What has Dominic Cummings revealed about Matt Hancock that we didn’t already know? The most eye-catching stuff, of course, is the Prime Minister calling the health secretary ‘totally fucking hopeless’. But on the specific charges that created this impression, much of his lengthy blog on evidence reiterates what he told the select committee session last month, rather than providing the documentation backing it up.
Cummings rebuts Hancock’s claim that he threw ‘a protective ring around care homes’, writing: ‘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.’ It is well-known that patients were sent untested to care homes.
Hancock’s claim is that he told colleagues he wanted to get patients tested and then went about setting up that testing capacity. Cummings needed to provide evidence for his allegation that Hancock told government colleagues these patients were definitely already being tested when in fact they were not. There is no documentation in this blog regarding that. He writes:
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.
He later says that on 7 May he ‘concluded to the PM that Hancock’s failures and dishonesty made him unfit for his job, that there was still not serious testing in care homes and this was killing people. The PM agreed but still he would not act.’ Again, there isn’t evidence of this being the case, nor is there evidence of the Cabinet Secretary concluding that Hancock couldn’t be trusted when he made assertions.
At the end of his blog, Cummings poses a number of questions for Boris Johnson, including this one: ‘How many people died in care homes because of what you called the ‘disaster’ on PPE and what you called Hancock’s ‘totally fucking hopeless’ performance on testing in March?’ The chances are that we will never know the answer to this question, given the Public Health England study suggesting that only 1.6 per cent of care home outbreaks were seeded from hospital discharges is unreliable, in part for the very obvious reason that those discharges were happening without testing so it isn’t clear who had Covid anyway.
But unless Cummings has more to offer on his Substack, we may never get the answer to the question of whether Hancock did claim those care home residents were being tested.
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