Ministers have come under fire from police officers and the travel industry after private messages from Matt Hancock highlighted the rapid and occasionally haphazard way in which they wrote Covid lockdown policies.
Senior representatives of the police service attacked the government’s handling of the pandemic after the Telegraph published messages showing the former health secretary urging ministers to “get heavy with the police” over lockdown enforcement.
Officers were criticised in 2020 and 2021 for their hardline interpretation of the regulations, which involved them monitoring people with drones, fining people going for walks with cups of coffee and handing out leaflets asking why people were outside.
The former chief constable of Greater Manchester police Sir Peter Fahy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday: “This [lockdown] legislation was rushed out: it was confused, with poor definitions in it, there was this constant confusion between what was legislation and what was guidance. Often it seemed ministers themselves didn’t understand the impact of the legislation.”
He said it caused “huge resentment within policing” when “individual instances of officers trying to do their best were highlighted and misunderstood”.
The chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Martin Hewitt, criticised Hancock’s use of the word “plod” in the messages, saying it was “much more a reflection on him than it is on the committed police officers and staff on the frontline protecting the country from Covid-19”.
Hancock also came under fire from Willie Walsh, the head of the travel industry body Iata, for another set of messages that showed him complaining about airlines and joking about people having to be quarantined in hotels on entering the UK. At one point he criticises airlines and airports for complaining about travel restrictions, and agrees when Simon Case, the Downing Street permanent secretary, calls them “horribly self-serving”.
Walsh, the former boss of British Airways, said: “The messages between Matt Hancock and Simon Case making light of travel lockdowns and the economic collapse of the airline industry reveal a breathtaking contempt for travellers and aviation workers.”
The attacks cap a bruising week for Hancock, who is now an independent MP, having lost the Tory whip for appearing on the television show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!
Over the last five days the paper has revealed how Hancock’s office helped arrange rapid Covid tests for a child of his Conservative colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, how he clashed with the then education secretary, Gavin Williamson, over school lockdowns and how officials and ministers had to explain basic transmission statistics to the then prime minister, Boris Johnson.
On Friday, the Telegraph published a new cache of messages showing the lengths Hancock went to during the crisis to protect and burnish his own reputation.
At one point, the former health secretary asks an adviser whether he should release photographs of him on a surfing trip. At another, he shares a message from a friend who tells him the crisis could help “propel him into the next league” and “break you through in terms of public perception”.
