Covid inquiry live: Matt Hancock hits back at ‘toxic culture’ at centre of government after pandemic grilling

Matt Hancock claims he told Boris Johnson on 13 March 2020 that he would need to plunge Britain into lockdown to control the pandemic.

But Covid inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC asked why the intervention was not recorded in his diary.

A stunned Mr Keith said: “There is a whole page on how you woke up from the dawn flight to Belfast … you then went to Cardiff and so on.

“Telling the prime minister of this country, for the first time, that he had to call an immediate lockdown, is surely worthy of some recollection, is it not?”

Mr Hancock replied: “I didn’t have full access to my papers for the writing of that, and this came to light in researching the papers ahead of this inquiry. This is after all the formal public inquiry.”

A damning WhatsApp message on 12 March 2020 from Matt Hancock to Dominic Cummings said: “We are better prepared than other countries.”

The former health secretary was grilled over the exchange by the Covid inquiry’s lead counsel Hugo Keith KC, who said: “Why did you say we are better prepared than other countries?”

“By the 12th of March, you were surely aware that we were not better prepared than other countries,” Mr Keith said.

Mr Hancock said he was worried about the “risk of going too early” with measures to control the virus. But he said he realised the next day that it was “the end of the road” for the argument that it was better to wait.

Matt Hancock was asked about claims by ex-senior civil servant Helen MacNamara that he displayed “nuclear” levels of overconfidence, and asked whether he rejects that he gave that impression to colleagues in presenting the “extraordinarily difficult issues” his department faced.

The ex-health secretary said: “It depends who with … in a trusted environment we were self-critical about how we were responding – that’s only natural, because we could see what was happening and could see we were in the middle of something that hadn’t happened for decades and it was on our watch.

“I also thought it was necessary – and I can understand how some people will have interpreted the way that I now know that they did, although I didn’t know this at the time because nobody raised any of these issues with me – I can see how my sense of needing to keep driving the system forward might have had this impact on some people.

“Especially those who were more sceptical of the need of the government to act, frankly. We have seen some of the evidence that the same people who were accusing me of overconfidence, at the same time were blocking the action that I was saying we needed.

“And so I can now see the dynamics of – if they were against action being taken, and I was going in and saying we absolutely must do this, and there was a huge amount of uncertainty and worry – and I basically felt it was my professional to try to keep driving forward.”

Asked who was against action being taken, he said: “I don’t want to point fingers because everybody was doing there best”.

Matt Hancock has been confronted with a message from Boris Johnson on 7 March 2020, in which the former prime minister asked him whether there was “anything I can do to help”.

Hugo Keith KC asked: “Was that not an opportunity for you to say to the prime minister: ‘well we absolutely have to get on top of the very real difficulties with the absence of real plans for infection control, with the development implementation of counter-measures, with the incredibly difficult issue of funding and planning for vaccines, shielding – all the other areas that your department was grappling with?”

Mr Hancock replied: “By this point, the prime minister, the Cabinet Office machine and No 10 were wholly engaged. The prime minister I think chaired the first Cobra on 2 March, and so we’d had almost a week of me being able to say all of that.

“So I think this was a … he asked if there was ‘anything I can do to help’, and I said we should have a whole national effort so that pretty much covers all bases.”

In March and April 2020, the Department of Health and Social Care was “under enormous pressure and enormous stress”, said Matt Hancock.

“We brought in more resources – basically from wherever we could find them – and did everything that we could. But that ramp-up was extremely difficult.”

Our political correspondent Archie Mitchell reports:

Matt Hancock has said the health department’s concerns about Covid were “not taken as seriously as they should have been” until the end of February.

The former health secretary said he was blocked from calling an emergency Cobra meeting in the early days of the pandemic.

Responding to criticism that Mr Hancock’s department took too much responsibility for the handling of Covid, and did not tell tell central government how bad it was, he said the opposite was true.

“There was so much that needed to be done, and in some cases we just had to get on and do it,” Mr Hancock said.

Matt Hancock has described vicious messages about his competence as part of an “unhealthy toxic culture” in which “extremely unpleasant language and false allegations were thrown”.

“I tried to lead a positive culture, a can do culture, where if there was a problem, the question that was raised in the department was how do we fix this,” the former health secretary said.

He added: “Unfortunately, that rubbed up against this deep unpleasantness at the centre.”

There was a “lack of generosity or empathy” at the centre of government in “understanding the difficulty of rising to” the challenge of the Covid pandemic, Matt Hancock has said.

“Some of these exhibits you’ve just shown demonstrate a lack of generosity or empathy in understanding the difficulty of rising to such a big challenge,” he told the inquiry.

“So did the DHSC need to expand and grow? Of course. Did it get everything right? No, of course not. No doubt we’ll go into individual challenges. But did it rise to the challenge overall of responding to the biggest public health crisis in a century. I think it did.”