Matt Hancock’s first attempt to defend himself against the bombardment of allegations from Dominic Cummings went well. The health secretary appeared in the Commons to answer an urgent question from Labour’s Jon Ashworth on the matter, and he managed to get through the session without appearing beleaguered.
This was partly as a result of a coterie of loyal (to the point of sounding entirely bizarre) Conservative backbenchers who stood up to congratulate the government on not having Cummings in it any more and to thank the health secretary for visiting their local hospital. There had clearly been an energetic effort on the part of Hancock’s PPS and the Conservative whips to get a good number of colleagues to turn up and ask such questions.
Perhaps more helpful and credible were the contributions from more senior figures such as Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary turned health select committee chair who played his part in the seven hour grilling of Cummings yesterday. He rose to tell Hancock that the allegations were ‘unproven’ and that the country needed the health secretary to be doing his job.
Hancock, for his part, insisted that the ‘serious allegations’ made by Cummings ‘are not true’, adding: ‘I have got up each morning and I have asked what must I do to protect life?’ One of the central allegations made by Cummings was that Hancock’s statements to colleagues weren’t credible, and coming from anyone else, the claim that he got up every morning and asked this question might have fallen into the incredible category.
The session wasn’t a battering for the minister, but neither did it really remove some of the allegations which are easier to prove. His claim that the government had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes has long been on extremely shaky ground, and Cummings only highlighted it yesterday. When asked about the testing regime for people going into care homes from hospital by a number of different opposition MPs, Hancock dodged the question.
The care homes issue is the most difficult for Hancock at the moment because it does not rely on Cummings providing evidence such as text messages to the committee inquiry to back up the assertions he made yesterday. It is also such a central and emotive part of the botched handling of the early months of the pandemic that it will be difficult to dodge continually.
Hancock has a press conference this afternoon as well, where he will take questions from the media. Even if he gets through that in one piece, he does have a problem with his authority to contend with. As I explain in my column in today’s i paper, he is currently working on reforms to the NHS which give the health secretary more operational power. This sort of fiddling is always controversial, but even more so when the ability of that health secretary to wield the power in the right way has been brought into question so dramatically.
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