Matt Hancock says he tried to ‘wake up Whitehall’ to Covid threat in early 2020

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Former UK health secretary Matt Hancock came out fighting on Thursday, telling the Covid-19 inquiry he tried to “wake up Whitehall” to the virus’s threat in early 2020 and attacking a “toxic” culture in Boris Johnson’s government.

Hancock, who has been fiercely criticised by several former government aides and officials in evidence so far, denied lying to colleagues during the health crisis and said he felt at times that he was being “blocked” by senior officials.

Hancock said that while he had sought to “drive the system forward”, officials “simply didn’t cotton on to the fact that this enormous wave was coming” months before the UK entered lockdown in March 2020.

“From the middle of January, we were trying to effectively raise the alarm,” he said. “We were trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem.”

Hancock denied claims made to the inquiry by Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary when the pandemic began, that he regularly misled the cabinet about plans being in place to deal with the virus.

“You will note that there’s no evidence from anybody who I worked with in the Department [of Health and Social Care] or the health system who supported those false allegations,” he said.

Hancock, who quit as health secretary in June 2021 after admitting to breaking social-distancing guidance by kissing his adviser, also blamed an “unhealthy toxic culture” at the heart of government for the spread of “misinformation” about his department.

He said the “culture of fear” emanating from Downing Street had “essentially” been created by Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to Johnson.

Hancock described Cummings as a “malign actor” who attempted to stage “a power grab” in early 2020 by barring ministers from meetings of Cobra, the emergency committee that helps co-ordinate a pan-Whitehall response to crises.

His comments add to the series of damaging revelations from former top officials and ministers about Britain’s response to the pandemic under Johnson, prime minister between 2019 and 2022.

The inquiry is examining the government’s response to Covid, including the UK’s preparedness and senior decision-making, and is due to run until the summer of 2026. Johnson is due to give evidence next week.

In a series of damning testimonies, several former senior officials have criticised Hancock’s role during Covid. In private messages from 2020 seen by the inquiry, Johnson was told by Cummings that Hancock’s “uselessness” was “killing” people.

MacNamara said this month that Hancock displayed “nuclear levels of confidence” about pandemic preparedness.

Hancock rejected that claim on Thursday, saying: “The same people who are accusing me of overconfidence were at the same time blocking the action that I was saying we needed.”

Hancock, who became health secretary in 2018, said there was not an “absence of a plan, there were plans” to deal with a pandemic. “I’ve critiqued the plans, I’ve said that they weren’t adequate but there were plans in place,” he said.

Hancock also rejected a claim made to the inquiry by Lord Simon Stevens, former head of NHS England, that he wanted the right to decide “who should live and who should die” if hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from Covid.

In diary entries seen by the inquiry on Thursday, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser when the pandemic began, wrote of a “massive internal mess inside DHSC and PHE [Public Health England]” in early 2020.

Lord Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary between 2018 and 2020, said there was a “clear lack of grip in DHSC”, according to another diary entry.