Matt Hancock will be remembered for a series of disastrous mistakes as the UK faced the biggest health crisis in its history. Photo / AP
Matt Hancock will be remembered for a series of disastrous mistakes as the UK faced the biggest health crisis in its history. Photo / AP
When former UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt pinned his NHS lapel badge on to his successor Matt Hancock in July 2018, he gushed that he "couldn't ask for a better successor".
After just six months as culture secretary, Hancock, aged 39, was seen as the rising star of the Cabinet, full of Tiggerish enthusiasm for whatever role he was given.
Health workers were rather less certain, pointing out that Hancock had no relevant experience and had not made a single mention of GPs or doctors during his eight years in Parliament.
After resigning last night, Hancock will be remembered for a series of mistakes that exposed his lack of experience as the NHS faced the biggest crisis in its history, with Britain in the grip of a deadly pandemic.
Month after month, the Government took a series of calamitous wrong turns, which led Prime Minister Boris Johnson privately to dismiss his health secretary as "totally ----ing hopeless".
Had it not been for the success of the vaccine rollout - which was masterminded by the highly capable Dame Kate Bingham - Hancock might have been long gone before footage of him devouring his aide Gina Coladangelo was leaked to The Sun.
One of the central themes of the charge sheet against him was that he was driven by personal ambition ahead of the country's needs: as one former colleague said yesterday, "when the pandemic hit, he gave the clear impression that he thought it would be great for his career".
Johnson's former aide Dominic Cummings told MPs that Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things" and that Sir Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary at the time, also wanted him sacked.
Boris Johnson's former aide Dominic Cummings told MPs that Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things". Photo / AP
Hancock's 'lies' over PPE
Colleagues who claimed Hancock misled the Prime Minister in order to save his own career repeatedly cited the shambolic shortage of personal protective equipment in the early months of the pandemic.
Many claimed Hancock simply lied about the situation to buy himself time to fix it - and there was ample evidence to suggest they were right.
Hancock said earlier this month that there was "never a national shortage of PPE" at any stage of the pandemic, ignoring the fact that many NHS workers had to buy their own masks and gloves or make gowns out of bin bags.
Leaked emails obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, sent by chiefs at two NHS trusts last year, state that the country was in the middle of a "national shortage" of the long-sleeved gowns used to protect medics at risk of infection from Covid-19.
Senior procurement officials insisted that there were "significant shortages" of several types of PPE, including gowns and FFP3 face masks, last year. One senior government source said: "Hancock would be asked in meetings about the situation with PPE and he would insist that everything was fine."
That patently wasn't true. We hadn't stockpiled enough equipment and we ended up sending RAF planes to Turkey to get emergency supplies that turned out to be unusable when they arrived.
According to Cummings, Hancock tried to blame Sir Simon Stevens, the NHS boss, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, for the PPE problems, prompting Sir Mark to say he had "lost confidence in the Secretary of State's honesty in these meetings".
Prime Minister Boris Johnson privately dismissed his Health Secretary as "totally ----ing hopeless". Photo / AP
Cummings told MPs that Hancock had given the Prime Minister a sugar-coated report of pandemic preparedness, saying there were "full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepared and refreshed ... we're stress testing now, it's our top tier risk register".
In fact, the pandemic plan only covered influenza and proved inadequate for a respiratory virus with asymptomatic infection.
Cummings memorably recalled Helen MacNamara, deputy Cabinet secretary at the time, declaring in March last year: "There is no plan... I think we're absolutely ----ed."
Hancock's harshest critics believed he bore responsibility for thousands of avoidable deaths because of the decision to discharge NHS patients into care homes without first testing them for Covid.
Since March 2020 more than 42,000 care home residents have died with, or because of, coronavirus, a fact that will be central to a forthcoming public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.
Cummings claimed Hancock lied to the Prime Minister over the discharge policy, telling him that patients would be tested before being sent from hospitals into care homes.
Hancock responded by saying that his "recollection" was that he had committed to testing people discharged from hospital once the testing capacity existed, but that he did not have enough tests to do so when hospitals were told to clear their wards in March last year.
Cummings claimed Johnson was furious when he came back to work after recovering from coronavirus in hospital in April last year, to find that untested patients had been discharged to care homes in England, asking: "What on earth has happened with all these people in care homes?
"Hancock told us in the Cabinet room that people were going to be tested before they went back to care homes. What the hell happened?"
Anti-lockdown demonstrators in Parliament Square, London on June 21. Photo / AP
Care home bosses had also accused Hancock of failing to grasp the fact that staff often worked in more than one establishment to top up their meagre pay, which meant Covid was being spread from one care home to another by the very people trying to save residents' lives.
'World beating' testing
In May last year, Boris Johnson promised a "world beating" test-and-trace system, but Hancock failed to deliver it, and ended up butting heads with officials over the strategy to achieve it.
Once again, colleagues claimed his own strategy was driven by a day-to-day desire to make upbeat announcements in press conferences rather than by any long-term plan, with his promise to achieve 100,000 tests per day by the end of April 2020 a case in point.
One former colleague said: "Whenever we had meetings with him, the overriding impression you got was that he was spending his time trying to find positive things he could announce in press conferences rather than getting to grips with what actually needed doing."
Hancock's allies claimed the target was a success, because not only did he achieve it, but he also drove up capacity by setting such an ambitious goal. But detractors claim tests had to be deliberately held back in the days leading up to the deadline in order to achieve a brief spike in numbers.
Total tests jumped from 86,000 on April 29 to 122,000 the next day, despite having crept up by only a few thousand per day until then; they then fell back to below 100,000 per day before picking up again.
Cummings described the 100,000 target as "incredibly stupid" because it caused chaos in Whitehall in order for Hancock to "go on TV and say 'look at me and my 100k target'," and was "criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm".
Laboratory capacity was so paltry that swabs were sent to Italy and Germany for processing, and people trying to book tests were told the nearest available slot was hundreds of miles away.
People queue at a mass Covid vaccination centre at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, north London, on June 25. Photo / AP
It was the tracing element of the plan that proved the biggest embarrassment, however. Months after its May 2020 launch, Test and Trace was still managing to reach fewer than half of infected people's contacts in some of the worst-hit areas, and delays in processing test results meant that by the time those contacts were reached, they had already spread Covid to others.
Yet on July 12, 2020, Hancock declared that the figures showed that Test and Trace "is working". He said: "The vast majority of people are engaging with NHS Test and Trace, isolating when asked and providing their contacts quickly."
A recording obtained by The Telegraph told a different story. The following day, this newspaper revealed that a senior DHSC official had admitted that the system would, at that point, fail to prevent a second wave of Covid-19 infections because it was only identifying a third of people it needed to track down.
Alex Cooper, who was put in charge of efforts to test the public, said the system was only identifying 37 per cent of the people "we really should be finding".
One of the beneficiaries of the Government's headlong rush to find suppliers during the pandemic was Alex Bourne, whose firm Hinpack was awarded a £30 million (NZ$58.9m) contract to supply test tubes. Bourne happens to be the landlord of Hancock's local pub in his West Suffolk constituency, the Cock Inn, a picture of which hung on the wall of his study in his London home.
Bourne told The Guardian that he had exchanged WhatsApp messages with the health secretary over several months, offering his company's services. He said there was "no evidence" he had been given preferential treatment by the Department of Health and Social Care, and Hancock said he had "absolutely nothing to do with that contract".
Hancock took down his picture of the Cock Inn and replaced it with a different photo. The matter is being investigated by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency.
It also emerged this week that a £28m NHS contract was awarded to a firm of which Gina Coladangelo's brother Roberto is a director, though the company has denied the contract had anything to do with Hancock.
Hancock himself, meanwhile, owns 15 per cent of the shares in Topwood Ltd, of which his sister Emily Gilruth is a director, which has won NHS contracts for document storage and shredding. He failed to declare his sister's involvement when he registered his shareholding with Parliament.
Holding back data
Last weekend saw a further breakdown of trust between Hancock and his former colleagues in government, and on the backbenches, when this newspaper revealed that he failed to tell Johnson about a major Public Health England (PHE) study showing the effectiveness of vaccines against the Delta variant during a key meeting to decide whether to extend Covid restrictions.
Hancock had known about the PHE data three days before the "quad" of four senior ministers, led by the Prime Minister, met to decide whether to postpone the planned June 21 reopening until July 19.
However, multiple sources familiar with the meeting said it was not raised by Hancock or discussed at all during the course of the talks. The data were also not included in briefing papers given to Johnson, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, in advance of the meeting.
Hancock ordered officials to issue a public rebuttal to the story, but the statement did not dispute any of the facts in the article.
Curfew-busting drinks
Hancock's admission this week that he had broken the Government's social distancing rules by kissing Coladangelo was not the first time he had been accused of ignoring diktats he had so often told the public to abide by.
In October last year he was accused of ignoring the Government's 10pm pub curfew by carrying on drinking in a House of Commons bar well past the deadline.
An MP who witnessed the scene said Hancock was still drinking wine at 10.25pm. Hancock's spokesman disputed the timeline but the MP insisted: "I know what I saw and I can tell the time."
Commons venues were not at the time legally required to close at 10pm because they were classed as "workplace canteens", but Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, had made it clear that bars in Parliament should abide by the same rules as pubs across the country following a public outcry over the exception.
Toe-curling hypocrisy
Hancock managed to combine hypocrisy, rule-breaking and womanising into one toe-curling moment when he was captured on film in a passionate embrace with Coladangelo.
He apologised for breaking social distancing rules by kissing his adviser, but until last night had refused to resign as health secretary - despite having been quick to say last year that Professor Neil Ferguson, government scientific adviser at the time, was right to resign after The Telegraph exposed him for breaking lockdown rules to meet his lover.
Hancock had already faced questions over the appointment of Coladangelo, an old friend of his from his time at Oxford University, as he failed to declare he had appointed her as an unpaid adviser and later to a taxpayer-funded role as a non-executive director on the Department of Health and Social Care board.
