NHS chief Simon Stevens squirms and refuses to answer when asked if he thinks Matt Hancock is ‘hopeless’ – with Dominic Cummings saying Health Secretary ‘tried to throw Stevens under the bus over PPE’
- Sir Simon Stevens squirmed and smirked before he refused to say if he thinks Matt Hancock is ‘hopeless’
- NHS England chief refused to give Mr Hancock support amid war of words with Dominic Cummings
- Mr Cummings claimed Sir Simon remembers when Mr Hancock ‘tried to throw Sir Simon under bus’ over PPE
NHS England chief Sir Simon Stevens squirmed and smirked before he refused to say if he thinks Matt Hancock is ‘hopeless’ amid a bitter war of words between the Government and Dominic Cummings.
Sir Simon refused to give the Health Secretary support when he was pressed by Sky News political editor Beth Rigby if he has confidence in his ability, having worked with Mr Hancock during the pandemic.
After an awkward pause, the NHS boss smirked then said: ‘I mean, that is a political question’.
Responding to the clip on Twitter, Mr Cummings claimed that Sir Simon ‘remembers very well’ a meeting while Boris Johnson recovered from coronavirus in Chequers when Mr Hancock ‘tried to throw him under the bus’ over the PPE scandal which dominated the early part of the crisis.
It follows a series of explosive revelations against the Government and ‘hopeless’ Mr Hancock in particular – amid reports claiming the Health Secretary will be cleared over claims he lied about care home testing.
Mr Cummings had posted a 7,000-word diatribe alleging a series of failures during his time as a top advisor, claiming Mr Johnson has a ‘clear plan’ to quit Downing Street by 2026 because he wants to ‘make money and have fun’.
The Vote Leave maverick has taken particular aim at Mr Hancock, who was said to have been branded ‘f***ing hopeless’ by the Prime Minister.
In a Twitter thread that is now 92 posts long, Mr Cummings wrote: ‘Hancock claimed to MPs a/ ‘no PPE shortage’, b/ ‘everybody got treatment they needed’; c/ he was a heroic success on testing, d/ HMT hampered him on procurement, e/ ‘protective ring around care homes’.
‘His claims = false. Evidence here, more to come…’
NHS England chief Sir Simon Stevens squirmed and smirked before he refused to say if he thinks Matt Hancock is ‘hopeless’ amid a bitter war of words between the Health Secretary and Dominic Cummings
Sir Simon refused to give Mr Hancock support when he was repeatedly pressed by Sky News political editor Beth Rigby if he has confidence in the Health Secretary’s ability, having worked with him during the pandemic
Responding to the clip on Twitter, Mr Cummings claimed that Sir Simon ‘remembers very well’ a meeting while Boris Johnson recovered from coronavirus in Chequers when Mr Hancock ‘tried to throw him under the bus’ over the PPE scandal which dominated the early part of the crisis
Dominic Cummings comes back from a run after tweeting about Health Secretary Matt Hancock this week
Boris Johnson’s former top aide has made a series of fresh claims about Matt Hancock and the Government’s pandemic response in a lengthy blogpost published yesterday.
Below is a breakdown of his most incendiary accusations:
PM labelled Hancock ‘totally f****** hopeless’ over testing
Mr Cummings said that in a morning meeting on March 24 last year he had quizzed Mr Hancock on the ramping up of testing capacity and was told by the Health Secretary that capacity would hit 10,000 a day by March 30.
Mr Cummings said he then texted Mr Johnson at 23.39 on March 26, minutes before the PM tested positive for coronavirus, after he was made aware of information showing the ‘testing plans were a shambles’ and ‘Hancock had misled us all again’.
Mr Cummings sent a WhatsApp message to the PM: ‘US has gone from 2200 tests a fortnight ago to 27,000 a week ago to 100k yesterday. This is what we said we shd do. Instead we are still stuck on about 5-7k and MH saying today he’s ‘sceptical’ about getting to 10k by Monday which he said wd ‘definitely’ happen on Tuesday. This means tens of 1000s of NHS staff aren’t at work over next critical 3 weeks – apart from my earlier point re resting being integral to escape plan…’
Mr Johnson apparently replied: ‘Totally f****** hopeless.’
Ministers ‘threatened to stop coming to meetings with Hancock’
Mr Cummings accused Mr Hancock of ‘misleading’ ministers and officials over efforts to ramp up testing capacity.
He said the Health Secretary had ‘wrongly sought to blame others for delays’.
Mr Cummings said this was a ‘recurrent pattern’ with Mr Hancock and in April it ‘got so bad some ministers threatened to stop attending meetings until Hancock was fired’.
PM said Hancock was ‘hopeless’ on ventilator procurement
The PM’s former aide said in the new blogpost that ‘everything to do with Hancock and procurement was a disaster’.
He said there had been a ‘nightmare’ on ventilator procurement because of the Health Secretary.
He said that officials said at a meeting on March 27 that the Department of Health had turned down ventilator offers – despite the UK suffering a shortage – because the prices had gone up.
Mr Cummings messaged Mr Johnson: ‘They’ve totally f***** up ventilators. I just heard officials admit we have been turning down ventilator offers because ‘the price has been marked up’.’
Mr Johnson apparently replied: ‘It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.’
PPE was ‘being shipped in at the peak of crisis instead of flown due to cost concerns’
Mr Cummings said that in a meeting on March 26, Mr Hancock had told the PM not to worry about PPE supplies because it was ‘all sorted’ – but this ‘turned out to be a total fiction’.
The ex-aide said he had separate meetings with officials in which they said vital PPE deliveries would not arrive until after the April peak because they were being shipped rather than flown.
Mr Cummings was apparently told items were not being flown in because that would be ‘against the procurement rules’ because shipping was cheaper.
Mr Cummings then said he instructed officials to immediately ‘call the airlines’ and shift to emergency air deliveries.
PM ‘suggested stripping Hancock of responsibility for PPE’
Mr Johnson apparently floated taking responsibility for PPE away from Mr Hancock and giving it to Michael Gove
Mr Cummings rejected Mr Hancock’s claim to MPs that there was never a shortage of PPE last year.
He said he had suggested ‘divvying up’ parts of the Health Secretary’s job – something Mr Johnson appeared to be in favour of.
Mr Cummings published a WhatsApp exchange with the PM apparently from April 27.
Mr Johnson: ‘Agree about Vallance and Whitty. On PPE it’s a disaster. I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting Gove on.’
Mr Cummings: ‘With the CABOFF such a total s***show im afraid this wd have a severe risk of making it worse not better.’
Mr Johnson: ‘OK. Wtf do we do? Another meeting w Matt and Stevens and Deighton and co?’
Mr Cummings: ‘You know my view and we must get to grips with this issue: without profound changes in CanOff these problems will not be solved. Not just PPE. Track and trace. Vaccines. Treatments. Testing.’
PM ‘has a clear plan to leave No10 a couple of years after next election’
Mr Cummings claimed that Mr Johnson does not intend to serve a full term in Downing Street if he wins the next general election.
He said that ‘unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election, he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’.’
He attached a link to his blog, outlining in more detail his claims against the Government.
But despite claims the PM held his Health Secretary in such low regard, Mr Hancock is set to be exonerated over allegations he lied to Mr Johnson, according to the Times.
Images published yesterday by Mr Cummings reveal that the Prime Minister considered stripping Mr Hancock of responsibility for the procurement of PPE supplies for the NHS, handing over responsibility to Michael Gove instead.
But Jeremy Hunt, who is the chairman of the joint parliamentary inquiry that heard seven hours of evidence from Mr Cummings earlier this month, said the former chief advisor had not substantiated his key claim that Mr Hancock lied about testing patients who had been discharged into care homes from hospitals.
The committee does not plan to bring more witnesses to examine Mr Cummings’s claims against the Health Secretary, and will likely conclude they are unsubstantiated in a report, reports claim.
Mr Hunt said: ‘It is not possible to stack up the most sensational revelations without evidence. Today’s new tweets [from Mr Cummings] show the PM’s total frustration but do not prove anyone ”lied”.’
Downing Street insists that the Prime Minister has complete confidence in Mr Hancock. It was also pointed out by allies of the Health Secretary that Mr Cummings had failed to prove his allegations.
Mr Hancock was forced to defend himself against the charge levelled by Mr Cummings that Mr Johnson described the Health Secretary’s performance at the start of the pandemic as ‘f***ing hopeless’.
As he drove to the Commons in an official car for a debate on delaying ‘Freedom Day’, a journalists shouted: ‘Are you useless, Mr Hancock?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.
In one exchange from March 27 last year, Mr Cummings criticised the Health Secretary over the failure to ramp up testing. Mr Johnson replied: ‘Totally f****** hopeless.’ He then tried to call his senior aide three times without managing to get through.
Another from the same day saw Mr Cummings complain that the Department of Health had been turning down ventilators because ‘the price has been marked up’. Mr Johnson said: ‘It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.’
On April 27, Mr Johnson apparently messaged Mr Cummings to say that PPE was a ‘disaster’, suggesting that Michael Gove should take charge instead.
‘I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting Gove on.’
Mr Cummings dropped the incendiary revelations in a lengthy post on the Substack blogging platform just minutes before PMQs.
It included vicious passages condemning Mr Johnson for ‘telling rambling stories and jokes’ instead of chairing crucial meetings properly, and a claim that the PM is intending to quit in order to ‘make money’ rather than serving a full term if he wins the next election.
Downing Street declined to deny that the messages were genuine. ‘We are not going to get into engaging with individual allegations, so we will leave it there,’ the PM’s press secretary said.
Asked if Mr Johnson has full confidence in Mr Hancock, his spokesman said: ‘Yes.’
Mr Cummings has also criticised the way in which Mr Johnson runs meetings as he said summits chaired by Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, were ‘much more productive’ because he can ‘chair meetings properly instead of telling rambling stories and jokes’.
He said Mr Raab did a better job than Mr Johnson because he let ‘good officials actually question people’ unlike the PM who shouts ‘forward to victory’, gives a ‘thumbs up’ and is then seen ‘pegging it out of the room’ when things get ’embarrassing’.
Mr Cummings set out the PM’s alleged Number 10 exit strategy in a lengthy blog post published yesterday morning in which he renewed his attack on the Government over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
He said a promised public inquiry into the crisis ‘cannot fix’ problems in Whitehall.
He continued: ‘It will not start for years and it is designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone – unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election, he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’.
‘So we either live with chronic dysfunction for another ~5 years or some force intervenes.’
Mr Johnson has committed to the public inquiry getting underway in Spring 2022.
Asked if Mr Johnson intends to quit as PM, his Press Secretary said: ‘The PM has actually been asked this before and has said himself it is utter nonsense, so that still stands.
‘The PM was elected in 2019 and continues to focus on delivering on the manifesto we were elected on and leading the country out of the pandemic.’
Mr Cummings told MPs when he gave evidence to them last month on the response to pandemic that he believes Mr Johnson is unfit to be premier.
In his latest salvo, he renewed his criticism of the PM as he claimed Mr Johnson is an ineffective chairman of formal meetings.
He said meetings chaired by Mr Raab when he was in charge when Mr Johnson was recovering from coronavirus were ‘much more productive’.
He said: ‘Under Raab, the meetings were less pleasant for everybody but much more productive because unlike the PM a) Raab can chair meetings properly instead of telling rambling stories and jokes, b) he let good officials actually question people so we started to get to the truth, unlike the PM who as soon as things get ‘a bit embarrassing’ does the whole ‘let’s take it offline’ shtick before shouting ‘forward to victory’, doing a thumbs-up and pegging it out of the room before anybody can disagree.’
Alongside the image of the apparent WhatsApp exchange with Mr Johnson, Mr Cummings tweeted: ‘Evidence on the covid disaster: as the PM said himself, Hancock’s performance on testing, procurement, PPE, care homes etc was ‘totally f***ing hopeless’, & his account to MPs was fiction.’
His message, which was dated March 27 last year and contained several typos, read: ‘US has gone from 2200 tests a fortnight ago to 27,000 a week ago to 100k yesterday. This is what we said we shd do. Instead we are still stuck on about 5-7K and MH saying today he’s ‘sceptical’ about getting to 10k by Monday which he said wd ‘definitely’ happen on Tuesday. This means tens of 1000s of NHS staff arent at work over next critical 3 weeks — apart from my earlier point re testign being integral to escape plan…’
The PM, whose name appeared as Johnson Boris in the screenshot, appeared to reply ‘Totally f***ing hopeless’.
In his long blog post, Mr Cummings said that ‘although the PM whinged to me and others, he would say to him, despite dozens of requests from two Cabinet Secretaries, me and other ministers and officials: stop this routine or you’re fired, your behaviour is undermining the whole effort’.
Mr Cummings posted a WhatsApp from March 24 last year – the day after the first lockdown – showing he had questioned Mr Hancock over his claims that the Treasury was delaying progress setting up an antibody testing scheme.
The former Vote Leave chief went on: ‘Under pressure at the morning meeting, Hancock had done what he did so often: blame others, often HMT.
‘As usual, it turned out that the delay was not with HMT but Hancock had misled the morning meeting and wrongly sought to blame others for delays.
‘This was a recurrent pattern and in April got so bad some ministers threatened to stop attending meetings until Hancock was fired (see below).’
In a brutal asssessment of the PM’s skills, Mr Cummings wrote: ‘On 20 April, Hancock faced intense pressure. Under Raab, the meetings were less pleasant for everybody but much more productive because unlike the PM a) Raab can chair meetings properly instead of telling rambling stories and jokes, b) he let good officials actually question people so we started to get to the truth, unlike the PM who as soon as things get ”a bit embarrassing” does the whole ”let’s take it offline’ shtick before shouting ‘forward to victory”, doing a thumbs-up and pegging it out of the room before anybody can disagree.’
Mr Cummings also claimed that Mr Johnson does not intend to serve a full term in Downing Street if he wins the next general election.
He said that ‘unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election, he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’.’
But the premier’s press secretary said: ‘The PM has actually been asked this before and has said himself it’s utter nonsense, so that still stands. As you know, the PM was elected in 2019 and continues to focus on delivering the manifesto we were elected on and leading the county out of the pandemic.’
Labour said the messages showed the need for an immediate start to the public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.
In an exchange with Boris Johnson from March 27 last year Dominic Cummings criticised the Health Secretary over the failure to ramp up testing
On April 27, Mr Johnson apparently messaged Mr Cummings to say that PPE was a ‘disaster’
Mr Cummings gave a brutal assessment of the performance of the government during an exchange of messages in April 2020
Dominic Cummings (right) posted bombshell messages from Boris Johnson attacking Matt Hancock (left)
Mr Cummings levelled his latest allegations in a lengthy substack blog post minutes before the weekly PMQs
Shadow health minister Justin Madders said: ‘This is more evidence that the Conservatives were too slow to lock down, too slow to deliver PPE and too slow to protect our care homes. With this evidence that even the PM thinks Hancock is useless, why in the worst pandemic in our history has he left him in charge?
‘Hancock and Johnson need to respond to these latest revelations and immediately start the public inquiry into their handling of the pandemic.’
But the Labour benches were bewildered that Sir Keir did not seize on the revelations at PMQs.
‘I thought he was going to. And then he just didn’t. It would have been an easy win,’ one senior MP told MailOnline. No-one could really understand why. There is a lot of unrest about him on our benches. He’s got trouble and things aren’t getting better when he misses easy chances.’
Launching a dramatic bid to bring down the PM and the Health Secretary last month, Mr Cummings blamed a toxic mix of complacency and indecision for the needless deaths.
He told MPs that senior ministers and advisers, including himself, had fallen ‘disastrously short’, adding: ‘When the public needed us most, the Government failed. Tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die.’
In an epic seven-hour performance, Mr Cummings launched attacks on Mr Johnson, his fiancée Carrie Symonds and Mr Hancock over their personal conduct during the crisis.
Mr Cummings claimed the Prime Minister was ‘unfit for the job’ and could not lead Britain out of the pandemic. He said the Health Secretary ‘should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things, including lying’.
He alleged Mr Hancock had lied to the PM over the disastrous policy of not testing older people for Covid before they were discharged from hospital into care homes.
The former No10 aide outlined a series of failings by him and the ‘smoking ruin’ Department for Health, including lying in January last year that pandemic preparations were brilliant when they were ‘completely hollow’.
Mr Cummings alleged Mr Hancock lied about testing hospital patients for coronavirus before they were sent back into care homes, in a suggestion that thousands died because of his dishonesty.
He also claimed that the Health Secretary lied about people getting the treatment they needed during the first peak last March and April – adding that ‘many people were left to die in horrific circumstances’.
Mr Cummings then accused Mr Hancock of ‘appalling’ behaviour towards chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, saying: ‘He used the whole ‘we’re following the science’ as a way so that he could always say, ‘well if things go wrong, we’ll blame the scientists and it’s not my fault’.’
Downing Street has not denied that Mr Johnson considered sacking the Health Secretary in April last year but insisted the Prime Minister has confidence in him now.
PM wants to quit No10 and ‘make money’ and ‘rambled’ at meetings, says Cummings
Boris Johnson has a ‘clear plan’ to quit Number 10 by 2026, his former chief aide Dominic Cummings claimed as he again took aim at his old boss and questioned his suitability to be prime minister.
Mr Cummings said Mr Johnson intends to ‘leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election’ which is expected to take place in 2024.
The Vote Leave maverick suggested Mr Johnson would not serve a full term in Number 10 if he secures re-election because he wants to ‘make money and have fun’.
Number 10 dismissed the claim, pointing to Mr Johnson’s previous response to a similar question when he said it was ‘utter nonsense’.
Meanwhile, Mr Cummings criticised the way in which Mr Johnson runs meetings as he said summits chaired by Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, were ‘much more productive’.
Mr Cummings said Mr Raab did a better job than Mr Johnson because he let ‘good officials actually question people’ unlike the PM who shouts ‘forward to victory’, gives a ‘thumbs up’ and is then seen ‘pegging it out of the room’ when things get ’embarrassing’.
Addressing the barrage of claims about his conduct from Mr Cummings at his own evidence session earlier this month, Mr Hancock denied claims that he ‘lied’ to fellow ministers and the public about the coronavirus response.
He replied bluntly ‘No’ when he was asked by science committee chair Greg Clark whether he had misled Boris Johnson about people being tested before returning from hospitals to care homes.
He said he had ‘no idea’ over why Mr Cummings was targeting him specifically over the problems. But he admitted that he knew the PM’s top aide had wanted him sacked because there was ‘briefing to the newspapers’.
He also swiped that government has been functioning much better since Mr Cummings left.
Mr Cummings told the joint committee last month: ‘One thing I can say completely honestly is that I said repeatedly from February/March that if we don’t fire the Secretary of State and get testing into somebody else’s hands, we’re going to kill people and it’s going to be a catastrophe.’
On the claim that Mr Hancock lied, Mr Cummings said: ‘There are numerous examples. In the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment they required.
‘He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak. We were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.’
Mr Hancock had also blamed NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens and Chancellor Rishi Sunak for PPE problems.
Mr Cummings said he asked the cabinet secretary to investigate, who came back and said ‘it is completely untrue, I have lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty in these meetings’.
The former aide said Mr Hancock’s public promise to deliver 100,000 tests a day by the end of April was ‘incredibly stupid’ because it was already an internal goal.
‘In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.
‘It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.’
There have been reports that Mr Cummings has documents showing the PM’s office summoned Mr Hancock to No10 on May 3 last year, for a meeting the following day, to explain misleading him, the PM and then Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill on the testing of patients before discharge into care homes, as well as about further testing of residents and staff.
The DoH said it ‘did not recognise’ the claim and Mr Hancock ‘had many meetings with the PM across a range of issues’.
Mr Hancock has previously said on care home testing: ‘We worked as hard as we could to protect people who live in care homes, and of course those who live in care homes are some of the most vulnerable to this disease because by its nature it attacks and has more of an impact on older people.
‘Now when it comes to the testing of people as they left hospital and went into care homes, we committed to building the testing capacity to allow that to happen.
‘Of course it then takes time to build testing capacity.
‘In fact, one of the critical things we did was set the 100,000 target back then to make sure we built that testing capacity and it was very effective in doing so.
‘And then we were able to introduce the policy of testing everybody before going into care homes, but we could only do that once we had the testing capacity which I had to build, because we didn’t have it in this country from the start.
‘We started with a capacity of less than 2,000 in March last year and got to 100,000 tests a day. And we set all of this out at the time in public documents. It’s all a matter of public record.’
Mr Johnson has said the government faced an ‘incredibly difficult series of decisions, none of which we have taken lightly’ and ‘at every stage we have been governed by a determination to protect life’.
Dominic Cummings’ savage blog post in full
The PM on Hancock: ‘totally f***ing hopeless’
Detailed analysis of all Hancock said to MPs would take days. I’ll focus today on just a few things to support what I told MPs and show that No10/Hancock have repeatedly lied about the failures last year.
No10 and Hancock are seeking to rewrite history:
They are trying to ‘memory-hole’ the original Q1 2020 debacle. The reality of the ‘optimal single peak strategy’ with herd immunity by September is in SAGE documents, COBR documents and was briefed by Hancock, CSA, CMO and No10 press office at the time and SAGE members explained it on TV. The reality is reflected in many emails/WhatsApps. Covid was the biggest crisis faced by Westminster since WWII. The No10/Hancock line now is as if No10 had said in summer 1940, ‘yes, our appeasement plan A was a great success on Hitler as you can all see, we didn’t need any Plan B, appeasement then fight them on the beaches was the original plan’.
Hancock is creating a new version of reality in which he came up with the idea to ramp up testing before 14 March, in an inspired and heroic move he announced his 100k target on 2 April to provide leadership, and this was responsible for the change in testing capacity. The reality: as part of the transition to Plan B No10 forced a new testing plan on Hancock, who was still operating under Plan A / herd immunity assumptions in the week of 16/3 according to which community testing was pointless (hence why it was briefly officially stopped); our plan was to build capacity on the scale of millions; the 100k then 1m target had already been set before he announced it; his behaviour in April distracted attention from testing in care homes and the PPE debacle. A public announcement was in principle definitely right but he did what he always did — he focused on the media and himself then lied. Testing, like vaccines, was removed from his control in May because of his incompetence and dishonesty March-April. You can’t understand what really happened on test-trace in the rest of the year without understanding what actually happened in March-April.
Hancock is creating a new version of reality in which the government really did ‘throw a protective ring’ around care homes. The reality: covid patients were sent untested from hospital to care homes and Hancock neglected care homes and testing throughout April partly because Hancock was trying to focus effort on his press conference at the end of April claiming success for his announcement on 2/4.
Hancock and No10 are creating a new version of reality in which: ‘there was no shortage of PPE’ and on 11 April Hancock removed procurement restrictions imposed by HMT. The reality… DHSC failed to plan for PPE demand and their procurement operation collapsed. They rejected chances to buy things because of sticking to the old rules. No10 insisted on removing these rules and HMT did remove their standard rules in March. Hancock told us PPE was ‘all under control’ in the week of 23 March. This meant further weeks were wasted instead of used to solve the problems. Hancock then sought to blame Simon Stevens, the Chancellor and the Cabinet Office for the PPE disaster in April. The Cabinet Secretary told the PM’s office that Hancock’s claims were false. The lack of PPE killed NHS and care home staff in March-May.
On the original ‘plan’, testing, PPE, procurement, care homes and more, Hancock gave a fictitious account to MPs last week and portrayed himself as a heroic figure who had been in agreement with the PM throughout the crisis. The PM has supported this fiction and ordered the No10 press office to support many arguments he knows are lies. At the time, the PM agreed with me and all serious people around No10 and the Cabinet Office — in his own words, Hancock’s performance on critical issues was ‘totally f***ing hopeless’ and he had to be removed from crucial decisions: PPE to Lord Deighton, vaccines to Bingham, ventilators to Agnew, testing to Harding.
Hancock has also given a fictitious account of what happened on masks but I’ll leave that to another day.
Why is this important?
A. If No10 is prepared to lie so deeply and widely about such vital issues of life and death last year, it cannot be trusted now either on covid or any other crucial issue of war and peace.
B. Hancock continues to have direct responsibility for things like dealing with variants and care homes. Having such a Secretary of State in a key role is guaranteed disaster. It is urgent for public safety that he is removed.
C. The PM is trying to influence officials/advisers to support the re-writing of history and is encouraging ministers to give false accounts to Parliament.
D. The PM’s defence of Hancock sends an unmistakeable signal across the system: a Secretary of State will be rewarded despite repeated incompetence and dishonesty and the government machine will seek to rewrite history in Orwellian fashion because the PM thinks it in his personal interests to do so. Any decent person in Westminster ought to be appalled by this behaviour.
E. The public inquiry cannot fix this. It will not start for years and it is designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone — unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election, he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’. So we either live with chronic dysfunction for another ~5 years or some force intervenes.
From the perspective of good government and ethics the Cabinet and MPs should intervene but this is unlikely while the polls have the Conservatives ~40%+ because our political system incentivises party loyalty over good government and ethics. Senior civil servants will wait for the polls to move before trying to ‘push what is falling’. But the systemic incompetence surrounding the PM is such that his operation is programmed to unravel — he always does, No10’s structure makes it impossible for anybody to govern properly, and he rejected the plan to change how No10 works. Just as I said 2017-19 ‘this No10 will unravel, some of us should prepare for what comes next’ the same is true now. This No10 will unravel — it would already be unravelling if Starmer were not also useless. People need to prepare for what comes next. Preparations — planning, building tools, preparing a team and so on — made in 2018-spring 2019 proved vital July-December 2019.
I was wondering about the issue of publishing private WhatsApp messages.
1) No10 and Hancock are openly lying even about what was briefed on-the-record, so clearly nothing is beyond their attempted rewriting of history.
2) To further their lies, PM/Hancock are spinning distorted versions of my messages from internal WhatsApp groups to the PM’s favoured stooges such as Playbook Wiki.
3) Hancock challenged me at the Select Committee to provide evidence and said my failure to publish anything was ‘telling’ evidence that my account was false.
4) The Select Committee has asked me to provide evidence and clearly what MPs see the public should also see — transparency on covid is crucial.
Clearly the government cannot reasonably complain about me publishing evidence. Given this I will publish some internal messages. There are many more I could publish but below and in future I will publish only ones that further the question of ‘what went wrong and how do we learn’. I won’t publish private messages just to embarrass the PM or others. My goal is to force the system to face reality and change, not to embarrass people for the sake of it.
Memory-hole for ‘herd immunity’
Plan A was described in official documents as ‘the optimal single peak strategy’ with all descriptions and graphs tailing off by September when ‘herd immunity’ was attained.
This is why there was no serious border policy Jan-March. (The border policy remains a joke because the PM personally opposed repeated attempts by me and others to implement something based on the successful East Asian approach. This has contributed to the spread of the ‘delta’ variant and will continue to create unnecessary risks not just on covid.)
This is why community testing was dropped in March until the shift to Plan B reversed the decision.
This is why nobody started thinking seriously about an East Asian style test-trace plan until we shifted to Plan B (see my PM study whiteboard of 13/3 with ‘crash program for testing’ scribbled on, below). (Jeremy Hunt has wrongly inferred that this thinking did not happen until May — it started in March.)
This is why there was no serious vaccine plan — i.e spending billions on concurrent (rather than the normal sequential) creation/manufacturing/distribution etc — until after the switch to Plan B. I spoke to Vallance on 15 March about a ‘Manhattan Project’ for vaccines out of Hancock’s grip but it was delayed by the chaotic shift from Plan A to lockdown then the PM’s near-death. In April Vallance, the Cabinet Secretary and I told the PM to create the Vaccine Taskforce, sideline Hancock, and shift commercial support from DHSC to BEIS. He agreed, this happened, the Chancellor supplied the cash. On 10 May I told officials that the VTF needed a) a much bigger budget, b) a completely different approach to DHSC’s, which had been mired in the usual processes, so it could develop concurrent plans, and c) that Bingham needed the authority to make financial decisions herself without clearance from Hancock.
This is why even on the 18 March the crucial SAGE meeting did not even have a lockdown plan to discuss, as I texted No10 officials from inside SAGE: neither DHSC nor Cabinet Office had provided such a plan nor had they asked SAGE to model such a plan (No10 did this direct with Vallance/SAGE/SPI-M as we bodged together Plan B).
This is why Hancock said to me, still delusional about us being ‘the best prepared country in the world’ (this was not one of his lies, he really did believe this because he had not properly investigated the preparations), on 12 March (the day of ‘chickenpox parties’ / Dilyn’s bad PR / Trump wanting us to bomb the Middle East): We’re better prepared than other countries, Wuhan will see a second wave when they lift their lockdown. (Also on 16 March in COBR, Hancock tried to delay the announcement on household quarantine ‘because the helpline isn’t ready’. Sturgeon also supported this delay. I and others warned the PM in advance this would happen and he overruled them. Both of them have misled the public about this.)
This is why even on 18 March, a SAGE member emailed me, the Cabinet Secretary and Hancock’s Permanent Secretary saying we would look back on SAGE discussions as ‘a strange dream’ because lockdown had not even been discussed: ‘Literally all the models assume that there will be a full-blown epidemic, and its just a matter of how much it can be drawn out, compressed, or the herd immunity directed to one section or another of the population’ because thinking was based on assumptions (no test-trace, population won’t listen to tough rules, reinfection from abroad etc) and ‘Once you take these assumptions for granted, the only paths that exist are to achieve herd immunity’. But, he rightly said, suppression should be considered partly because the imminent collapse of the NHS was so horrific and because ‘prior models and assumptions are WRONG [emphasis in original]. We could do this, ie a total lockdown. We’ll look back on it like a strange dream, but we could – and should – do it.’
And the DHSC Permanent Secretary responsible for pandemic planning responded with the logic of Plan A: ‘The virus will still exist in 3-4 weeks time and won’t we just start again with reinfection and re-spread?’ [bold added by me above] Even on the afternoon of 18/3, after SAGE (mostly, not unanimously) were pushing for urgent lockdown at least in London), the apex of power in the DHSC was still operating under the assumptions of Plan A, i.e suppression was counter-productive. This is four days after I proposed Plan B to the PM in his study (noon, 14/3) and five days before ‘stay at home’.
COBR documents on herd immunity plan
This COBR document (in multiple meetings in the week of 9/3 and 16/3) shows the logic of herd immunity by September: suppression means a disastrous second peak when the NHS is annually overstretched and the ‘advised approach’ (i.e advised by DHSC/SAGE/Cabinet Office to No10) ‘seeks to avoid this’ by getting herd immunity by September.
Another graph from the same mid-March COBR pack is here: N.B the red line is NHS ICU capacity, it appears to be lying almost on the x-axis because at ~5,000 it seems very near 0 when the y-axis stretches to 200,000. It shows the official Plan A as of 12-15 March involving at most the three actions which a) supposedly push the peak out into June (this thinking contributed to the lack of urgency before 16/3) but b) still totally overwhelmed ICU capacity. Note there is no line for a lockdown scenario because, contra Hancock’s false claims to MPs last week, DHSC had not developed a plan for it nor asked SAGE to model it (as the Cabinet Secretary’s reply to the email of 18 March above pointed out).
This graph from the same COBR pack shows the effect of Plan A’s three interventions: ~250,000 dead after the ‘optimal single peak strategy’, with herd immunity by September. N.B this projection, awful as it was, was obviously too optimistic because it did not take into account that in this scenario there would be no NHS for any other patients for months until it was rebuilt. Versions of this graph were in many official documents in the week of 9/3 and 16/3. As we pointed out to the PM in the ‘Goldblum’ meeting on 14 March in his office, in this scenario many more than 250,000 would die and, I said, the public would march up Downing Street and lynch him. (We discovered in April that DHSC did not have plans to deal with the number of dead we were facing after switching to lockdown — never mind what would have happened if it had been x5-x10 worse.)
Below are whiteboards from the evening of 13/3 and 14/3. Both were in the PM’s study and were shown to him at noon on 14/3 as I and Marc and Ben Warner explained why official thinking had gone so badly wrong and why we had to switch to Plan B. Both show ‘our plan’ (i.e Plan A) overwhelming the NHS. Plan B is different: suppression + crash programs on testing, drugs + increasing NHS capacity etc — which everybody can see is what actually happened. The graph with the squiggly line (‘Plan B’) is the first time No10 had a ‘document’ that ditched all the previous graphs with either a single peak ending by September or a second winter peak and showed instead us managing covid permanently below NHS capacity.
(Some have asked ‘what does ‘who do we not save?’ mean?’ I meant: on 13th it was already clear we’d made terrible errors and many would die, I was forcing people to consider: ‘on whom are our errors going to fall worst, who is not going to be saved in this disaster, and if forced to choose because of NHS collapse how does the system do this (e.g prioritise mothers of small children)?’ because only by facing such awful questions could we have a chance to change plan fast, e.g we turned shielding around on 19/3.)
I told MPs how, literally as I was sketching the whiteboard above in the PM’s study on 13 March in preparation for the meeting I planned the next day with the PM, the deputy Cabinet Secretary walked in and told us that DHSC clearly had no serious plan and was imploding. When asked last week by MPs re my testimony, Hancock said that the disproof of what I’d said was ‘we had a plan, we published it on 3 March’ and this plan discussed lockdowns. He is referring to the laughable contain-delay-mitigate ‘plan’ published on 3 March. This document was based on the logic that we would not do suppression. Obviously this embarrassingly awful document, which will be remembered as a case study in failure for decades to come, in no sense set out what we actually did, as everybody can see.
Journalists were briefed on the ‘herd immunity’ plan in the week of 9/3 by Hancock himself, by senior officials including the CSA and CMO, by the No10 press office, and SAGE members went on TV and radio explaining it.
On 13 March, as I was sketching the whiteboard above, the PM texted me, Hancock, Vallance and Whitty asking: how do we win the herd immunity argument? On 14th in his study, using those whiteboards, I told him: forget winning that argument, we have to switch to Plan B.
Hancock’s claim that the 3/3 document disproves my claims is, as the evidence shows above, entirely untrue. As the evidence above shows, that ‘plan’ was sending us to catastrophe so we ditched it.
TESTING
As we sketched Plan B it was clear mass testing and test-trace would be crucial.
This was part of our discussions on Plan B 13-15 March in the PM’s study.
No10 was very unhappy with what we heard from Hancock on testing before and after we started shifting to Plan B. I and others including the PM insisted on a much more radical scale-up than PHE/DHSC had considered and it was clear that PHE’s senior management was totally unable to meet the challenge and Hancock had no plan to fix this. Obviously Plan A had been effectively ‘do nothing’ on community testing because the herd immunity plan had no place for it, hence it was officially stopped on 12 March and the concept of moving to 100k then 1 million did not exist before Plan B.
In the morning meeting on 24 March I and others quizzed a very slippery Hancock on progress with testing to see where he was after which I sent this to a No10 group:
Steve O = Oldfield. TomS = Shinner. I’d asked Tom to ditch his job and join No10 over the crucial weekend of 14-15 March. He started on Monday 16th. He had worked on ‘no deal’ Brexit etc for two years and had huge knowledge of Whitehall systems and great people who could be shuffled into critical roles. He played an enormous part in recovering from the collapse of No10 in March and built an entirely new team — effectively a joint No10-Cabinet Office team — in March-July which evolved into the ‘covid taskforce’ there now. Before this there was no effective central entity to manage the crisis — as I told MPs, the Civil Contingencies Unit collapsed in March and had to be rebuilt with new skills and tools. (He also did a very valuable review of the whole ‘delivery’ mechanism of No10/Cabinet Office, which I will explore another time.) Shinner worked with officials in DHSC and elsewhere and recruited a new team including Alex Cooper to speed everything up.
So Hancock had told the morning meeting on 24th: 10k by Monday 30/3, 100k ‘within a month’ of 24/3.
Two hours later I texted a PM group (NB. the people displayed on this group shows Simon Case who was NOT on this group at the time):
I’d pushed, did not have confidence in what I was hearing, it had been suggested I should stop pushing, I did not, ‘let’s take it off line’ kept echoing enragingly around the Cabinet room, there was still nothing like the sense of urgency the public had a right to expect, including urgent replacing of some critical people and strengthening of teams.
You can see the trace of a classic Hancock-ism in my second message. Under pressure at the morning meeting, Hancock had done what he did so often: blame others, often HMT. As usual, it turned out that the delay was not with HMT but Hancock had misled the morning meeting and wrongly sought to blame others for delays. This was a recurrent pattern and in April got so bad some ministers threatened to stop attending meetings until Hancock was fired (see below).
On Thursday 26 March I sent this to a different No10 group (similarly neither Case nor Stratton were actually on this group then):
Like with concurrent vaccine development, much of the system had still not adapted to a world in which the cost of economic disruption was so high that spending billions on testing was a huge return on investment. I was pushing for the system to plan on the scale of a million per day. Tragically this did not become possible until the end of the year because of a further Whitehall debacle in which the people who knew how to do this were blocked for ~3-4 months by ‘business as usual’ thinking (see below). (The debacle of the first app is a story for another day.)
At 2339 on 26 March (minutes before he tested positive), after further information had come to No10 showing a) testing plans were a shambles, b) Hancock had misled us all again, I texted the PM:
(The missed calls are the PM calling me to say he’d tested positive and I couldn’t find my phone buzzing, we spoke minutes later.)
This shows the usual Hancock pattern. Having assured us ‘I’m totally on it I’m driving the team’ blah, on 24th we’ll ‘definitely’ be on 10k by Monday, then he’s ‘sceptical’, discussions with officials reveal Hancock had told us nonsense again about actual testing trajectory, he’d told us that he then Bethell then Oldfield then another official were in charge of it (all of which was nonsense that showed nobody was properly in charge of it), and all this while we’re facing the wave breaking over the NHS and care homes which could not test staff or patients. This pattern repeated: big talk in front of the PM, brief nonsense to the media, fail to deliver, and the rest of the system’s planning disrupted because nobody could rely on what he said in the Cabinet room because he would say anything he thought would get him through the meeting.
Remember, when a SoS says things like ‘we’ll definitely do X by Y’ in the Cabinet room, others plan on this basis — until they learn ‘this guy always talks nonsense’. His constant assurance of fake numbers to colleagues meant their plans were constantly disrupted. His dishonesty had destructive effects.
As the PM said of Hancock’s performance on testing so far, ‘totally f***ing hopeless’.
This was obviously true but although the PM whinged to me and others, he would never say to him, despite dozens of requests from two Cabinet Secretaries, me and other ministers and officials: stop this routine or you’re fired, your behaviour is undermining the whole effort, you must tell the truth in these meetings and not treat them like you do the media. For his ‘f***ing hopeless’ performance on testing in March alone, Hancock should have been replaced — and worse was to come.
Hancock’s story to MPs last week
The Select Committee unfortunately muddied the waters and helped Hancock muddy them when it interviewed him. Hancock told MPs that I had attacked (in my testimony to MPs) the 100k target. Hancock is not only lying about what happened last spring, he’s lying about my actual words to MPs in May 2021. Greg Clark unfortunatey seems to have got confused and echoed Hancock’s claim. Between them they suggested I had opposed and undermined the target at the time, even though anybody can see on YouTube I actually stressed the opposite of what they both claimed last week and as you can see from the above, this is the opposite of the truth. I was pushing the system on testing weeks before Hancock’s announcement and to build a system for 1m per day.
After the above exchange with the PM, he tested positive and everything got even more chaotic.
In this chaos Hancock blurted out the already-in-place 100k target to the media on 2 April. His fundamental nature is to grab the media spotlight and with the PM and me in bed he had a great chance.
To MPs last week, Hancock presented his announcement as a heroic act — testing wasn’t developing fast enough, he had taken ‘personal executive charge’ on 17 March, ‘I took personal responsibility, I set the target of 100k, I had to put myself on the line’, his heroism turned things around etc.
The problem with Hancock’s announcement was not the ‘ambition’ nor announcing the change of plan on testing.
1) The announcement on 2/4 had not been prepared, he just blurted it without proper planning and discussion.
2) It was done without agreeing a broader plan for how the capacity would be used and the different demands. In particular care homes were appallingly neglected in April, the crucial month (see below).
3) We should have been building capacity in April focused on saving lives immediately and building secure foundations for the months ahead beyond 100k to 1 million. Done properly this would have meant not just ramping up the existing testing technologies — the gold standard PCR — but also rapidly developing capabilities for a) LAMP and lateral flow (the tests that give results in minutes not days), b) developing a system to incentivise new technologies then scale them, which could make testing cheaper, faster, easier and so on. (a) and (b) were neglected in April and were not properly gripped until September). We also needed antibody tests (have you had it) which were also neglected.
A big problem in the crucial April month with testing in general, care homes in particular, and PPE/procurement was that many people complained that Hancock was distorting priorities across the system so that he could hold a successful press conference at the end of April and say on TV ‘I’ve met this goal’ and give his nauseating spiel about how he’s not really a hero, it’s a team effort… It was a classic case of how MPs optimise for media coverage but in this case it was during the critical period of a disaster in which he was failing on multiple fronts.
This is why I and others were so angry (including the PM sometimes). For crystal clarity…
Should there have been a 100k target? Obviously — and not 100k but on the scale of millions.
Should it have been made public? Obviously — it should have been public long before 2 April.
Was Hancock’s 2/4 announcement then wrenching Whitehall to focus on his press conference the right way to do it? Obviously not — it compounded the care home disaster and PPE disaster in April.
Did Hancock give an honest account of what happened on testing to MPs last week? Obviously not.
Also bear in mind: Hancock’s appalling prioritisation of gaming the lobby worked to a large extent 2020-1. When you will do anything for tomorrow’s papers, this earns you favours that are repaid when you fail. This sort of deep incentive problem is central to Westminster’s peformance.
Hancock, procurement, care homes
After I returned to work on 13 April, it became clear that a) Hancock’s assurance about testing people before moving them from hospital to care home had not been and was not happening and there was still no plan to do so weeks after he’d assured us in the Cabinet room, as he had on testing and PPE, that ‘everything is under control’, b) everything to do with care homes was extremely bad and the CSA and CMO were ringing alarm bells daily with No10, and warning us that neither DHSC nor PHE could cope in general or viz care homes in particular, c) everything to do with Hancock and procurement was a disaster, particularly the PPE situation.
We’d already had a nightmare with Hancock on ventilators. This message was from me to the PM the morning of 27 March. Just after we’d announced he had covid the morning covid meeting in the Cabinet room saw officials tell us that DHSC had turned down ventilators at this critical point because prices had been marked up.
As he had the night before viz testing, the PM accurately summed up the situation: ‘It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.’
The issue of officials turning down buying opportunities because of increased prices was a huge problem that recurred on subject after subject. The global crisis meant supply chains were disrupted and prices exploded. But Whitehall was still trying to use their normal EU-based procurement system and ‘value for money’ rules. This guaranteed crazy decisions, shortages and unnecessary deaths. (This is partly why I insisted on ARIA, the new science and technology funding agency, being excluded from normal Whitehall procurement rules, ‘value for money’ rules and so on — they are absolutely hostile to high-speed-high-performance execution.)
I had been trying to fix this on issue after issue since earlier in March. To MPs last week, Hancock claimed that a) he decided to change the procurement rules that constrained DHSC (‘I requested the cap was removed’), b) he went to the Chancellor about it because there was still a Treasury ‘cap’ on 11 April.
FALSE. 1) This is an accidental admission of uselessness — if you believe Hancock’s own account, he did not act on this issue until 11 April, weeks after it should have been dealt with! (No MP pointed this out.) 2) In fact, I and others in No10 had already acted on this in March, because of repeated insane meetings. In April, the Cabinet Secretary checked the paperwork (see below) and confirmed that the ‘cap’ on DHSC had been removed in March, as No10 had insisted. So last week Hancock was both accidentally admitting being so useless he did not act until 11 April and misleading MPs about what actually happened, and blaming HMT (still!) for delays in mid-April when the Chancellor had sorted this out weeks earlier. Hancock’s story to MPs is a lie that if true would show again he was useless.
The day before my text on 27th, in another meeting in the Cabinet room (the last such meeting with the PM/me/Hancock/Cabinet Secretary present until the PM returned to work), Hancock had told us all ‘don’t worry about PPE we’ve got it all sorted’. This turned out to be total fiction. If he’d admitted the facts then instead of his usual bluffing we would have saved more lives in April including NHS staff lives.
When I had a separate meeting with officials on PPE supplies, I heard the following terrible news, flatly contradicting Hancock: we won’t get most of our PPE deliveries until long after the April peak.
Me: Why?
Official: That’s how long it takes to ship.
Me [extreme sinking feeling]: What do you mean ‘ship’, surely we’re flying everything now?
Official: No, that’s against the [procurement] rules, we ship everything because it’s much cheaper.
Me (close to the most angry/appalled I was in 18 months): After this meeting, call the airlines, tell them we’re hiring their planes, their entire business is dead so you’ll be able to get a great deal, get officials figuring out where the nearest airfields are in China to the factories with our stuff, then fly the planes to those airfields, collect our stuff, fly it back, and tell everybody we’re flying stuff in an emergency not shipping it…
Official: Umm, will you get the Private Office to put that in writing. [A standard comment in such meetings.]
Me: Yes the PM will take full legal responsibility.
Even three weeks later after I’d returned to work, much of the system had still not shifted to a wartime mentality on procurement. Orders had to go through multiple processes inside DHSC and the Cabinet Office delaying things such that often we lost the order while officials emailed each other for days.
On 15 April, we agreed with Hancock to develop emergency domestic manufacturing of PPE because of the combination of our extreme shortage and supply closing down from around the world in the global scramble. Shinner also helped get Lord Deighton (who was thought to have done a good job on the Olympics) to help on PPE.
On 20 April, Hancock faced intense pressure. Under Raab, the meetings were less pleasant for everybody but much more productive because unlike the PM a) Raab can chair meetings properly instead of telling rambling stories and jokes, b) he let good officials actually question people so we started to get to the truth, unlike the PM who as soon as things get ‘a bit embarrassing’ does the whole ‘let’s take it offline’ shtick before shouting ‘forward to victory’, doing a thumbs-up and pegging it out of the room before anybody can disagree.
It was clear that, contra his assurance in the Cabinet room on 26/3, PPE was not ‘sorted’ — it was a disaster. He informed us that a) PPE contracts had been turned down by officials because in trying to obey ‘the rules’ they’d demanded a 25% discount on PPE amid a massive global shortage; b) this was the fault of the Treasury which had failed to change the rules; c) he admitted he did not have the right skills in place to solve the PPE problem; d) we had only just agreed that Ambassadors could buy PPE without clearance from London. In the discussion Raab pointed out to him that DHSC never gave him PPE asks of foreign leaders for his calls, why not given the emergency?
I said there was no excuse for officials turning down PPE on the basis of price markups — the PM and I had said clearly weeks earlier that those rules were binned. Obviously I suspected Hancock’s attempt to blame HMT was nonsense. So did the Cabinet Secretary who was very worried and investigated. He told me later that day: a) Hancock was wrong, officials had not been demanding a 25% discount (but it was telling Hancock believed his own department was doing something so crazy!); b) but, almost as bad, they had been rejecting PPE that had a 25% markup despite the fact that the PM and I had said repeatedly in March that all such rules should be torn up and cases judged on their merits by people who knew how to buy; c) the Treasury was not to blame, DHSC had been given the authority to make emergency purchases since March; d) he, the Cabinet Secretary, was investigating why we were refusing a 25% PPE markup when we had NHS staff wearing bin bags and dying for lack of PPE; e) it was only in the last week (!!) that DHSC had set up a 24/7 payments system for procurement with Asia — imagine if NHS staff wearing bin bags had realised that DHSC had not even set up a round-the-clock system at this point, imagine the rage in No10 when we discovered this, exacerbated by people telling us that Hancock was focused on his press conference at the end of the month.
The Cabinet Secretary added that he did not have confidence in Hancock’s ‘grip’ or honesty in Cabinet room meetings, neither did other officials and ministers, and this was damaging our response. I strongly agreed. (Our conversation was reinforced in written exchanges.)
On 21 April I told the Cabinet Secretary that we had to ‘divvy up’ Hancock’s job to deal with the problem: the vaccine requirements for manufacturing and distribution was a massive job alone then there was test-trace, procurement and so on. He agreed and we agreed he would write a machinery-of-government note for the PM on how to divvy up Hancock’s job to different people. He also said that his investigations had shown that DHSC had not rung alarm bells on PPE early enough, had dodged responsibility then ‘covered their tracks’ when pushed.
At this time NHS staff were screaming for PPE. The dashboard daily meetings showed we were running out of critical items such as gowns. Reports flooded in of hospitals having run out or on the brink of running out and begging for supplies. Hancock caused further chaos by repeated briefing to the media about how new loads were flying in, bluffing his way through meeting after meeting — his whole routine.
Hancock’s story to MPs last week was: ‘there was no PPE shortage’, I was leading a great team effort, the PM was totally supportive of me etc.
What did the PM himself actually think about this at the time? This exchange was 27 April.
‘On PPE it’s a disaster. I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting Gove on.’ (Ps. the reference to PV and CW was re a Cabinet presentation, not PPE.)
So Hancock’s account to MPs re PPE last week was fiction.
You can also see my rushed message re the core problem (CanOff=CabOff typo=Cabinet Office): No10 is only nominally in charge of much of the government, the Cabinet Office actually exercises real power over many things, ministers are nominally ‘responsible’ but they don’t actually have the power to run things because they can’t pick the team — the first essential of any serious management. The Cabinet Office built by Heywood was totally unable to cope with this crisis because it did not have the right sort of people with the right skills in key jobs and could not rapidly fire/promote/move people and act with determined authority — it could undermine departments and No10 and slow things down, and sometimes improve things, but it could not itself act as a proper executive authority but neither could No10 and, obviously, neither could DHSC which was overwhelmed.
At this point, months after it had started, there was still no analytical function in the Cabinet Office to figure out covid policy. One day around then, having been told repeatedly there was a ‘new unit’ in the Cabinet Office but having failed to see any trace of improvement, I walked around 70 Whitehall in search of this team. It turned out to be a Potemkin team. There was a room. There were a couple of people in it. But the analytical team was not there. Where are they? ‘In CLG.’ When I got the official on zoom who was supposed to be leading it, he said: ‘There is no analytical capability [in the Cabinet Office]. My unit does not actualy exist.’ (I will write separately about this crucial issue.)
Did things improve? No.
On 15 April No10 was told that a lot of testing capacity was being wasted (not used) because DHSC had left in place rules that were limiting those eligible for tests, despite care homes screaming. In response I said that the rules should be changed ‘immediately’ and this be communicated immediately to Hancock, which it was by a No10 official minutes later. The care homes nightmare continued. It was clear that Hancock’s claims on this, as on other things, were false.
On 3 May, the PM’s private office told DHSC that we needed an urgent meeting the next day to discuss testing and care homes. I wrote to the PM: ‘I think we are negligently killing the most vulnerable who we are supposed to be shielding and I am extremely worried about it’ and we must force DHSC to put all the details on the table. The PM agreed and we dug into DHSC plans and Hancock’s claims.
On 4 May the PPE situation was so bad that it was agreed in No10 that we could not possibly claim to have passed the ‘PPE test’ for reopening.
On 7 May after we’d dug into the care home situation, I concluded to the PM that Hancock’s failures and dishonesty made him unfit for his job, that there was still no serious testing in care homes and this was killing people.
The PM agreed but still he would not act.
Hancock: ‘everybody got the treatment they needed’
Hancock repeated to MPs his claim from summer 2020 that ‘everybody got the treatment they needed.’
This is false, he knows it’s false, the PM knows it’s false, families of the dead know it’s false, the CSA and CMO know it’s false.
Vallance and Whitty briefed me, the PM, Hancock and assorted officials around the Cabinet table on NHS data last summer. They said explicitly: the data shows that death rates spiked sharply upwards around the April peak, roughly doubling, because patients did not get the treatment they needed because the NHS was under so much pressure. MPs should demand this data and a briefing from PV/CW to explain it.
This was discussed a few times with the PM because a) it was relevant to the error made in the original planning — i.e the original graphs did not take into account that deaths would be higher than the simplistic calculations predicted because once the NHS was overwhelmed a lot more people would die than if they could get ICU treatment, and b) this was relevant to the threat of a second 2020 wave: if the NHS got close to capacity again then we should assume that, like the first wave, ICU care would be rationed. This obviously did happen again December-January because of the PM’s failure to act soon enough.
There is so much more that could be said but this is long enough for now…
A few simple questions to ask the PM
Given his failures on testing, care homes and PPE why did you keep in post a Secretary of State you described yourself as ‘f***ing hopeless’ and how many more people died as a result of your failure to remove him?
Why is No10 lying, including to Parliament, about the fact that the original plan was ‘herd immunity by September’ and had to be abandoned?
When did Patrick Vallance brief you on NHS data showing that the death rate at the first April peak was much higher than before/after the peak and do you now agree with Hancock that every patient got the treatment they needed?
Do you now agree with Hancock that there was no shortage of PPE or do you agree with yourself in April 2020 that PPE supply was ‘a disaster’ that required moving Hancock?
When will the SoS come to the House and correct his many false statements to MPs?
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