EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT: ‘The virus isn’t really killing many people – how can we justify all this paralysis?’: From Boris Johnson’s text message to Rishi’s Eat Out to Help Out…Matt Hancock reveals all in the latest instalment of his astonishing pandemic diary
- CLICK HERE TO READ MATT HANCOCK’S EXPLOSIVE PANDEMIC DIARIES EXCLUSIVELY ON THE MAIL+
- The former health secretary reveals the challenges of sorting out PPE contracts
- Mr Hancock says Dominic Cummings was ‘itching for me to fail’ in the pandemic
- He describes having to navigate through the first wave of the Covid outbreak
In the first week of April 2020, the whole country was in a state of high anxiety as worldwide cases of Covid passed one million. This instalment of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries begins with Boris Johnson in hospital in an intensive care bed fighting for his life.
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Boris is out of intensive care! More good news: the chief veterinary officer has advised that the risk of transmission from felines to humans is low. At least we’re not going to have to kill anyone’s cats.
Saturday, April 18
Hundreds of businesses are approaching the department offering to manufacture this or that. Half the time nobody returns their calls, even with big companies such as Primark.
The problem is weeding out time-wasters and chancers – of which there are many – without missing opportunities. One company with a good product got so p***ed off they sold everything to the Scottish NHS.
Even the Labour Party is writing in with suggested names of companies and individuals who could help – apparently without doing any due diligence on the offers.
Matt Hancock leaves 10 Downing Street in London on April 30, 2020
Monday, April 20
Crunch week for hitting my testing target of 100,000 tests done by May 1. There’s an uncomfortable amount of speculation about my career depending on it. [Dominic] Cummings is itching for me to fail.
Friday, April 24
Downing Street called my office saying I needed to schedule a quick call with the PM. I was looking forward to it, until I switched on Zoom to find the PM at Chequers flanked by Cummings and about a dozen other advisers. Rishi [Sunak] was there, looking sheepish. I realised instantly what was going on: an attempted ambush.
Boris opened with some gentle warm-ups, then Cummings started the shelling, subjecting me to a barrage of questions about my department’s response: on PPE, testing, NHS capacity, ventilators. Every so often, one of the others would pile in. Most questions seemed to be based on inaccurate media reports.
It was utterly exhausting, but I’ve lived this for months now, 18 hours a day, pretty much every day, so I am on top of every detail.
When they finally ran out of ammunition, I pressed ‘Leave Meeting’, sat back in my chair, checked my body for shrapnel wounds and saw that I was broadly intact. Next?
The UK had seen 28,000 deaths from Covid-19 by early May 2020 after less than two months of lockdown
Click here to read Part Three of Matt Hancock’s explosive pandemic diaries exclusively on Mail+
Friday, May 1
We did it, and with a very comfortable margin. 122,347 tests! Let the naysayers put that in their pipe and smoke it! I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed my moment, given how desperately certain people were willing me to fail.
Sunday, May 3
Boris thinks Australia’s decision to cut itself off from the world might be the way forward for the UK. ‘A prize for the best 100-word explanation for why the UK has 28,000 deaths and Australia has 100,’ he said, laying down the gauntlet to me, Cummings, [Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick] Vallance and the Prof [Chris Whitty, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer].
I told Boris: ‘Coronaviruses are seasonal and don’t transmit as much outdoors.
‘It is striking that no part of the southern hemisphere has seen such a significant outbreak.’
This seemed to do the trick.
We still haven’t figured out what to do about borders. [Dominic] Raab, [Grant] Shapps and Sunak all want to keep the borders open. Crucially, they’re supported by the Prof. On the other side, Priti Patel and I are in favour of far tougher measures, as is Boris.
Monday, May 4
Tonight, Nicola Sturgeon announced a ‘summer push to elimination [of Covid]’, a policy which has about as much hope of working as Chairman Mao’s attempt to eliminate sparrows by getting the Chinese population to bang pots and pans.
Much as I’m sure Nicola would love to build a Trump-style wall between her fiefdom and the rest of Great Britain, we’re all in this together. One person who’s clearly not keen on a hermit lifestyle is Prof Neil Ferguson [who was advising the Government on its Covid response].
I wasn’t particularly sympathetic when I heard he’d been caught breaking the rules [by meeting with his lover]. He’s issued a grovelling apology, but it was obvious he couldn’t continue to act as a Government adviser.
Government coronavirus advisor Neil Ferguson (pictured in January 2020) resigned after he was caught breaking Covid rules to meet his lover
Friday, May 15
The PM came over [in the Downing Street garden.] Like me, Boris had just got his results from the antibody test. I had medium to strong antibodies, but his were off the charts. He’s so competitive that even winning on the strength of his antibodies cheers him up. He went back to the group he was sitting with, grinning all over his face.
Friday, May 22
Westminster is abuzz with claims that Cummings broke lockdown rules, going to stay with his parents while he had Covid, which looks like a mega breach.
Saturday, May 23
Downing Street called asking if I’d do some media [to support Cummings], but I’m uneasy. Despite all the reassurances, it feels off.
In the end, I issued a supportive tweet, saying he was right to find childcare for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill.
George Osborne messaged me this evening warning me not to stick my neck out for Cummings again. ‘Lie low’ was his advice.
Sunday, May 24
I spent much of the day fielding angry messages, many of them questioning why the PM is still standing up for Cummings. The answer is that he rules through fear and intimidation, squashing those who dare to challenge him or get in his way.
Monday, May 25
Cummings tried to draw a line under the Barnard Castle affair by holding a press conference in the Downing Street garden. He sat behind a table, squinting awkwardly into the sun, looking like a sulky teenager who’d been sent outside to do his work for disrupting the class.
Boris Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings arrives at Downing Street on April 24, 2020
Afterwards, I found myself feeling strangely sorry for Boris.
Cummings has only one setting – divide and destroy – and now the boss is having to say some pretty stupid things as he machetes his way through the resulting mess.
The only thing for it was to keep backing Cummings – silence from me would only create an unhelpful story – so this evening I tweeted that I welcome the fact that Cummings ‘has provided substantive answers to all the questions put to him’. Apparently it got me some credit in No 10, but I can’t say I felt good about it.
Away from the Cummings s*** show, we had a Cabinet meeting to discuss plans for easing restrictions. It was a bizarre Cabinet, held on Zoom without a single mention of the Cummings-shaped elephant in the room.
In fact, an absurd amount of bandwidth was occupied by a discussion about whether – when we allow two households to get together outside – people should be permitted to walk through a house to get to a friend’s garden.
It’s fine by me, but are people going to ask whether they will also be able to go inside to use the loo? ‘If they’re quick and disinfect the handle?’ the Prof replied.
Who could believe that under a Conservative government, the long arm of the State would find its way into people’s loos?
Monday, June 1
A bad start to the day as No 10 omitted to invite me to a high-level meeting with the PM about coming out of lockdown. Probably Cummings’s doing.
Thursday, June 4
Boris messaged me at 6.43am saying he was ‘going quietly crackers’ about not testing enough people. He told me he sees it as our ‘Achilles heel’. He was in a proper flap. ‘What is wrong with our country that we can’t fix this?’ he complained.
I tried to calm him down. ‘Don’t go crackers,’ I said. ‘We now have the biggest testing capacity in Europe.’ Tempting as it was, I refrained from saying we did this against the obstruction of his own No 10 operation.
Monday, June 15
It seems that a drug that’s been around for 60 years can make a huge difference to the most poorly Covid patients. It’s called dexamethasone, and can reduce the chances of a patient on a ventilator dying by about a third. Bingo!
Tuesday, June 16
My dyslexic brain finds new words very hard to learn, and I was beginning to panic about fluffing ‘dexamethasone’ when we made the announcement today. I paced around my study, saying it again and again.
Eventually, I felt I’d mastered it – only to learn that Boris had decided at the last minute to make the announcement himself. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t annoyed to be stripped of my moment to shine.
Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak leave Downing Street to attend a cabinet meeting on September 1, 2020
Wednesday, June 17
In an embarrassingly crude power grab, [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen is trying to wrest control of vaccine research and procurement from EU member states.
Never mind that health is a matter for individual countries: the woman who once sent German army units on manoeuvres with broomsticks – because they didn’t have any rifles – wants to move responsibility for scientific development and manufacture into the sticky paws of Brussels bureaucrats.
I may have voted to Remain, but it’s enough to make a Brexiteer out of anyone.
Wednesday, July 8
Rishi’s announced a new Eat Out To Help Out initiative. I did my best to sound supportive, but in truth I’m worried that it might backfire and lead to a spike in cases.
Tuesday, July 14
Alastair Campbell, who’s presenting Good Morning Britain this week, was mouthing off about Nadine [Dorries, Mental Health Minister], asking when was the last time anyone heard or saw her talking about mental health.
She is already extremely sensitive about not being on TV/radio as often as she would like and it clearly touched a nerve. She thinks No 10 prefers to wheel out younger Ministers who went to Oxford University and made it clear she wants to do more.
Saturday, July 25
Anyone coming back from Spain from midnight tonight will have to self-quarantine for 14 days. This is very bad news for a lot of British holidaymakers.
Department for Transport officials kept pushing for 24 hours’ notice for the Spain decision, which I thought was curious – Grant Shapps is normally an ‘action this day’ Minister – until I discovered that Grant and his family had just flown there on holiday. The officials were trying, perhaps too hard, to protect their Minister.
In Cobra meetings, Nicola Sturgeon’s political games have become incredibly debilitating and significantly limit scope for open discussion. She sits like a statue, lips pursed like the top of a drawstring bag, only jolting into life when there’s an opportunity to say something to further the separatist cause.
The minute someone presses ‘End Meeting’, you can almost hear her running for a lectern so she can rush out an announcement before we make ours. We now chew over big decisions elsewhere and relegate formal meetings to rubber-stamping exercises.
Monday, July 27
Downing Street is in a semi-panic about a second wave.
Nicola Sturgeon (pictured on July 27 2020) pushed for a zero-Covid plan for the UK
Tuesday, July 28
Sturgeon is on manoeuvres again, trying to persuade us all to sign up to her impossible and anti- scientific zero-Covid plan.
Sure, we’d all love zero Covid, but that’s about as realistic as a bagpipe-playing unicorn.
She just wants to look and sound tough, then blame us when her policies don’t work.
I can hardly bear to watch her on TV any more.
Wednesday, July 29
Testing is a continuing concern. We still haven’t sorted procurement for what Boris calls ‘Operation Moonshot’. The idea is to carry out literally millions of Covid tests a day to keep the economy going.
Monday, August 3
To ram home his point about how complicated the Covid rules have got, Boris went round the [Cabinet] table asking everyone to set them out simply. We had endless different answers, and he got them all right.
‘I hope colleagues feel I have justified my general reputation for mastery of detail by being RIGHT this morning about the rules. It’s two households inside and six outside,’ he said triumphantly.
Boris Johnson holds a socially-distanced Cabinet meeting in July 2020, the first in-person meeting since the start of the pandemic
Friday, August 7
Boris is having a sugar rush about DIY Covid testing, which he believes could lead us to what’s he’s dubbed – in emphatic capital letters – ‘COVID FREEDOM DAY’. I have no idea who he’s been talking to, but he’s very fired up.
He thinks rapid home tests are the way to ‘get Whitehall and the whole British army of bludgers and skivers’ back to the office and ‘douse all remaining embers of the disease’. Today, I’m on a short break in Hay-on-Wye. When we got to the pub, there was great excitement. I’m not used to people recognising me, so the universal recognition is a bit of a shock. Something I’ll have to get used to, I suppose.
Tuesday, August 18
[Hancock has announced plans to abolish Public Health England.] On reflection, I should have been more brutal earlier. It wasn’t fit for purpose, and I should have cleared out senior figures who blocked the expansion of testing, basically because they didn’t want the private sector involved.
In response, Angela Rayner [deputy Labour leader] has been tweeting the usual tripe about Tories wanting to privatise the NHS by stealth. Does anyone seriously listen to this c**p any more?
The truth is, we wouldn’t stand a chance of winning this fight against Covid if it wasn’t for support from business. From manufacturing tests to developing the vaccine, the private sector – alongside the NHS and academia – has been critical to the fight.
Friday, August 21
Border enforcement is a mess. Everyone who flies in to the UK has to fill out a passenger locator form, which they’re supposed to hand to officials on arrival at the airport, but half the time the documents go straight in the bin.
Monday, August 24
I only get 4G in the garden of our rented constituency house in Suffolk, and even there, it’s patchy. Ridiculously, the best spot is 12ft up an old ash tree in the treehouse I built with the kids last year. Behold the temporary new offices of the Secretary of State for Health.
Tuesday, August 25
Nicola Sturgeon blindsided us by suddenly announcing that when schools in Scotland reopen, all secondary school pupils will have to wear masks in classrooms. In one of her most egregious attempts at oneupmanship to date, she didn’t consult us. The problem is that our original guidance on face coverings specifically excluded schools.
Cue much tortured debate between myself, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and No 10 about how to respond.
Much as Sturgeon would relish it, nobody here wants a big spat with the Scots. So, U-turn it is.
Boris Johnson (pictured on August 26 2020) asked Matt Hancock ‘how can we possibly justify the continuing paralysis?’ of Covid restrictions
Wednesday, August 26
I was minding my own business, when suddenly, ping! Ping! Boris sprang into life. It was 6.29am. He veered off the reservation, suddenly going off on one about how the virus isn’t really killing many people any more so ‘how can we possibly justify the continuing paralysis?’
He noted that an 80-year-old now has a six per cent chance of dying, which he didn’t think was enough to justify what we’re doing.
‘If I were an 80-year-old and I was told that the choice was between destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a 94 per cent chance of surviving, I know what I would prefer,’ he argued.
This exchange, which continued on WhatsApp pretty much all morning, was more than a little stressful, given that it represented a fundamental challenge to our entire pandemic response.
I’m not quite sure what he expected – that the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Adviser, Cummings and I would all suddenly throw our hands up and say: ‘You know what, you’re right, this whole thing has been a huge mistake. Let’s ditch everything we’re doing and pretend none of it ever happened’?
Fortunately, after a few hours he ran out of both statistics and steam. All the same, I sense a very definite shift in attitude. Something has unsettled him. Who has he been on holiday with?
Thursday, August 27
Overnight, Boris’s creeping suspicion that everything we’re doing has been a catastrophic over-reaction has evaporated as quickly as it appeared, to be replaced by annoyance at the discovery that there is a supply/demand gap for testing.
In fact, we are a victim of our own success. Our advertising campaign encouraging more people to come forward for tests has been a bit too effective, and now we’re overwhelmed.
Saturday, August 29
Boris has started going on about ‘freedom passes’. I think he envisages some sort of app that would allow anyone who can prove they’re negative to get back to normal. I can see the appeal, but I can also see the likely furore over anything resembling ‘Papers, please’.
Covid cases are rocketing in France. ‘We need to draw lessons pronto,’ Boris said, asking if the French have tried local lockdowns or whether it is ‘a case of the whole frog getting slowly boiled?’
Wednesday, September 2
Test and Trace is now identifying more than half of new cases. ‘It’s like the system actually works!’ I messaged Dido Harding [head of Test and Trace] excitedly. ‘Who would have guessed!!’ she replied.
The AstraZeneca vaccine (pictured on September 9 2020) was trialed as Covid cases began rising in the UK once again
Tuesday, September 8
I got a blast from No 10 about talking up the vaccine yesterday. Other than Boris, nobody there has ever really believed we can make it happen. In reality, their scepticism suits me, because it means they’re not meddling. The last thing I need is Cummings interfering or the project going through the Cabinet Office mincer.
Thursday, September 10
God, I loathe the BMA [British Medical Association]. Doctors: great. Their trade union: awful. Their in-house magazine, the British Medical Journal, has attacked Moonshot, repeating an absurd suggestion by consultants that it could cost ‘over £100 billion’.
Ludicrous! Feeling in need of moral support, I messaged Jeremy Hunt, who holds the BMA in even more contempt than I do. When he was Health Secretary, they put him through hell.
Tuesday, September 15
The PM is still dithering over restriction tiers, a classic Boris battle between head and heart.
Thursday, September 17
Cases are growing. Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] thinks we need a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’. Boris seemed confused, doing that thing he does, emphatically verbalising the arguments for and against out loud – alarming everyone as they try to work out where he’s going to land.
Friday, September 18
We are now at 6,000 new Covid infections a day in England alone, nearly double the figure last week.
By 10pm, No 10 had done a complete about-turn. They now want tougher local lockdowns and more warnings about what happens if people don’t follow the rules. Apparently the PM wants to explain that we have to balance Covid with other health and economic factors.
Well, no s***. What’s really infuriating is that the people who want action to control the virus didn’t insist on me being there [at meetings] to press the point.
Monday, September 21
Boris is torn. Everyone’s getting heavy with him, from the Prof to Sage, who say there will be ‘catastrophic consequences’ if we don’t act now. They’ve proposed a two-week circuit-breaker.
Friday, September 25
An alarming note from the modelling people who advise Sage. They say the epidemic is ‘close to breaching the agreed reasonable worst-case scenario’. Meanwhile, public finances are a horror show – from April to August, the figure borrowed was £173.7 billion.
Rishi has clearly been using these figures to freak out the PM. But the only sustainable way to get the economy back on track is to defeat the virus, not pretend it’s gone away.
The government’s Covid app proved unable to take data from NHS coronavirus tests in September 2020
Saturday, September 26
We’ve spent millions promoting the [NHS Covid] app, including buying wraparound ads in loads of publications. Just as I was allowing myself a moment of satisfaction at a job well done – or at least not ballsed up – there came news of fresh horror. A major glitch has emerged: the app can’t take data from NHS Covid tests.
I sat very still, trying to absorb the full implications of the fact that we’ve just spent tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on an NHS app that… doesn’t link to the NHS. Which genius thought it would not need to do this, first and foremost? Which other genius signed it off on this basis?
Given the multiple overlapping responsibilities of the various quangos involved, Whitehall’s institutional buck-passing and the involvement of two mega tech companies (Google and Apple), we just didn’t know.
What I did know was the buck stopped with me, and it was probably time to adopt the brace position. I prayed that word of this hideous blunder would not reach Cummings, but that was of course too much to hope. Naturally he went nuts when he found out, and I can’t say I blame him.
I find this sort of screw-up personally mortifying. Should I have asked such a basic and obvious question? I took it for granted that we would link our own app up to our own tests. Never assume!
My blazing bust-up with Kate Bingham over vaccines
Monday, May 4, 2020
Boris suggested Kate Bingham [as head of the new Vaccine Taskforce]. She’s a formidable venture capitalist with a background in the pharmaceutical industry and will be ideal.
Friday, June 19
A massive blow-up with Kate. She simply doesn’t see the need to order 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine – she wants 30 million – and can’t seem to grasp almost everyone may want or need it.
Kate Bingham said in June 2020 that the Oxford vaccine was ‘neither proven nor scaled’
I warned her during today’s meeting that if we don’t get our ducks in a row on this one, we risk a complete car crash.
She pushed back hard. But with the other elected Ministers on my side, I won the argument [for buying 100 million doses].
‘I’m not happy with that meeting,’ Kate snapped afterwards. ‘Nor me,’ I replied.
‘We will create a guide for you to explain what we are doing – there are enormous risks with this,’ she said, as if I don’t spend all my time thinking about how to save lives.
Kate pressed on, claiming that the technology that underpins the vaccine Oxford is working on ‘is neither proven nor scaled’, and that she has ‘an expert team who are working round the clock, pushing hard’.
I told her: ‘We need to have tried everything feasibly possible to accelerate delivery. I’ve been asking the same question over and over again and not yet had a satisfactory answer – hence my frustration.’
This only seemed to wind her up further, prompting a mini-lecture about the dangers of trying to go too far too fast.
‘The worse case is we kill people with an unsafe vaccine,’ she said. ‘We need to tone the comms to register the fact this is risky and unproven.’
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being patronised.
Monday, July 6
The Vaccine Taskforce have consistently argued that we only need to back three [vaccine] brands. My view is that, to hedge our bets, we need more. Any one of the vaccines could fail in clinical trials.
Fortunately, Rishi and Steve Barclay at the Treasury are totally onside.
Sunday, October 4
Kate has been telling the Financial Times we should only vaccinate the vulnerable. Except she has nothing to do with the deployment – only the buying. And what she’s criticising is the Government’s agreed policy.
‘We absolutely need No 10 to sit on her hard,’ I told the spads [special advisers], adding that I consider her ‘totally unreliable’.
Head of the vaccine taskforce Ms Bingham told the Financial Times in October 2020 the government should only vaccinate the most vulnerable
Tuesday, October 6
The Economist has got wind of an old vaccine deployment plan. I instinctively asked my spads if Kate might be behind it. ‘I have some evidence to suggest it might have been – ie the fact she had a meeting yesterday with the journalist who has the story,’ came the reply. Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Sunday, November 8
The Sunday Times has done a hatchet job on Kate, revealing that she spent £670k of taxpayers’ money on hiring eight full-time spin doctors. I had no idea it was at public expense.
‘Who the hell signed this off?’ I asked the team. Blank faces all round. Turns out the contract went through the Department for Business, not us, so we had no opportunity to block it. I’ve no idea what Kate was thinking: we have plenty of brilliant comms people who would have been more than capable.
Thursday, February 18, 2021
A senior member of the Vaccine Taskforce is threatening to resign. It transpires he and Kate have a fundamental problem with us buying vaccines from India. It explains why we didn’t get the Indian doses last year: he and Kate were working against it, and completely ignoring ministerial steers.
‘That’s why we kept getting bull**** excuses,’ I told Boris.
Friday, February 19
We finally managed to secure almost ten million extra doses from India. We could have had them in December, had Kate and her allies not been working behind the scenes to block them.
Please don’t let the dog sniff Covid on Camilla!
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Could labradors be our secret weapon against the pandemic? A bizarre and cheering morning watching disease-detecting dogs on the concourse at Paddington Station demonstrate what they can do on a crowd that included the Duchess of Cornwall.
Inside, I was panicking. I couldn’t stop worrying that the mutts might pick out Camilla, or indeed me, as having the dreaded disease. ‘Please, please, don’t do that,’ I willed silently.
In 2020, dogs including labradors were trained to detect Covid-19 after tests found they could sniff out the disease
Luckily, the labs correctly identified the man with the T-shirt that had been worn by an affected patient. I was impressed.
These dogs can pick up the scent of Covid just like they pick up the scent of drugs. I want them at airports and train stations to sniff out super-spreaders.
The [Health] department’s briefing was: ‘Evidence base too thin.’ It’s absurd. Just because they aren’t conventional tests, officialdom can’t see the point.
I’ve pushed it and asked Jim [Bethell, a Health Minister in the Lords] to follow up.
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
The civil service seems determined to kill off the Covid dogs idea, which is so much more versatile than normal testing and really worthwhile. The animals are amazing – they get it right over 90 per cent of the time – but officials are being very tricky.
We should have started training dogs months ago and then sending them to railway stations and other busy places, where they could identify people who probably have Covid so they can then get a conventional test.
Unfortunately, even though I’ve signed off on it, the system just doesn’t buy it.
So far we’ve done a successful Phase 1 trial, but Phase 2, which costs £2.5 million, has hit the buffers. The civil service have come up with no fewer than 11 reasons to junk the idea.
Matt Hancock’s book sale royalties will be donated to NHS Charities and good causes relating to dyslexia.
- Click here to read Part Three of Matt Hancock’s explosive pandemic diaries
Extracted by Corinna Honan from Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid by Matt Hancock & Isabel Oakeshott, to be published by Biteback on December 6 at £25. © Matt Hancock & Isabel Oakeshott 2022. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 17/12/22; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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