Matt Hancock was instructed by the Cabinet Office to tone down claims in his memoir that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak in China, according to leaked correspondence. Officials warned it would “cause problems” if he repeated the claim in his Pandemic Diaries and insisted he must make clear he was not reflecting the Government’s view, The Daily Telegraph reported.
The changes to the book were made after he submitted the manuscript to the Cabinet Office for review last year – a procedure all former ministers are obliged to follow.
According to the Telegraph, which has obtained tens of thousands of the former health secretary’s messages, Mr Hancock had wanted to say that “given how cagey the Chinese have been” their official version of events should be treated with “considerable scepticism”. “Global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation into what happened,” he wrote in the original manuscript.
