Ever since he left government, Matt Hancock’s closest allies have claimed that Boris Johnson and his top team at No 10 would try to set him up as the “fall guy” for the government’s mistakes during the pandemic.
Over the last few days at the Covid inquiry in central London, it looked like these fears had been realised. Witnesses opening up to the inquiry have only lightly rejected repeated claims that Hancock regularly said things during the pandemic that were not true.
Here are the top things we have learned about the former health secretary from the inquiry so far.
Hancock wanted to decide who should live and who should die
The former chief executive of NHS England, Lord Simon Stevens, was discussing the ethical debate over whether the medical profession or ministers should have the final say if worst case scenarios occurred.
Matt Hancock took the position that he “rather than, say, the medical profession or the public, should ultimately decide who should live and who should die”, Lord Stevens said.
“Fortunately this horrible dilemma never crystallised,” he added, insisting he discouraged the idea that any secretary of state should be able to decide how care was provided.
Hancock’s position, which materialised during a planning exercise at the Cabinet Office in February 2020, was different from that of his predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, who had wanted such decisions to be reserved for clinical staff.
Overconfident Hancock pretended to bat away Covid pressures
Helen MacNamara, who served as deputy cabinet secretary, told the inquiry Hancock displayed “nuclear levels” of overconfidence and a pattern of reassuring colleagues the pandemic was being dealt with in ways that were not true.
She recalled a “jarring” episode when she offered Hancock help, concerned about the toll the pandemic had taken on his mental health.
Hancock took a cricket batsman’s stance to demonstrate how much he was enjoying the responsibility during the pandemic.
“They bowl them at me, I knock them away,” he said confidently in one of the dark moments of the early pandemic, according to her testimony to the inquiry.
McNamara also criticised Hancock, saying that he would suggest in meetings things were under control or would be sorted but then days or weeks later they “would discover that was not in fact the case”.
Ministers often avoided Hancock-led Cobra meetings
Lord Stevens told the inquiry senior ministers “sometimes avoided” Cobra meetings in the early days of the pandemic if they were chaired by Hancock.
Lord Stevens said Cobra meetings “usefully brought together a cross-section of departments, agencies and the devolved administrations”.
But he said they were not “optimally effective” as they were quite large, so ministers would leave them to their junior ministers.
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Hancock was branded a ‘liar’ during the Covid pandemic
Dominic Cummings and other senior advisors in No 10 had repeatedly urged Boris Johnson to sack his health secretary.
In a message sent to the then prime minister in May 2020, Cummings said: “You need to think through timing of binning Hancock. There’s no way the guy can stay. He’s lied his way through this and killed people and dozens and dozens of people have seen it.”
Another message sent by Cummings to Johnson in August 2020, read: “I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or shd (sic) believe on anything, and we face going into autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of NHS still.”
Sir Christopher Wormald, a top civil servant in the department of health, told the inquiry he was not aware of the extent of views about Hancock’s truth-telling.
Hancock was kept in health secretary role as ‘sacrifice’ for Covid inquiry
Boris Johnson may have wanted to keep Matt Hancock in post as health secretary as a “sacrifice” for the Covid-19 inquiry, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
Hancock was a frequent target of criticism by Cummings during the pandemic, with Cummings claiming that the then-Cabinet minister “killed people” during the crisis.
Cummings said that Johnson’s political secretary, Ben Gascoigne, had told him “that the PM wanted to keep Hancock as ‘the sacrifice for the inquiry’.
“If we’d replaced Hancock before August then things like rapid testing would have been smoother, planning would have been more honest and effective, and thousands would have survived.”
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