did:
On March 7, 2023, The Telegraph reported that, in 2020, Case called himself ‘Mr Killjoy’ (emphases mine below):
Britain’s most senior civil servant said he was “Mr Killjoy” in meetings with “bouncing Boris J” because the former prime minister was too optimistic about the economy during the Covid pandemic.
Simon Case, hired by Mr Johnson from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s office to work on the pandemic, was later promoted to Cabinet Secretary and remains in post serving Rishi Sunak.
WhatsApp messages leaked to The Telegraph and published in The Lockdown Files investigation show him complaining about Mr Johnson in June 2020.
In a morning conversation with Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, Mr Case said a strategy meeting later that day would be “even more all over the shop than usual” …
The Telegraph has screenshots of Case’s WhatsApp exchanges with Hancock. Case wrote:
We got stuck with PM enthusing about how there were great opportunities ahead for the UK economy …
He ended the message with a forehead slap emoji.
Hancock responded:
He’s right. There are. Did you mention there are also some challenges?
Case replied:
Yes — I am becoming Mr Killjoy in meetings with Bouncing Boris J
The article then discusses Case in the present. The Lockdown Files have not done him any favours:
… he has served three prime ministers during his time in office, having occupied the role in September 2020 under Mr Johnson and throughout Liz Truss’s tenure in Downing Street.
In recent days, he is understood to have been privately criticised by senior civil servants, including the permanent secretaries of a number of government departments.
“The general feeling among perm secs is that his leadership has been relatively weak. Lots of perm secs will tell you that attacks on the Civil Service have increased in the last few years,” a senior Whitehall source told The Telegraph.
“His instinct is more to tuck away and get things done through other routes and back channels rather than stick his head above the parapet. All of that feeds into that criticism of Simon where some have described him as being a bit spineless.”
Sources close to Mr Case suggested he was considering resigning and expected him to pursue a new career in academia.
“I think that when he joined the Civil Service in 2006, it was that or academia,” said one friend. “I think that the academic world is something he makes no bones about, that he’s always admired. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did embrace an academic career once he retires.”
Another source said Mr Case would be unlikely to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and take a peerage, adding: “I just don’t see the Lords as something he’d be interested in. I think an academic route would be a much more attractive option.”
Mr Case’s allies in Government were fighting back on Tuesday, insisting he had no intention of resigning and was pushing ahead with plans. The Cabinet Secretary is scheduled to be in York this Friday, meeting civil servants, and in Glasgow next week, with a speech engagement at a Civil Service conference due in July.
A senior Cabinet Office source told The Telegraph: “He is not about to resign this week, next week, or any time soon. He is cracking on with the job.”
It is understood Mr Case had conversations with some of Mr Sunak’s senior advisers in the wake of the revelations in The Lockdown Files and was assured over his position.
On that subject, another Telegraph article appeared that day, ‘Rishi Sunak refuses to say Simon Case should stay in post after WhatsApp backlash’:
Rishi Sunak has refused three times to say he has confidence that Simon Case will remain the Cabinet Secretary until the next election, amid a growing backlash to his pandemic-era WhatsApp messages.
The Prime Minister was on Tuesday night asked to comment on speculation that Britain’s most senior civil servant was preparing to stand down, but initially said only that he “continues to support the government’s agenda,” including on small boat crossings.
It came as Labour sources said Sir Keir Starmer would sack Mr Case if he w[ere] to win the next election and The Telegraph revealed new WhatsApp messages in which he criticised “bouncing Boris” Johnson for being too optimistic about the economy during the pandemic.
The 44-year-old mandarin has been accused of “naivety” after a tranche of messages obtained by this newspaper showed he mocked people forced to quarantine in hotels during the pandemic and described Mr Sunak as “bonkers” …
Asked for a third time about the controversy in a press conference on Tuesday, Mr Sunak said he looked forward to working with Mr Case “for a very long time to come” but declined to say whether he thought he would still be in post by the next election.
Cabinet Secretaries typically remain in post in the period before and after a general election to oversee the transition between administrations, leading to speculation in Whitehall that this is a “natural moment for him to do it” …
A spokesman for Sir Keir denied that he had already decided to sack Mr Case if Labour wins the next election.
In a briefing with reporters and press conference on Tuesday Mr Sunak was asked three times whether he believed Mr Case would remain in post and refused to address the issue directly, claiming he had “hadn’t actually seen any of the messages”.
Cabinet Office sources pointed to the end of his third answer, where he praised Mr Case’s record in government, adding: “I’m very grateful to him for that and I look forward to working with him for a very long time to come, quite frankly.”
The lockdown sex ban
The Lockdown Files also told us how the ban on sex was arrived at during the first lockdown in the Spring of 2020:
Professor Sir Chris Whitty [Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at the time] warned against imposing the lockdown “sex ban” because the public was not “likely to listen” to an order not to see their partners, The Telegraph can disclose.
England’s Chief Medical Officer said the Government should use a “bit of realism” and stop short of an outright ban, instead encouraging couples not living together to avoid contact “if they can”, leaked WhatsApp messages show.
Sir Chris’s warning came on March 24 2020 – the day after Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, gave the first order that the public should “stay at home” and avoid contact with people living in other households.
For couples living separately, it became an effective sex ban because the public was not allowed to meet up in houses that were not their own …
James Slack, then Mr Johnson’s official spokesman, asked Sir Chris and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, whether couples could see each other and warned that the Government could be entering “choppy waters” by separating them.
“Sorry for this, but the biggest Q of the day for our finest political journalists is: can I see my boyfriend or girlfriend if we don’t live in the same household?” he asked a group WhatsApp conversation containing the two men, Downing Street officials, Mr Johnson and Matt Hancock, the then health secretary.
Sir Patrick replied that the “aim is to break contacts between households so the strict answer is that they shouldn’t meet or should bunker down in the same house. But Chris can give the official CMO love advice”.
But Sir Chris said the rules should be relaxed to encourage public compliance.
“I think a bit of realism will be needed,” he said.
“If it’s a regular partner I don’t think people are likely to listen to advice not to see them for 3 weeks or maybe more.
“We could say; if they can avoid seeing one another they should, and if either of them has an older or vulnerable person in the house they must.”
But in a press conference later that day, Dr Jenny Harries, Sir Chris’s deputy, and Mr Hancock said couples should either decide to move in together or remain apart for the duration of lockdown.
“If the two halves of a couple are currently in separate households, ideally they should stay in separate households,” said Dr Harries.
“The alternative might be that, for quite a significant period going forwards, they should test the strength of their relationship and decide whether one wishes to be permanently resident in another household.”
Mr Hancock added: “There you go. Make your choice and stick with it.”
The most high-profile breach of the guidance on couples living separately was by Prof Neil Ferguson, a scientist on the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
He resigned from his post after The Telegraph revealed he had invited his married lover to his home on at least two occasions.
He was reinstated several months later.
The article continues:
The guidance for non-cohabiting couples remained in place for two months, until June 1, when it was strengthened with legislation that meant that anyone breaching them could be prosecuted.
The legal rules banned gatherings of two or more people from different households indoors, although couples were free to meet outside.
The rule became known colloquially as the Government’s “sex ban” …
The ban was lifted for some couples in England on June 13, 11 weeks after it was first imposed, when the Government introduced “support bubbles” to alleviate loneliness and isolation.
The new rules allowed people living alone to “bubble” with another household and stay overnight.
How lockdown became a reality
Never mind the sex ban, ‘The messages that reveal how Britain was plunged into lockdown’ is much more intriguing.
In January 2020, Boris was Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority, and we were in our transition year of fully leaving the EU with remaining negotiations underway. For conservative Britons, the world looked bright.
However, a few weeks before, on December 30, China issued a public health alert after a cluster of patients in Wuhan province had respiratory problems.
Here in the UK:
… ministers and officials were discussing the possibility of the outbreak spreading to Europe and possibly the UK.
As the weeks passed, there was mounting frustration over Downing Street’s reluctance to engage. Number 10 was buoyed by the UK’s recent departure from the EU and did not want Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, making gloomy proclamations about diseases.
On January 23, exactly two months before Boris announced lockdown:
Gina Coladangelo, Mr Hancock’s aide and now his partner … was part of a group chat involving the then health secretary and his special advisers …
She WhatsApped a link to a Daily Mail story about passengers arriving at Heathrow receiving advice to ring the NHS 111 number if they got ill. She asked:
I am assuming PHE [Public Health England] have this already under control…??
Emma Dean, a Spad (special adviser) in the Department of Health replied:
Completely.
That day, a civil servant messaged Hancock’s media Spad Jamie Njoku-Goodwin:
Should I be worried? About this virus
Njoku-Goodwin quipped:
You might want to cancel you [sic] romantic holiday to Wuhan…
On February 8, Coladangelo sent a link to a Sky News story about a Briton being among five people in France with coronavirus. The following day she sent another link about a Briton infected in Mallorca.
Lord Bethell, the then-minister representing the Department of Health and Social Care in the House of Lords, joked:
Mallorca! Damn, there goes the fallback plan.
By the end of the month, Hancock was busy talking with the devolved nations — Wales, Scotland and Northern — about an ‘action plan’.
On February 29, Dominic Cummings tweeted a link to a Mail story about an Israeli vaccine which, according to the paper, was ‘just WEEKS away’. The Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance replied, in part, that it would take:
many months at the very and most optimistic best.
Chris Whitty replied, in part:
For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.
So they already knew the mortality rate was low. Interesting.
Six minutes later, Vallance replied again:
… existing drugs best things to try for this outbreak. Accelerate vaccine testing where we have good candidates for future, and prepare for manufacturing capacity for longer term.
Existing drugs were never allowed. I would like to see the detail behind that.
On March 1, Boris’s adviser James Slack put forward the press briefing format, which he ran by Dominic Cummings.
That evening, Cummings proposed a Singapore-style response to the virus, because:
My impression is media do not expect china [sic] style response nor do they think it possible …
The following day, James Slack asked for advice on whether people should stop shaking hands, as the subject had come up on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that morning.
Cummings, ever in the zeitgeist, responded:
I’ve stopped!
By March 5:
There were also highly sensitive discussions about what to do if the NHS ran out of staff and beds. If push came to shove, could unqualified volunteers help in intensive care units? Could families be shown how to care for their own sick and dying?
Day by day, the disaster moved closer to home. Terrifying scenes in Italy, where hospitals were overwhelmed by gasping Covid victims and distraught doctors were having to turn away the dying patients were fuelling a sense of impending doom in the UK.
Rumours swirled that Parliament might be forced to close for up to five months. A nervous public was beginning to stay away from restaurants, pubs and theatres – the start of a disastrous hiatus for the hospitality industry.
Warning that insurance would rapidly become a problem, Mr Cummings told Mr Hancock that businesses were “starting to scream” about cancellations. The Department of Health hastily registered Covid as a “notifiable disease”, making it easier for companies to claim compensation.
On March 6:
As people began to panic buy, the Government started talking to supermarkets about how to maintain supplies. Officials wondered whether the Government was being seen to do enough.
On March 7, the Government began thinking about a possible ventilator shortage.
On March 8, Hancock messaged Slack about France:
FYI France has just banned gatherings of over 1000 and said no kissing or handshakes. I imagine we will get some questions over why that’s different to our approach
Slack replied:
I think we’re heading towards general pressure over why our measures are relatively light touch compared to other countries. Also why we aren’t isolating/screening people coming back from Italy. We’ll need to explain very calmly that we’re doing what actually works.
Oh, if they had only left it there, but they didn’t.
On March 9, discussions took place about prioritising life-saving healthcare.
On March 10, the Cheltenham Festival (horse racing) opened and would last through March 13:
The first split was over mass gatherings. In England, Sage continued to advise against cancelling big sporting events. On March 10-13, the Cheltenham Festival went ahead. The Scottish government took a different view. As the pandemic progressed, an increasingly vocal Nicola Sturgeon was a persistent source of anxiety for Number 10 …
Slack sent out a message. Note that the media appear in it:
For the first time, it feels as if we’re under sustained pressure today over why we aren’t doing more. A split with Scotland would be particularly difficult.
We are also in a bad place on Italy. To the media mind, we’re asking UK nationals to self isolate and saying no one should travel to Italy, but Italians arriving in the U.K. are free to ignore our advice, hop on the Tube and visit tourist hotspots.
On March 11, the then-Digital Culture Media Sports Secretary Nadine Dorries was the first MP to get Covid:
Amid speculation over who else she might have infected, Downing Street was being asked whether Mr Johnson was at risk.
Hancock replied, in part:
PM was not in close contact with Nadine. You have to be within 2m of someone to pass it on, which he tells me he was not. CMO content with this
James Slack asked for an answer on the policy about Italy. Hancock responded:
Because of the level of risk in Italy
Hmm.
Patrick Vallance sent a message, the first part of which reads:
Not correct that the test does not work on people with no symptoms. It does and that’s why we contact trace.
Hmm.
Hancock responded to Vallance’s message, in part:
… Patrick what you’ve said is not right.
The clinical advice I’ve had is that the test is NOT reliable on people without symptoms.
I thought so, even at the time.
He ended with this:
Can the scientists please clear this up urgently
The article continues:
Inside Downing Street and the Department of Health, senior figures were fixated by growing calls from the media for more action. Anxious to retain control of the narrative, they fretted that Mr Johnson was being too cautious about imposing restrictions, and discussed how best to change his mind …
Cummings sent a long message reflecting his frustration. At that point, the Government advised frequent and lengthy handwashing. Cummings wanted social distancing measures, citing the new CDC policy in the United States and imagining what the British media and/or the public would say:
*’WHY WAIT 5 DAYS WHY NOT MOVE NOW AND FLATTEN CURVE EARLIER??’*
Slack replied, excerpted:
Agree with all of this. We’re at a tipping point in the media cycle … The Times and The Telegraph leader columns today point to the growing disquiet …
On March 14, the Cheltenham Festival was over. It was blamed for an uptick in cases. Meanwhile:
All over the world, politicians wrestled with the moral and practical implications of letting the virus run its course, allowing populations to build up “herd immunity”.
It was a source of much heated debate in government, but “letting it rip” was never UK Government policy. Mr Hancock was furious when Sir Patrick publicly suggested otherwise …
The article has screenshots of the many WhatsApp conversations that took place about testing, the media and schools.
On the evening of Monday, March 16:
Mr Johnson addressed the nation and warned that, without drastic action, the virus would spiral out of control.
The next day:
The elderly and vulnerable were told to stay at home for 12 weeks. Schools would remain open – but not for long. Ministers rushed through legislation giving the Government unprecedented new power to take control of essential services and restrict individual freedoms. Some hospitals were already beginning to struggle because of staff absence …
On March 19:
As the nation headed inexorably towards its first-ever national lockdown, some voices, notably those in the Treasury including Liam Booth-Smith, the then chancellor Rishi Sunak’s special adviser, were trying to present the alternative argument …
Booth-Smith asked, quite rightly:
… so how much additional benefit does ‘locking down’ actually get you?
Cummings, a lockdown zealot — even though he would violate the policy himself by driving his wife and young child to County Durham — replied:
All stop using lockdown it’s confusing
We’re trying to stop all non essential social contact. The problem is defining non essential
By Friday, March 20, Rishi’s optimistic budget of March 11 had died a death:
Mr Sunak, who had already announced billions of pounds worth of Covid loans and grants, unveiled his furlough scheme, under which the Government undertook to pay 80 per cent of workers’ salaries.
All pubs and hospitality were ordered to close from midnight that night. Then came the problems with personal protective equipment …
On the evening of Monday, March 23, at 8:00 p.m.:
the UK went into full lockdown with Mr Johnson’s order to “stay at home”. It was the first of three national lockdowns [in England, anyway], the last of which would only be lifted more than 12 months after the first had begun.
WhatsApp auto-delete now active
In the wake of The Lockdown Files, The Telegraph reported that some in government were changing their WhatsApp settings: ‘Ministers activating auto-delete on their WhatsApp messages’:
Cabinet ministers are using technology that automatically deletes WhatsApp messages, raising fears they are circumventing the Government’s transparency rules.
Some frontbench figures have switched on a function offered by the social media service that effectively means messages self-destruct after a short time period, such as a day.
It calls into question whether ministers are fully following guidance that electronic messages about government policy should be stored for possible Freedom of Information requests.
Some political advisers have even switched on the technology in the wake of The Lockdown Files, which revealed some of the 100,000 WhatsApp messages involving Matt Hancock.
Opposition MPs called for the practice to be stopped on Tuesday, questioning why government ministers would choose to automatically delete some messages …
Such discussions are theoretically covered by the Government’s existing transparency rules but they rely on ministers deciding which messages are relevant and storing them.
The Cabinet Office has guidance on the use of private emails which also applies to “other forms of communications and records which deal with departmental business”, such as WhatsApp messages.
The guidance reads: “The responsibility for deciding whether emails should be retained rests with the originator and recipient.
“In general terms, a record need only be retained if it is needed for substantive discussions or decisions in the course of conducting official business.”
How many ministers are using the automatic deletion tool on WhatsApp and for how many interactions is unclear.
Similarly it is not known how often ministers pass on WhatsApp messages about detailed policy discussions to the civil service to be stored.
However, the fact that some ministers are using the automatic deletion mechanism has prompted some MPs to raise concerns that not enough information is being stored …
A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “In the modern age, ministers will use a variety of communication channels for discussions so appropriate arrangements are in place for the management of electronic communications.”
Who else is among those who have set WhatsApp to auto-delete? None other than Simon Case, as The New Statesman reported on March 17. Their scoop comes from Boris’s sister Rachel Johnson:
Props to Rachel Johnson, the journalist and sister of the former prime minister, Boris. She provided great value for money for attendees of the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Conference in London on Wednesday, 15 March.
Chairing a panel discussion on the press, politics and police, Johnson provided her audience of journalists with something of a scoop on Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, who has come under pressure over leaked WhatsApp messages that have come to light in the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. (One message showed Case saying it was “hilarious” that holidaymakers were being “locked up” in quarantine hotels.)
“I had to be in contact with Simon Case about something a month or so ago,” said Johnson. “And when I was WhatsApping him, my WhatsApps disappeared because he’s now set his phone so that all his WhatsApps disappear immediately.” She added: “I think they disappear within hours, even. You know, so there’s no record of all the things he’s said to me.”
(Without wishing to overcomplicate this story, the Chatterer would note as well that, in January, Johnson said Case had questions to answer in the row over whether the BBC chairman Richard Sharp played a role in a loan-guarantee arrangement between Boris Johnson and the former PM’s distant cousin Sam Blyth.)
Who’d a thunk it?
More on The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
Because events in British politics have been so dramatic, it has been some time since I wrote about Red Wall MPs in England.
My last entry was for Marco Longhi in July 2022.
Yesterday, I mentioned Miriam Cates’s renewed opposition this month not only to certain aspects of sex education curricula in England but also to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s seeming disdain for mothers who wish to stay at home to raise their children. He said:
… it is damaging to the economy …
Egregious.
Background
Miriam Cates was elected in December 2019 to represent the South Yorkshire constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, which was created in 2010.
Until 2019, Labour’s Angela Smith represented Penistone and Stockbridge. Smith, who by then was a Liberal Democrat, ran an unsuccessful campaign in Altrincham and Sale West, which Sir Graham Brady, the Conservative incumbent and chair of the Party’s 1922 Committee, won. Cates defeated Labour’s Francyne Johnson by 7,210 votes, quite the achievement, considering that the old Penistone constituency had only one Conservative MP, elected in 1931. All the others were Labour.
Cates, the daughter of a general practitioner (since retired), was born in Sheffield in 1982. Her parents were practising Christians, and she has two younger brothers.
Cates has spent most of her life in or near Sheffield. She left to read Genetics at Cambridge, then returned to her home town to earn a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Sheffield Hallam University. She taught science, including biology, at the city’s Tapton School. She and her husband then founded their own firm, a technology consultancy called Redemption Media.
She and her husband have three children and live in Oughtlibridge, a village in the Sheffield area. She and her husband met at church whilst working on a project there. Cates is an Evangelical Christian.
Cates became interested in politics when she began listening to BBC Radio 4 at the age of 11. She was elected as a councillor for the Oughtlibridge Ward in 2015 and was re-elected in 2019. She resigned her post in 2021.
In 2016, she was a Remainer until aspects of the Leave campaign convinced her to vote for Brexit in the June referendum that year.
Maiden speech
Cates gave her maiden speech in the House of Commons in February 2020, when the 80-strong Conservative majority were full of optimism:
She gave her speech, during a debate on Migration and Scotland. Emphases mine below:
My interest in this place began when I was 11 years old and somehow I acquired an ancient, long-wave radio that would only tune to Radio 4. In the 1990s, before YouTube and Candy Crush, I had to make do with the “Today” programme and “Westminster Hour”, but I was hooked—captivated by the history of our democracy, the workings of our politics and its power to bring change.
My first big political experience was the 1997 general election. Growing up in Sheffield, in what was the capital of the socialist republic of South Yorkshire, this was no ordinary election. I was fascinated by the whole campaign and I sent off for and displayed posters from every single political party, including the Referendum party. I even had a Liberal Democrat board on a post in our front garden, but we all make errors of judgment in our youth …
To cut a short story even shorter, I found my home in the Conservative party and I now stand before you as the Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge. Apart from a three-year stint at university, I have lived in the Sheffield area for my whole life, so it is a profound privilege to represent a community that I call home.
Penistone and Stocksbridge is a truly remarkable constituency. We have stunning scenery, moorland and reservoirs. We have beautiful rural villages like Bolsterstone, Wortley and Cawthorne. We have the historic market town of Penistone, which received its market charter in 1290 and where Penistone Grammar School, founded in 1392, still provides an excellent education to local children. The school’s original motto was “Disce Aut Discede”, which means learn or leave. This sentiment clearly held sway in the 2016 referendum, where the constituency judged that the EU had failed to learn and so we should indeed leave.
The town of Stocksbridge, with its industrious history of steel manufacture, boasts the proud legacy of Mr Samuel Fox, inventor of the Paragon umbrella frame, and whose wire factories were responsible for the development of the town we know today. We have many other wonderful communities, like Dodworth, Pogmoor, Chapeltown, Ecclesfield, High Green, Grenoside and Burncross, and numerous rural villages, each with their own unique character.
Ten years ago, I moved to Oughtibridge, one of these villages, and, being until this point a city girl, I was utterly unaware of the strength and depth of community that I was about to encounter. Throwing myself into village life, I discovered voluntary groups, the school PTA, the local church and the parish council, bringing together people of all ages and from all walks of life. The wonderful thing about a village is that when everyone shares the same school, the same park and the same pub, it is natural to form friendships that are based on a common interest and a common geography, and not on social background or political worldview.
It was in my capacity as a parish councillor that I first met my predecessor, Angela Smith. I found her to be hard-working, sincere, thoughtful and helpful, and I want to thank Angela for the part that she played in securing an £8 million investment in the Fox Valley shopping centre, which has been responsible for significant regeneration in Stocksbridge and the surrounding area. In more recent times, Angela became known for her inclination to switch allegiances, being, at different times during 2019, a member of no fewer than five political parties or groups. I am heartily glad that the people of Penistone and Stocksbridge shared this enthusiasm for switching parties and in December elected me as their first Conservative MP. On the topic of Scottish migration, perhaps the Scottish Government would want to offer a visa to any of my constituents who want to complete the set and experience representation by the SNP, although I feel sure they would only require a temporary visa.
We have heard much about how we Conservatives won seats such as Penistone and Stocksbridge for the first time. Like my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, I understand that many people lent me their votes, and I take seriously my responsibility to deliver on the commitments we made. One of the most important of these commitments is the pledge to radically improve public transport in the north of England. When I was first selected as a parliamentary candidate, I began by going around our communities asking people what changes they would like to see, and public transport was raised time and again.
We desperately need to level up our northern transport and infrastructure. Public transport is not just about getting people from A to B; it connects people with well-paid jobs, training and education, hospital appointments and shops, and it prevents loneliness and isolation. Transport is the key to spreading opportunity and investment. That is why I am campaigning with the Don Valley railway group to see a Stocksbridge to Sheffield passenger train line reinstated and with Thurgoland Parish Council public transport working group to secure better rural bus services. I am delighted therefore by today’s announcement on funding for buses and trains, which demonstrates that this one nation Conservative Government are committed to an ambitious programme of levelling up.
Levelling up is not just about financial investment, bricks and mortar, and miles of train track. The national soul-searching of the past four years has demonstrated that there are areas of our country, particularly northern towns such as Penistone and Stocksbridge, that have been left behind—not just in an economic sense, although that is certainly the case, but in terms of how our communities and our culture are understood and valued as part of our national life. As I said, I have lived in the area my whole life, and that is by no means unusual. Our towns and villages are wonderful places to live, not least because of the strength and depth of community life. Social mobility should not mean having to leave your home, your family and your community to find work, training or investment. We do have ambition, aspiration and talent, but we are also rooted in a deep sense of place. We need opportunities right in the heart of our communities, and this Government’s initiatives, such as the towns fund and the shared prosperity fund, will help us to deliver.
I want to finish where I started. A quarter of a century on from when my interest in this place began, I still believe that politics has the power to bring change and that we should celebrate our history as a democratic nation—not a perfect history by any means, and one with many dark moments, but one where the trend has been towards progress and fairness. To continue this progress we must begin to heal the very real divides that have been exposed, between north and south, towns and cities, leave and remain, old and young. We need to find a way to recognise and value our differences while celebrating what we have in common as citizens of this great nation. However different our life experiences, our place of birth, our social background, we have a shared identity as human beings. Whether this identity derives from an acceptance of our intrinsic worth as people or a belief, like mine, that we are all children of the same heavenly father, we need to cherish what we have in common.
There are many different opinions in this country, and we have given each other many different labels, but the vast majority of us want to make this nation a better place for everyone who lives here. We may disagree, sometimes passionately, about how that should be done, but if we can respect each other’s motives and leave the labels behind, be slow to judge and quick to forgive, the healing will begin. December marked a fresh start for our democracy, and a fresh start for Penistone and Stocksbridge. I am honoured to serve this wonderful constituency, and I will work hard to deliver for all of my constituents.
Coronavirus realist
I might have coined a new expression there. Cates was not a Covid sceptic but rather a Covid realist in recognising how much damage lockdown and other measures did to the country.
She participated in the Coronavirus debate of June 16, 2021. This one concerned the extension of the Coronavirus Act 2020:
Following the science is an attractive and even comforting idea in a time of uncertainty. But—I say this as a scientist —we can no more follow science than we can follow history. Science gives us knowledge and understanding, but it cannot give us wisdom, and it is wisdom that we need to make what are essentially moral and political decisions about how we balance the short and long- term best interests of our whole society. I am saddened that we have lost—I hope only temporarily—that sense of balance.
Preventing death from covid seems to have become the principal purpose of our national endeavour, no matter the cost to our way of life. We have placed insufficient emphasis on the terrible long-term consequences of lockdown—poverty, unemployment, lost education, debt, undiagnosed cancer, loneliness, hopelessness and fear—and focused far too narrowly on just one set of metrics: the daily covid data. Even the most hardened libertarian would accept that, in a national emergency and in the face of significant threat to life, restrictions on our freedoms have been necessary and right, but with all vulnerable people having now been offered vaccination, the balance of risk has shifted.
Covid is no longer a substantial threat. The average covid mortality so far in June is seven deaths a day—seven out of around 1,500 daily deaths that we could expect in normal times. The number of people in hospital now stands at 1,177—some 37,000 fewer than at the peak in January. Thanks to the incredible efficacy of our vaccination programme, it is hard to comprehend how our hospitals could quickly become overwhelmed. The idea that we are still in a state of emergency is not supported by the evidence, yet significant legal restrictions on our basic freedoms are to remain, even dictating how many of our family and friends can visit us in our private homes. The restrictions we face are now out of proportion to the threat, so extending the measures sets a dangerous precedent.
We must learn to live with covid in the way that we live with so many other risks. Vaccines will never be 100% effective, just like seatbelts, smoke alarms or contraception, but it is vital to our autonomy and our identity as human beings that we are able to make our own choices and evaluations of everyday risks, as has been the norm in our country for generations. I have the greatest respect for Ministers, who have had to make unimaginably difficult decisions over the past year, but now is the time to restore a sense of balance, proportion and fairness, and to make a return to life in all its fullness.
In my final seconds, I want to say this: childhood should be a time that is care-free. Testing our children twice a week, making them wear masks when they are not at risk, and constantly reminding them that they may be a danger to people whom they love, is damaging them psychologically, and we have to stop.
Three months later, on September 21, the Backbench Business Committee granted her a debate about giving the coronavirus vaccine to children, which she introduced as follows (excerpted below). This took place in Westminster Hall, where additional debates take place:
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate, and draw Members’ attention to the three e-petitions that relate to this topic, which have amassed more than 100,000 signatures between them.
Vaccination has transformed public health over the last two centuries. As a science teacher, I remember teaching students about the amazing work of Edward Jenner, who famously developed the smallpox inoculation. Two hundred and fifty years later, vaccinations have again ridden to our rescue with the rapid development and roll-out of covid vaccines across the UK. The phenomenal success of the vaccination programme can be seen clearly in the data …
Those figures are a ringing endorsement of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s strategy to recommend vaccination based on the medical benefits and risks to the individuals concerned. The Government have repeatedly defended both this strategy and the independence of the JCVI, and resisted calls to prioritise the vaccination of teachers or police officers over those at higher risk of serious illness. That was the right approach, and the UK has led the world in falling rates of deaths and hospitalisations.
It was therefore surprising, to say the least, when the Government put political pressure on the JCVI to quickly reach a decision about the vaccination of children. On 3 September 2021, the JCVI announced that it was unable to recommend the mass vaccination of healthy 12 to 15-year-olds. The reason was that, although there are marginal health benefits of covid vaccination to children based on the known risks of the vaccine, there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms, such as the long-term effects of myocarditis …
There is no rush to roll out the vaccine to children. We know that children are not at risk from covid; teachers are no more at risk than the rest of the population; the vast majority of vulnerable adults have been vaccinated; over half of children already have antibodies; and there is no evidence that schools drive transmission …
It is widely known that access to GPs is challenging at the moment, and that presents challenges in this situation. It is widely understood that if a child can consent, contrary to parental consent, that is not a tick-box exercise; it is a matter for a medical professional to assess whether the child is competent to consent. If there are problems accessing GPs, there are clear issues here …
… instead of accepting the JCVI’s assessment and waiting for more evidence to emerge, the Government asked the chief medical officer urgently to review the decision based on the wider benefits to children, including from education. Last week, the CMO announced that he would recommend child vaccinations on the basis of these wider benefits.
That decision is a marked departure from the principle of vaccinating people for their own medical benefit, because those wider issues—educational disruption and concerns around mental health—are the consequences of policy decisions and are not scientific inevitabilities. Children in the UK have already missed more education than children in almost any other country in Europe, despite comparable death rates. Since January 2020, British children have lost on average 44% of school days to lockdown and isolation. That is not a consequence of covid infections in children, but rather a result of policy decisions to close schools and isolate healthy children.
… There is a much simpler way to stop harmful educational disruption, and that is to follow the advice of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and end the mass testing of asymptomatic children. This unevidenced and unethical policy is costing tens of millions of pounds a week—I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm the exact cost—and is continuing to disrupt education. Even the CMO acknowledges that a vaccination programme alone will not stop school closures. Perhaps the Minister could clarify how the Government intend to end educational disruption.
On the potential mental health benefits from reducing the fear of covid, it is not covid infection that is making children fearful; it is the uncertainty, frustration, loneliness and anxiety that they experience as a result of lockdowns and harmful messages such as, “Don’t kill granny.” Children need not fear catching covid, but they have every right to fear policy decisions that cause them significant harm, and sadly we cannot vaccinate against those.
Nonetheless, the decision has been made, and we have to be very clear that the risks to children, both from covid and from vaccines, are tiny. Concerns should now focus on making sure that the necessary safeguards are put in place as vaccination is rolled out … While I appreciate Ministers’ commitments, children already face discrimination in some schools over mask wearing and testing.
Vaccination must be a free and informed decision … Parental consent must also be respected. Much has been said on this subject, but the heart of the matter is that parental responsibility and authority are foundational to society …
Throughout the past 18 months, “protect the vulnerable” has been our clarion call. We have rightly made significant efforts to protect elderly people and those who are particularly susceptible to covid, but children, who cannot speak out, do not own property, and have no legal agency, are also very vulnerable. Yet during the pandemic, we have asked this group of vulnerable people to make huge sacrifices to protect the rest of us. The harms of lockdown for our children are significant and, for many, will be irreversible: lost education, missed opportunities, abuse and horrific online harms. The number of children presenting in A&E with acute mental health conditions has risen by 50% since the start of the pandemic.
A climate of fear and uncertainty has robbed children of the structure, routine and security that they need to thrive and has placed on them a heavy emotional burden from inferring that they may be responsible for the deaths of those they love. We have pretended that online learning is somehow a substitute for being in schools, and closed our eyes to the consequences of social isolation for children and young people.
Of course, we should raise our children to take responsibility for their actions, but as adults we should always shoulder the greater burden. We have imposed absurd rules on our young people, right down to deciding whom they can play with at playtime and whether they are allowed to change for PE.
However, we have not seen that much action to urge adults to take responsibility for their own covid risk by, for example, losing weight or exercising—something that would have had a far greater impact on our rates of hospitalisation and death.
The lightweight Maggie Throup responded for the Government:
… My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge asked a number of questions. I reiterate that the CMOs sought advice from experts in the field; it was not just the information they had themselves. It is only right that, based on that advice, 12 to 15-year-olds are able to take up the offer of the vaccine in a fair and equitable manner.
My hon. Friend asked about disruption to education from the programme. NHS England already has plans in place for the mop-up programme, which is not likely to be on school sites, to minimise disruption to education and the rest of the immunisation programme …
It is important that we do whatever we can—use whatever we have in our toolbox—to make sure that children are able to continue with their education, and vaccination is one part of that. I know my hon. Friend is passionate, as am I, about making sure that children get a full education, and that the pandemic does not affect their futures. My hon. Friend raised several other questions and, if she will allow me, I will write to her in response to any I do not answer in my speech.
As is customary, the MP who introduces the debate concludes it. Cates ended with this:
To finish, I reiterate the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Chris Green): what is success? Where does this end? How do we get back to normal? I do not believe the vaccine roll-out among children will get us there. We need determined political leadership that puts the welfare of children front and centre, ends educational disruption and allows us to move forward with their future.
I will have more about Miriam Cates next week.
Before David Cameron became Prime Minister in May 2010, Conservatives used to encourage marriage and the family.
Very few Conservatives these days speak highly of either institution in or out of Parliament.
Two debates in the House of Commons within a week of each other demonstrate the low regard the Conservative Government has for families.
Education
On Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), Conservative MP Miriam Cates, who represents Penistone and Stockbridge (a Red Wall constituency), expressed her concern to Rishi Sunak over the adult — not to mention deviant — nature of the sex education curricula offered in schools in England.
The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):
Rishi Sunak has ordered an urgent review of sex education after The Telegraph exposed evidence of the widespread teaching of “age inappropriate” materials in schools.
MPs have welcomed the news, but warned that the review must be independent as the Department for Education (DfE) has produced “confusing” guidance.
This week, nearly 50 Conservative MPs wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to launch an independent inquiry into “age inappropriate” sex education following evidence that graphic sexual content and gender ideology was being widely taught in schools.
The letter, co-ordinated by Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stockbridge, was signed by Priti Patel, the former home secretary; Simon Clarke, the former levelling up secretary; and Jonathan Gullis, Andrea Jenkyns, Brendan Clarke-Smith and Kelly Tolhurst, all former Cabinet ministers.
It came after The Telegraph revealed last week that some 13-year-old pupils have been taught there are 100 genders, while in some schools children as young as 12 have been asked how they feel about oral and anal sex.
On Wednesday, Mr Sunak told the Commons that he would now bring forward a review into sex education …
In the Commons, Mrs Cates said: “Graphic lessons on oral sex. How to choke your partner safely, and 72 genders. This is what passes for relationships and sex education in British schools.
“Across the country, children are being subjected to lessons that are age inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate, often using resources from unregulated organisations that are actively campaigning to undermine parents.
“This is not a victory for equality. It is a catastrophe for childhood.”
In theory, parents are supposed to be able to see the teachers’ materials for these lessons. However, in reality, some parents have been denied access to them. Others can see only a broad outline of the curriculum, which does not include specific lesson content.
This has been allowed to go on since 2019, with input from sex equality charities and their activists.
One teachers’ union blamed the Government. No surprise there:
James Bowen, the director of policy at the NAHT school leaders’ union, said it was hard “ to be anything other than deeply concerned by this announcement”.
“The overwhelming majority of schools are doing nothing more than following the Government’s own statutory guidance when it comes to relationships and sex education,” he said.
“It is worth remembering that the current curriculum was subject to extensive consultation before it was introduced. We have seen no evidence to suggest there is a widespread problem with pupils being presented with age-inappropriate materials and if this were the situation, we would expect it to have been picked up on a case-by-case basis.
“There is a real concern that this is a politically motivated review, rather than one based on the reality of what is happening in the vast majority of schools up and down the country.
“Our appeal to [the] Government is to ensure this review is now handled with the care, sensitivity and impartiality it requires and to listen carefully to the voices of education professionals and pupils.”
Notice that he omits the voice of parents.
Jeremy Hunt’s budget
On Wednesday, March 15, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt presented his budget. It is rather Blairite in many ways. Most people will find it ‘middle of the road’. Upon closer inspection, there is no plan for growth through tax cuts. Furthermore, corporation tax will rise to 25%. There is much more that one could criticise. Not mentioned in Hunt’s speech is the drastic reduction of capital gains allowance this year and next year.
This is what Hunt had to say about working mothers (see Column 846):
For many women, a career break becomes a career end. Our female participation rate is higher than average for OECD economies, but we trail top performers, such as Denmark and the Netherlands. If we matched Dutch levels of participation, there would be more than 1 million additional women working. And we can do that.
So today I announce a series of reforms that start that journey. I begin with the supply of childcare. We have seen a significant decline in childminders over recent years— down 9% in England in just one year. But childminders are a vital way to deliver affordable and flexible care, and we need more of them. I have listened to representations from my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) and decided to address this by piloting incentive payments of £600 for childminders who sign up to the profession, rising to £1,200 for those who join through an agency.
I have also heard many concerns about cost pressures facing the sector. We know that is making it hard to hire staff and raising prices for parents, with around two thirds of childcare providers increasing fees last year alone. So we will increase the funding paid to nurseries providing free childcare under the hours offer by £204 million from this September, rising to £288 million next year. That is an average of a 30% increase in the two-year-old rate this year, just as the sector has requested.
I will also offer providers more flexibility in how they operate in line with other parts of the UK. So alongside that additional funding, we will change minimum staff-to-child ratios from 1:4 to 1:5 for two-year-olds in England as happens in Scotland, although the new ratios will remain optional with no obligation on either childminders or parents to adopt them.
I want to help the 700,000 parents on universal credit who, until the reforms I announced today, had limited requirements to look for work. Many remain out of work because they cannot afford the upfront payment necessary to access subsidised childcare. So for any parents who are moving into work or want to increase their hours, we will pay their childcare costs upfront. And we will increase the maximum they can claim to £951 for one child and £1,630 for two children, an increase of almost 50%.
I turn now to parents of school-age children, who often face barriers to working because of the limited availability of wraparound care. One third of primary schools do not offer childcare at both ends of the school day, even though for many people a job requires it to be available before and after school. To address this, we will fund schools and local authorities to increase the supply of wraparound care so that all parents of school-age children can drop their children off between 8 am and 6 pm. Our ambition is that all schools will start to offer a full wraparound offer, either on their own or in partnership with other schools, by September 2026.
Today’s childcare reforms will increase the availability of childcare, reduce costs and increase the number of parents able to use it. Taken together with earlier Conservative reforms, they amount to the most significant improvements to childcare provision in a decade. But if we really want to remove the barriers to work, we need to go further for parents who have a child under 3. For them childcare remains just too expensive.
In 2010, there was barely any free childcare for under-fives. A Conservative-led Government changed that, with free childcare for three and four-year-olds in England. It was a landmark reform, but not a complete one. I do not want any parent with a child under five to be prevented from working if they want to, because it is damaging to our economy and unfair, mainly to women, so today I announce that in eligible households in which all adults are working at least 16 hours, we will introduce 30 hours of free childcare not just for three and four-year-olds, but for every single child over the age of nine months.
The 30 hours offer will now start from the moment maternity or paternity leave ends. It is a package worth on average £6,500 every year for a family with a two-year- old child using 35 hours of childcare every week, and it reduces their childcare costs by nearly 60%. Because it is such a large reform, we will introduce it in stages to ensure that there is enough supply in the market. Working parents of two-year-olds will be able to access 15 hours of free care from April 2024, helping about half a million parents. From September 2024, that 15 hours will be extended to all children from nine months up, meaning that a total of nearly 1 million parents will be eligible. From September 2025, every single working parent of under-fives will have access to 30 hours of free childcare per week.
Here, too, Miriam Cates spoke out, saying that Hunt’s plan did not offer parental choice:
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a father of six, had Cates on his show last night:
Guido Fawkes has the story (emphases his):
Miriam Cates has added her name to the list of those criticising the Chancellor’s £4 billion childcare handouts which, as Guido pointed out yesterday, restrict choice. Speaking to an approving Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News, Cates joined a growing list of Conservatives, including Ranil Jayawardena and Kit Malthouse, speaking out against the policy. She got to the heart of the matter:
It doesn’t provide choice… many mothers do want to go back to work, but many mothers don’t. And they want to look after their own children, particularly babies under two and I very much question if this is the right policy for children and families.
At least some in the Conservatives are intent on playing happy families…
I would not have thought that the Centre for Social Justice and a Conservative MP would be natural allies, but the think tank applauded her and showed a video of her testimony at Westminster Hall in a side debate:
Most other European countries lower taxes for parents. I have seen the French advert showing the mother cradling her newborn and advising that she contact her tax office as soon as practicable to let them know she has just had a child. Note that British working class voters would rather provide child care themselves were money not an object:
Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom has spoken several times over the past few years in favour of 1000 Days, a programme that promotes babies’ development in the first three years of life. The CSJ refers to it below and rightly recommends the resurrection of the Marriage Allowance, a Conservative policy that disappeared some years ago:
I fully agree that any tax scheme should discourage abuse from people who are already receiving benefit, but encouraging more mothers to stay at home in those precious early years at least would effectively ward off influences from outside the home:
Guido Fawkes also supports the aforementioned French policy of tax relief:
Guido says that his wife decided to give up work to care for their children:
Other mothers agreed:
Guido has a post on the French policy and on Conservative MPs who support a family-friendly policy for parents:
Guido would suggest borrowing from our esteemed European neighbours. As Madeline Grant points out, in France, parents of two children only hit the top tax bracket when household income reaches €250,000, while the childless hit it at under €100,000. French family taxation is based on the number of adults and children within the household, rather than on the parents individually. Policy Exchange say that “at an annual income of £30,000, a UK household currently pays £3,250 in tax with an actual tax rate (ATR) of 11%. Under the French principle of quotient familial, that same household would pay no tax (an ATR of 0%)”. Making babies tax deductible is a sexy policy.
If a UK household earns £70,000, they currently pay £15,500 in annual tax with an ATR of 22%. Applying the French principle would save the same family £9,000. Even in the US, Obama gave parents a $1,000 tax break per child in 2010. This would also benefit stay-at-home mums (or dads) who choose to look after their own children rather than to farm them out to strangers in order to boost GDP. Childcare policy in the UK is framed in terms of what is good for the economy rather than what is good for children and family life. Tax deductible children would please the squeezed middle-classes during tough economic times… who knows they might even vote for a party that puts it in the manifesto.
Kit Malthouse, a former Cabinet member:
had an article in The Times on same theme this morning:
If we are serious about supporting people to have children and get back into work, a major childcare overhaul is clearly the right place to start. Here is how we start.
We need to begin with the tax system. I have often wondered why we recognise children in the welfare system but not through our taxes. In that sense, they’re treated like a burden that needs offsetting rather than a cause for celebration and an economic bonus. To fix that, we could abolish child benefit and simply gave parents a tax-free income allowance of, say, £15,000 per child up to 11 years old. If you are a couple on £30,000 each with two children, for instance, this would mean that with your existing personal allowance, you could jointly earn £55,140 before you paid a penny to the government …
So rather than collecting money from families in taxation, losing some of it in administration and then returning it to them as childcare, we could simply leave more of it in their pockets to do with as they see fit.
Another Conservative, Ranil Jaywardena, spoke out in favour of a flexible taxation system for families:
He said (see Column 783):
… I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to helping families with the cost of childcare specifically. It is a great starter for 10. Finding ways to keep down the cost of childcare for parents is important, but we must not lose sight of keeping down the cost of childcare for the taxpayer too. It is extraordinary to see some on the Opposition Benches and elsewhere attack the alignment of the system in England with the system in Scotland, increasing the ratio from 1:4 to 1:5, but what is missing is choice. For 25 years, the consensus has been that everyone should go to work, and the state will provide ever more free childcare, except that it is not free—taxes are at a 70-year high—and I contend that choice is missing from the equation.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all system from Whitehall, families should be able to decide what works for them. Instead of the Government dictating how many hours of free childcare and from who in the years ahead, how about moving to a system of tax reliefs, so that parents can pay for the childcare they want, and from whom they want? Indeed—a radical thought—one parent could even choose to stay at home, allowing the other to work extra hours, if that is what they want to do.
I therefore urge the Treasury to consider reigniting the review into family taxation. Things may have changed since 2019, but I recall that in 2019 single people without a family paid 8% less tax than the OECD average, but a single-earner couple, with two children, paid 26% more. There is an injustice in this that I hope the Government will address in the not-too-distant future by commissioning a family tax review.
That tax review should reflect the fact that familial support not only for childcare but for elderly relatives provides about £1 trillion of unpaid care in this country, which people could decide to pass to the state. I do not believe that is desirable, and I believe that the state should in turn provide the environment that allows people to take responsibility for themselves.
On wraparound childcare, this is an excellent step to help working parents and for them not to have to worry about what happens after school time, but I urge the Government to ensure that we give that money directly to schools and academies to do what is right, providing a co-curricular offer that is suitable for their particular community and their children, who they know best, rather than any Government Department, or indeed any local authority.
We cannot pay for any of this without strong British businesses, and I welcome the full expensing of the business investment …
Is there any chance that Jeremy Hunt will listen to these sensible suggestions?
I doubt it. They are not statist enough for him or most Conservative MPs, sadly.
Interestingly, as I close this post on Thursday afternoon, Conservative MP George Eustice, another former Cabinet member, is on the side of his colleagues quoted above. Eustice said in Parliament this afternoon that our society no longer values motherhood and considers the term ‘stay-at-home mother’ to be derogatory.
How right he is.
As for David Cameron, Eustice said in his speech that the former Prime Minister was the greatest supporter of marriage and family ever but that ‘bean counters in the Treasury ground him down’ over tax relief.
There must be some way to discourage more welfare claims for motherhood and a way to encourage two-parent families and marriage tax allowances.
It is an interesting coincidence that family policies are being debated just days before Mothering Sunday, March 19.
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.
On Wednesday, March 8, I went out for a leisurely lunch.
I thought I could avoid the parliamentary debate, which inevitably becomes party political. As it did … on Thursday afternoon, while I was preparing dinner.
Looking back at Wednesday, Guido Fawkes’s Christian Calgie gallantly wished British women a happy day. Pictured are all the British political parties that, at one time or another, have had an elected female leader. All, that is, except for — wait for it — Labour:
Guido’s post says (emphases his):
On today’s International Women’s Day, Guido thought it was time to celebrate the first female leaders of significant political parties in the UK. The timeline of trailblazers is:
-
- Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, 1975
- Green Party, Jean Lambert, 1992
- Welsh Nationalists, Leanne Wood, 2012
- Scottish Nationalists, Nicola Sturgeon, 2014
- Democratic Unionist Party, Arlene Foster, 2015
- UKIP, Diane James, 2016
- Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson, 2019
- [Labour Party, NA, NA]
Unless Sir Keir has a big announcement to make, sadly the Labour Party can’t yet properly participate in this list…
Guido and his team reinforced the message about Labour’s lack of elected lady leaders:
A Labour group later tweeted about diversity on this day. Look closely at the photos. What do you see?
A cross-dressing career comedian who hopes to be a Labour candidate in the next election is pictured in the second row from the bottom, second photo from the right. His name is Eddie Izzard. This week, he declared that he would like to be known as Suzy.
Labour make themselves out to be the progressive choice. Yet, one of their MPs, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, did a bit of mansplaining to a doctor on the BBC’s Politics Live about the importance of using gender-neutral language when describing medical conditions that women have. Recently, he tried to intimidate a female Conservative MP during a debate in the Commons:
The Shadow Health Minister, Labour’s Wes Streeting, has form when it comes to names for women:
Perhaps he has since repented. After all, the tweets Guido captured (more here) are well over 10 years old.
Before marking the next general election ballot for Labour, British women might want to imagine themselves in a hospital bed and having Mr Streeting visit their bedside as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in a few years’ time. What would he call them: ‘old bag’, ‘cow’ or ‘tart’?
Elsewhere, a Conservative MP, Theresa Villiers, appeared on GB News and sent Guido a photo of the channel’s gender-neutral loos:
Guido tells us that GB News has nothing to do with the loos. They come with the building:
Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers was on GB News and sent Guido this picture of the gender-neutral toilets at their Paddington studio – she was most disconcerted to find men coming in whilst she was touching-up her make-up. Opining that “This doesn’t seem entirely consistent with their apparent enthusiasm for fighting culture wars” …
The private sector seems to be solving the fellas-in-frocks in the same washroom as teenage girls problem with single cubicle washrooms. It is obviously more expensive to build single-person washrooms, the higher costs are less controversial than the alternative. Expect to see more of these in the future…
Returning to Labour, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the Evening Standard an incredible piece of misinformation on Wednesday:
Ms Reeves began her career at the Bank of England, where the court of directors has 13 men and just three women …
“I want it to change,” Ms Reeves told the Standard.
“I have worked at some of those institutions. The Bank has never had a female governor. There has never been a woman chancellor in 800 years. I want to see change.
“When I started at the Bank of England my graduate intake was 37 and only six of us women.”
Ms Reeves began at the Bank 23 years ago, in the same graduate intake as former Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
She’s right, but she’s also very wrong. An MP should know better.
I read that article on the train home from lunch yesterday and nearly went ballistic.
Here’s why.
Every now and then, a photographer manages to get the part of the door to No. 10 on which there is a brass plate above the doorknob that reads:
FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY
Perhaps Ms Reeves needs to look at more photos of that famous door.
The First Lord of the Treasury is a title that the Prime Minister holds.
To whom does the Chancellor report? The Prime Minister.
We have had three female First Lords of the Treasury — thanks to the Conservatives. They are Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. The inscription is just above the letterbox slot:
That’s three more female Party leaders and Prime Ministers than Labour have had.
The UK is doing well as far as women in leadership positions go. Well done, Conservatives.
Churchmouse Campanologist 