If you want to get under the skin of politics, nothing beats a good diary.
And what distinguishes the best – from Alan Clark and Tony Benn to Alastair Campbell and more recently Sasha Swire – is the willingness to be vulnerable. A diarist’s job is to capture how it felt in the heat of the moment, however mortifying it might be to read in retrospect. Everything else is just publicity. Or in the case of Matt Hancock, who never actually kept a diary but hasn’t let that stop him publishing one, a book concocted after the event (but before the public inquiry) with the help of journalist Isabel Oakeshott from a mishmash of old papers, notes and emoji-laden WhatsApps. And with the selective benefit of hindsight, what the former health secretary mainly sees is – surprise! – all the times he was brilliantly prescient, and all the times his Downing Street nemesis Dominic Cummings wasn’t. If you couldn’t bear watching him on I’m a Celebrity, I’m afraid this book may go down like a plate of sheep’s unmentionables.
New Year’s Day 2020 finds our eagle-eyed hero in his kitchen, seizing on a tiny newspaper story about an obscure pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan and resolving to find out more. Five days later, he’s quizzing chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty about “the likely need for a vaccine”. (In fairness, Hancock has a tech geek’s love for scientifically engineered solutions to problems, meaning that bit might actually be true.) But still he can’t get his Brexit-focused colleagues to wake up, or let him call a Cobra meeting. Even when the penny finally drops, and despite what Hancock grandly calls his economist’s ability to “see the behaviour of individuals at the scale of whole societies”, for some inexplicable reason Cummings keeps arranging big meetings behind his back. Stepping back for a moment, you don’t have to pick a side in the Cummings-Hancock war to see the practical difficulties of trying to run a Covid strategy with these two, plus a prime minister who in the middle of the second deadly wave apparently inquired about testing his dog to see if it had had Covid.
Hancock is bullish in dismissing what he calls “incredibly hurtful” allegations, mostly in the Guardian, about the handling of government Covid contracts. He still insists the biggest unwitting virus spreaders in care homes were staff moving between them, not patients being discharged from hospital untested. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the public inquiry to rule on all that, although Hancock does concede those staff movements could in hindsight have been stopped earlier. It’s striking, however, how few entries care homes get in a story dominated by the more ultimately successful races to procure PPE, tests and vaccines.
Towards the end things take a surprisingly Mills & Boon turn, as Hancock is surprised by his “feelings” for aide Gina Coladangelo, which he is shortly afterwards caught on CCTV expressing. “I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything (for love),” confides Hancock, in precisely the sort of sentence that should never make it into “the novels”. What’s never quite explained is exactly how Coladangelo morphed from old university friend sending helpful texts about his choice of socks into a quasi-official role helping him “communicate”, and ultimately a job on the Department of Health board, some months before they got together. Personally, I’d rather read more about the exact capacity in which Gina went with him to debrief the PM in the Downing Street garden one fine May evening and less about the end of his marriage.
What ultimately stuck in my head however was an oddly poignant account of Hancock driving home through London in mid-February, as the government’s scientific advisers began secretly preparing options for a lockdown, past pubs full of people with no idea their lives were about to turn upside down. Just for a moment, you feel the burden leaders carry of knowing the things most of us would rather not. The Downing Street whiteboard with “who do we not save?” written on it; the mathematical models outlining just how many could die; the fear of running out of body bags. There are kernels of truth in here, some uncomfortable, about why politicians make the decisions they do. It’s just a shame extracting them feels much like enduring one of I’m a Celebrity’s bush tucker trials; all that groping through muck and grubs, just for a couple of plastic stars.
• Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid by Matt Hancock with Isabel Oakeshott is published by Biteback (£25). To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
