Hancock resigns as health secretary

In the past few minutes Matt Hancock has announced his resignation as health secretary after a torrid few days in which he was revealed to have broken Covid restrictions.

Hancock writes in his resignation letter to Johnson that he does not want his private life to distract from the handling of the pandemic, while Johnson says he is ‘very sorry’ to receive the letter. 

This is an unsurprising change from Friday, when Downing Street said Johnson had accepted Hancock’s apology and ‘considers the matter closed’. It was very clear at the time that the matter wasn’t closed at all: neither No. 10 nor Hancock would say anything other than that he had broken ‘guidance’ on social distancing when it wasn’t clear whether he had gone further and broken the law. 

Hancock could probably have tried to stay on. But what would have happened would be that it would be harder and harder for him to reimpose restrictions in the autumn when there is another surge of cases. He would also lack the authority necessary to take the Health and Social Care Bill through Parliament. Any reform of the NHS is politically difficult. It’s even harder for the Conservatives to do it. And harder still for a Secretary of State who commands so little respect to expect Parliament to hand him more powers, as Hancock was doing with this legislation.

Resigning now also means – as Johnson alluded in his acceptance letter – that Hancock can come back to government in future. His departure will be linked with his private life and not with the allegations levelled by Dominic Cummings and others about his handling of the pandemic.

In this sense, while it was his private life – or to be more accurate, the way in which he undermined his own meddling in everyone else’s private lives by disobeying his rules – that did for him, Hancock is not being held accountable for what he did and didn’t do during the pandemic, or indeed for what he claimed to do, such as throwing ‘a protective ring’ around care homes.