DISGRACED former health secretary Matt Hancock told the Covid inquiry today that he is not a liar but Dominic Cummings is a malign actor.
Maintaining the government’s impression of rats in sacks, the minister in charge of Britain’s pandemic response at the time blamed the chaos on premier Boris Johnson’s top aide Cummings, who created a “toxic culture” in Downing Street.
Mr Hancock, later sacked for being caught on camera in an intimate breach of Covid rules with an aide, also admitted that the country should have locked down at the start of March 2020, three weeks before it eventually did.
This would have saved 90 per cent of the lives that died in the first wave of the virus, he said.
“With hindsight, that’s the moment we should have done it, three weeks earlier, and it would have saved many, many lives,” he told the inquiry headed by judge Heather Hallett.
The problems that beset the government with the onset of the pandemic, already graphically described to the inquiry by previous witnesses, were largely down to Mr Cummings who, in Mr Hancock’s telling, staged an internal coup against democratic government.
He said Mr Cummings “decided to take all of the major daily decisions into his office and he invited a subset of the people who needed to be there to these meetings.
“He didn’t invite any ministers. He didn’t regard ministers as a valuable contribution to any decision-making as far as I could see in the crisis or, indeed, any other time.
“In one of these early meetings the chief adviser said decisions don’t need to go to the prime minister.
“Now that is inappropriate in a democracy.”
Much that is inappropriate has already been exposed in evidence, and Mr Hancock added his tuppence worth on a “culture of fear” inculcated by Mr Cummings.
Mr Cummings himself was one of those who accused Mr Hancock, subsequently reinvented as a reality TV star, of telling untruths about what was or wasn’t being done as the pandemic took a grip.
Today the former Svengali kept up a running commentary on X, formerly Twitter, on Mr Hancock’s performance.
“Flat out lying to the inquiry” over lockdown timings was a representative sample, with Mr Cummings claiming that the former health secretary was still advocating for “herd immunity” — letting the virus rip — as late as mid-March 2020.
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: "Saying sorry now rings hollow. Nothing can ease the pain for the families of care home residents and staff who died."
“They’re paying the price for his incompetence and will never forget Mr Hancock abandoned their loved ones."
