Hancock goes to bat for Hancock at the Covid inquiry

The Covid inquiry’s forensic unpicking of the chaos at the heart of the UK government in the early months of the pandemic finally produced an apology this week. Michael Gove apologised to families who lost loved ones for the government’s mistakes, admitting that the UK was too slow into the first and second lockdowns in 2020.

The inquiry also finally heard from then health secretary Matt Hancock who, in previous evidence, was accused of having “nuclear levels” of confidence and took the position that he should “ultimately decide who should live and who should die”.

So what? The inquiry asked three questions this week that boiled down to the same key concern – did so many people have to die? Lead counsel Hugo Keith KC asked Hancock: 

• Whether the country should have locked down earlier.
• Could the government have done more to slow the spread of the virus?
• Why were people with Covid sent into care homes early in the pandemic?

The answers were bleak.  

1. Hancock admitted the UK should have gone into full lockdown three weeks earlier on March 2nd as it would “have saved many lives.” According to estimates from a team at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, introducing lockdown measures just one week earlier would have reduced the number of cases in June by 74 per cent, meaning approximately 34,000 fewer deaths as well as halving the required time spent in full lockdown. Acting two weeks earlier would have reduced deaths by 43,000.
2. Hancock said that there were no plans in place for infection control as late as February 2020 and the government had the “wrong doctrine” – planning for the consequences of the pandemic rather than suppressing it.
3. Former deputy chief medical officer Dame Jenny Harries had said discharging Covid patients into care homes would be “entirely clinically appropriate” in March 2020. Hancock admitted that his claim that the government threw a “protective ring around care homes” was incorrect. Official data shows there were nearly 20,000 Covid-linked deaths in care homes in England and Wales in the first three months of the pandemic. Ultimately, there were an estimated 274,000 deaths in care homes in England and Wales from Covid-19, according to the Office for National Statistics.
4. Michael Gove, then chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, warned that the government was “f***ing up” its Covid response at the height of the pandemic and would “regret it for a long time” in WhatsApp messages to Boris Johnson’s top adviser Dominic Cummings.
5. Cummings called the Cabinet Office a “f***ing joke” in his response to Gove, complaining that officials had lied about the existence of a plan to tackle the pandemic.
6. Cummings acted as Prime Minister in all but name during the pandemic, according to Sajid Javid who was appointed health secretary in June 2021. 
7. Hancock described Cummings as a “malign actor” who created a “toxic” and “deeply unpleasant” culture of fear at the heart of government, hindering the pandemic response.
8. Javid was not invited to Omicron planning meetings in the summer of 2021 and told the inquiry he had only heard they existed this week.
9. Boris Johnson referred to both mask wearing and the idea of discussing the return to work with trade unions as “b****cks”, according to former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance’s diaries.
10. Vallance’s diaries also recalled a meeting where Johnson said the nation would have to learn “to die with” the virus. 
11. In August 2020, Hancock warned cabinet secretary Simon Case that Rishi Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out is causing problems in our intervention areas. I’ve kept it out of the news but it’s serious.”
12. Hancock’s special adviser Jamie Njoku-Goodwin messaged his boss on 5 May 2020 to say “we might have some issues” with “you telling the PM we ‘locked down’ care homes before the rest of the country”.
13. Questioned about a government document saying Boris Johnson had asked officials to prepare “in slower time” a package to protect people with disabilities, Gove said he thought the phrase referred to the fact that preparing those measures was going to take more time, not that the disabled were a lower priority.
14. Hancock said the UK did not have a plan to deal with the pandemic and still doesn’t. “We spend less than one per cent of our total budget for defence” on health security, he told the room. “Yet health security failings have killed more civilians than any other external threat since the Second World War.”
15. After Hancock’s appearance on Thursday, Cummings took to Twitter/X to accuse him of “flat out lying” to the inquiry when he claimed he had pushed for an earlier lockdown. 
16. Cummings also claimed that Hancock “physically stopped” the then health secretary coming to a meeting because he “was bull****ting everybody about herd immunity”.
17. Gove said the government didn’t “go early enough and we didn’t go hard enough” on lockdowns.
18. Gove also said there was “a significant body of judgement” which claimed the virus was “man-made” and suggested that may have been part of the reason the government was unprepared for it. 
19. Simon Case said in a WhatsApp message that he had never seen such a bunch of people less well equipped to run a country.