Matt Hancock and his officials bombarded Downing Street with early warnings about Covid-19 but were treated with ridicule and contempt, according to senior Whitehall figures, who believe that the former health secretary is unfairly being made a scapegoat by civil servants and scientists during the official inquiry into the pandemic.
Attempts by the Department of Health, in mid to late January 2020, to raise the alarm were dismissed out of hand by senior staff working for the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, because they believed Hancock was mainly seeking publicity and exaggerating the dangers, the insiders say.
One with detailed knowledge of events at the time told the Observer: “The DoH was pushing really hard and the Cabinet Office and Downing Street were saying ‘Look, we’ve just had an election and we have got to get Brexit done: could you and your pandemic just fuck off and stop irritating us.’ They totally trivialised it and did not want to engage.”
On Thursday and Friday, Hancock will appear before the Covid inquiry and is expected to mount a concerted effort to defend his reputation, after weeks in which he has come under attack for being dishonest, incompetent and more interested in self-promotion than tackling the spread of the coronavirus.
Allies of the former health secretary – while accepting that his behaviour was often irritating and that he at times seemed overconfident – hope he will use the occasion to challenge what they believe has been a semi-orchestrated attempt by others to deflect blame away from themselves, and conceal their initial slowness to react.
Referring to several officials – including Johnson’s closest adviser Dominic Cummings, the former Cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill, and the permanent secretary at No 10 Simon Case – the source said that “those around Johnson” knew they were late to see the Covid danger. They realised that because many people found Hancock to be annoying, they could usefully make him a fall guy: “Matt was irritating, yes, but the idea that he was not trusted or was thought of as dishonest at the time, that was just not true.”
Sedwill has already admitted to the inquiry that he received a request on around 21 January 2020 from Hancock’s DoH for a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee to discuss the spread of Covid and its threat to the UK.
“I felt that a Cobra which might have been convened primarily for communications purposes wasn’t wise,” Sedwill said, making clear he believed Hancock was raising concerns in order to get himself into the media. “Two days later I was advised there was a genuine cross-government basis for it and I agreed,” Sedwill said.
WhatsApp messages from Sedwill also reveal that he told Johnson to sack the “lying” health secretary in order to “save lives and protect the NHS”. Sedwill later claimed this was a joke in a Whatsapp to Case.
Criticism of Hancock has also come from the most senior scientists. Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific officer, told the inquiry last week that Hancock repeatedly got ahead of himself and said things for which there was no evidence.
“I think he had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for and he would say them too enthusiastically too early, without the evidence to back them up, and then have to backtrack from them days later,” Vallance said. “I don’t know to what extent that was sort of over-enthusiasm versus deliberate – I think a lot of it was over-enthusiasm.”
Earlier, Helen MacNamara, another senior civil servant in Downing Street, had told the inquiry that Hancock was “regularly” telling people things that they later discovered were not true and that No 10 had a “lack of confidence” that what he was saying “was actually happening”.
Hancock is bound to come under most pressure over his repeated claims in May 2020 to have put a “protective ring” around care homes, by which he meant that when patients left hospitals to go into homes they were Covid-free.
In the first wave of the pandemic there were, however, almost 27,000 excess deaths in care homes in England and Wales compared with the 2015–19 average. The virus penetrated homes so widely that 13 homes in England saw two dozen or more Covid deaths each in just 11 weeks at the start of the pandemic.
The former health secretary is also bound to be asked about his reservations at the time about Rishi Sunak’s decision to introduce the “eat out to help out” scheme.
The initiative, which is said to have been known at the time within the DoH as the “eat out to spread the virus” scheme, was announced without any consultation with scientists or Hancock. Hancock found out that it was happening only when he read the press release on the day it was announced.
Giving evidence last week, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s former deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic, also said he was not consulted over the “eat out to help out” scheme.
“The first I heard about it was on TV,” Van-Tam said, adding that had he been consulted he would have said it went against everything that the government and scientists had been trying to achieve over the previous months. “So it didn’t feel sensible to me.”
Both Sunak and Johnson are scheduled to appear before the inquiry next week.
