Matt hancock

Sir Keir Starmer got through the whole of PMQs without telling us that his mum was a nurse and he used to run the Crown Prosecution Service. What a relief. Instead, he gave us a different look-at-me moment. Hailing England’s victory over Germany last night he confided that his pleasure was of a purer and more refined variety than anyone else’s, ‘having been at Wembley for Euro 96 and experienced the agony of that defeat.’ The Labour leader is running out of disasters to berate the government with. The economy is on the mend. Freedom from lockdown looms. He can’t mention the Batley and Spen by-election in case he loses.

Sajid Javid has his first Commons outing as Health Secretary today, not even 48 hours after he took over from Matt Hancock. As Katy outlines here, the focus will be on how he differs from his predecessor on the pace of easing Covid restrictions. But Javid will also quickly face questions on whether he plans to scrap some of Hancock’s ambitious plans to reform the NHS too. As I reported last week, there is growing anxiety in the health service and in the Conservative party about the forthcoming Health and Social Care Bill, with one senior figure warning that it could end up being ‘Lansley mark II’. That’s a reference to

How much trouble is Matt Hancock in? The Sun splashes this morning on the Health Secretary’s affair with aide Gina Coladangelo. The paper has obtained screen grabs from leaked Whitehall CCTV footage showing very little the way of social distancing. The images are from the start of May, when laws were still in place to enforce social distancing. Hancock has issued a brief statement this morning, apologising for breaking the rules: ‘I accept that I breached the social distancing guidance. I have let people down and am very sorry. I remain focused on working to get the country out of this pandemic and would be grateful for privacy for my

Are the Conservatives going to repeat their mistakes of a decade ago on NHS reform? If a week is a long time in politics, perhaps ten years is such a lengthy period that it erases the memory entirely. The current Health and Social Care Bill is due for publication any day now and contains much of the same potential for an almighty political row as the Andrew Lansley reforms of 2011. Senior Whitehall figures and MPs have predicted that Matt Hancock’s new legislation could be ‘Lansley mark ii’, as I write in today’s i paper. In talking to MPs across the Conservative party, from backbencher to minister, and from lockdown sceptic to restrictions

Dido Harding’s campaign to become the next boss of the NHS in England took a high-profile turn this weekend. ‘Sources close to Dido Harding’ (perhaps ones occupying the same pair of shoes) briefed the Sunday Times about the Conservative peer and ex-boss of the £37 billion Test and Trace scheme pitch as a candidate. (If appointed, the noble Baroness will reportedly resign from the Conservative party and take an indefinite leave of absence from the House of Lords.) Apparently, the health world’s favourite noble Baroness will end England’s reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she replaces Sir Simon Stevens as the next head of NHS England. This is an interesting and

They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. If that’s the case, there must be an awful lot of people who are close to the health secretary, Matt Hancock. Hancock has not had the best of weeks. On Wednesday, Dominic Cummings released a series of WhatsApps which appeared to show the Prime Minister calling the health secretary ‘hopeless’ in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Asked about the texts later, Hancock meekly replied that he ‘didn’t think’ he was that useless. Now it turns out that he isn’t exactly well-regarded by senior NHS officials either. In an interview yesterday, the outgoing chief of the NHS,

You might think that a cabinet minister and privy councillor whose reputation for truthfulness had been brought into (very public) question would be inclined to keep their public utterances strictly on the straight and narrow. You’d be failing to allow for the enthusiastic approach of the Health Secretary. Matt Hancock used his presentation to today’s NHS Confederation Conference to try to explain that the five million-strong NHS backlog, claiming it was down to Covid-19. Asked about providing guarantees of funding to address the NHS backlog, Mr Hancock told the event that ‘the virus is responsible, and the backlog is a consequence of the pandemic’.  This is, quite simply, untrue. The NHS backlog

When Dominic Cummings gave seven hours of evidence to a Commons inquiry into the government’s Covid response, it was Matt Hancock who received the most criticism. The former No. 10 senior aide’s accusation that the Health Secretary was negligent – the most serious charge being that Hancock had misled the government over testing and care homes – led to questions over Hancock’s position. But it quickly became clear No. 10 had no plans to fire Hancock. The Prime Minister opted to rally round his minister rather than cast him out. So, does the publication of WhatsApp messages allegedly showing the Prime Minister heavily criticising Hancock change things? In a new blog on

The government has just suffered a further verbal drubbing for the way it announced it would be delaying the roadmap out of Covid restrictions.  Matt Hancock gave a statement in the Commons tonight, a couple of hours after the Prime Minister announced all the details of the delay. Before he spoke, though, he had to listen to a still-angry Speaker explaining why this was so unacceptable.  Hoyle wasn’t the only one to complain about the way ministers had behaved Hoyle once again described the government’s behaviour as ‘entirely unacceptable’, adding that it was ‘disrespectful to the House and to our constituents’. He also reiterated a point made by Peter Bone

Matt Hancock enjoyed an early boost in his evidence session to the select committees investigating the lessons learned from the government’s handling of the pandemic, when one of the committee chairs Greg Clark confirmed that Dominic Cummings had not submitted written evidence for the allegations he had made in his own session. Those allegations included that Hancock had lied to the Prime Minister about testing of patients being discharged into care homes; that he had been told by the chief scientific adviser that not everyone who needed treatment received it; that the Cabinet Secretary had ‘lost confidence’ in the minister’s honesty; and that he had interfered in the expansion of

Did Matt Hancock’s negligence lead to Covid seeding into care homes because patients were not tested before being discharged? This was one of Dominic Cummings’s more potent charges  and it brings back memories for me because I spent a chunk of last summer looking into this. In my line of work, the success rate for stories is quite low: investigate five avenues and you’re likely to find four dead ends. So you end up with a lot of data and research that’s never used, because the original premise doesn’t hold up. I was (and remain) critical of much of government policy on Covid response: it seemed horribly plausible to me that panicked NHS