Matt Hancock desperately fought to try and take credit for the coronavirus vaccine, leaked WhatsApp messages show.
The then-health secretary demanded that he go on television to talk about the breakthrough.
In one message he warned “It MUST NOT be Alok!” as he insisted he should get publicity rather than business secretary Sir Alok Sharma.
The business department, led by Sir Alok, was central to efforts to get a vaccine.
In November 2020, the Department of Health got wind that Pfizer was planning an imminent announcement that its vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective against Covid.
When he heard the news about to break, Mr Hancock complained he was not live on TV from the House of Commons and worried he would be overshadowed by Sir Alok.
In messages to an aide, seen by the Telegraph, he wrote: “ Pity I'm not up in the Commons! I should do a clip.
“I should DEFINITELY do the round tmrw. It MUST NOT be Alok!”
The latest revelation comes after a tranche of messages were shared with the Telegraph by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who co-authored Mr Hancock's memoir about his time as health secretary.
A separate exchange showed him criticising vaccines tsar Dame Kate Bingham, after she said vaccinating everyone in the UK was "not going to happen" and the country needed to just "vaccinate everyone at risk" in an interview with the FT.
The WhatsApps from October 2020 show him saying she "has view and a wacky way of expressing them & is totally unreliable".
"She regards anything that isn't her idea as political interference."
A spokesman for Dame Kate told the paper: "These WhatsApps suggest that Matt Hancock was not aware of the published and agreed government vaccine procurement policy, did not read the reports by and about the work of the Vaccine Taskforce, and did not understand the difference between complex biological manufacturing and PPE procurement."
Ex-vaccines taskforce boss Clive Dix said Mr Hancock acted a "bit like a headless chicken", and said he was the "the most difficult of all the ministers because he didn't take time to understand anything".
Writing in the Telegraph, Mr Dix said: "He was all over the place, a bit like a headless chicken. He often made statements saying 'we are going to do X and we want to let the world know about it', but we were dealing with an uncertain situation in bringing the vaccines forward.
"The manufacturing process was brand new and any process like this is fraught with problems, which we need to fix as we go along, but normally you would spend two or three years stress-testing something like this.
"Hancock was laying down timelines by saying things like 'we will vaccinate the whole population', and these timelines drove his behaviour."
Mr Hancock has condemned the leaks as a "massive betrayal" designed to support an "anti-lockdown agenda".
He said last week that all the material for his book have been made available to the official Covid-19 inquiry.
Ms Oakeshott has said the disclosures are in the public interest.
The Telegraph also reported on Mr Hancock's apparent concerns over the answer to a parliamentary question regarding the role that Gina Coladangelo - the former aide with whom he had the affair that forced his resignation - played in a G7 health ministers' meeting in June 2021.
After being informed about the question, the former health secretary is said to have responded: "This will be another s-show if it goes wrong."
