In “a healthy democracy we must find new ways to reach people”, Matt Hancock declared yesterday in his letter explaining why he will not be standing at the next election.
It soon afterwards emerged that the officers in his local association in West Suffolk consider him “not fit to represent this constituency”.
Hancock has recently sought, on I’m A Celebrity, to find new ways to reach people. Viewers have seen, and in many cases liked, a politician of conspicuous egotism and shamelessness, who perhaps hoped that by courting publicity he could rebound from the disaster which overtook him in June 2021, when The Sun published a picture of him kissing his aide Gina Coladangelo in breach of Covid guidelines, as a result of which he had to resign from the post of Health Secretary.
There is method in Hancock’s shamelessness. Half a century ago, Jack Profumo went quietly off to Toynbee Hall, in the East End of London, to atone for the scandal named after him.
Hancock opted instead to stage a public penance. By embracing with fortitude and good humour the grotesque humiliations of reality TV, he set out to show what a good sport he is.
It seemed possible he could trump, or Trump, the usual run of dreary office-seekers by establishing a direct and personal connection with the voters. Embarrassment might be transmuted into self-advancement.
The more tasteless his behaviour, the better he could serve as the people’s champion against the pious, condescending Establishment.
But if Hancock was to make a comeback, he needed to surmount a second obstacle. People might well hold him responsible, as Health Secretary, for fatal errors made by the Government in its response from January 2020 to the Covid pandemic, and in particular for the large number of deaths after hospital patients were discharged into care homes.
Hancock has just sought, by publishing a book entitled Pandemic Diaries, serialised in The Daily Mail, to show that anything which went wrong in this period was not his fault.
Sam Leith, Literary Editor of The Spectator, is one of those who have pointed out that this volume is not a diary, kept contemporaneously, but has been “cooked up” after the events it describes, and is therefore “a fundamentally dishonest and trivial way” to present an account of those events.
Hancock’s attempt to protest not just his innocence, but his extraordinary far-sightedness compared to his colleagues, has met with widespread incredulity.
“Nobody likes a hypocrite,” a senior doctor observed to ConHome. “He wouldn’t have resigned if he hadn’t been caught.”
This doctor pointed out some of the reasons why the NHS found responding to the pandemic so difficult. Compared to the health services in Germany and France, it lacked spare capacity, possessing too few staff and too few spare beds. Running the system at 95 per cent occupancy has left nothing in reserve.
The NHS also found, and continues to find, great difficulty in discharging patients who do not need to be in hospital, but do need looking after: the social care deficiency which has been known about for years, and from which so many other problems flow.
And the doctor remarked that from May to September 2020, “the NHS was the quietest it has ever been in my lifetime”.
Waiting lists are now so long in part because almost everything apart from dealing with the pandemic stopped in March 2020, and did not get started up again anything like as soon as it should have been.
The doctor lamented, as others have, the failure at that time by the Government to commission any kind of cost-benefit analysis. No attempt was made to weigh up the long-term damage to health which was bound to be caused by suspending other kinds of treatment in order to concentrate on the pandemic.
No fair-minded person would attribute to Hancock all the deficiencies with which the NHS entered 2020, or blame on him all the misjudgements that were subsequently made.
One Downing Street insider who was there throughout the pandemic said of Hancock to ConHome: “He wasn’t responsible for any deaths. He wasn’t important enough.”
In May 2021, when Dominic Cummings gave evidence for seven hours to the Health Select Committee, he uttered harsh criticisms of Hancock, saying he should have been sacked for “at least 15 to 20 things – including lying to everybody on multiple occasions”.
By seeking in his new book to rebut these criticisms, Hancock has tended instead to remind people of them, and of his own willingness to blame other people, for example in this entry on 29th January 2021:
“Scandalous behaviour by certain care home operators, who are unscrupulously using staff with Covid. Inspectors have identified no fewer than 40 places where this is happening.”
In a diary entry made on 27th May 2021, just after Cummings denounced him, Hancock wrote:
“Of all the many accusations Dom Cummings has hurled at me, the media seem most interested in his claims that I lied about the arrangements surrounding hospital discharges into care homes at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Annoyingly, it was only after this evening’s [Downing Street] press conference that I received some very pertinent PHE [Public Health England] data. They analysed all the Covid cases in care homes from January to October last year and found that just 1.2 per cent could be traced back to hospitals.“
This may well be correct. Care home staff did indeed catch Covid in the wider community and take it into those homes.
But Hancock seems quite oblivious to the air of bogus precision which hangs over the one statistic he gives here, namely that “just 1.2 per cent could be traced back to hospitals”.
How much work is being done by the words “could be” in this formula? Whether or not he is trying to pull the wool over our eyes, he sounds as if he is trying to do so.
Again and again, Hancock declines to take us into his confidence, but says whatever he thinks he can get away with. The cumulative effect of this special pleading is to make one lose whatever patience one may once have had with him.
The official inquiry into Covid, chaired by Lady Hallett, a crossbench peer and retired Appeal Court judge, will start public hearings next year, which is also when the Conservatives will have to select their candidate for the London mayoral election to be held in May 2024.
In last week’s Spectator, James Forsyth suggested:
“If Hancock is going to attempt to return to the political front line – and given his high embarrassment threshold and his sheer determination to be involved this seems probable – his most likely route would be the Tory nomination for Mayor of London.”
Here is a field in which both Ken Livingstone (Mayor from 2000-08) and Boris Johnson (Mayor from 2008-16) demonstrated that a capacity for self-promotion, by methods regarded as rackety by their more conventional colleagues, can be an advantage.
In 2007, the Conservatives had great difficulty finding a plausible candidate to run against Livingstone, who was generally reckoned to be invincible.
Greg Dyke, a former Director General of the BBC who was best known for introducing Roland Rat, a glove puppet, to viewers of breakfast television, was among those approached by the increasingly desperate Conservatives, but said he would only run as an Independent with Tory and Lib Dem support.
The Lib Dems turned down that idea, and Johnson, MP for Henley but getting nowhere at Westminster, at length decided to have a go.
Hancock is no Johnson, but in some quarters is just as distrusted, and is likewise getting nowhere at Westminster.
In February 1960 Clement Attlee, Prime Minister from 1945-51, remarked in a piece for The Observer (reprinted in Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, edited by Frank Field):
“There is one thing about politics that I think cannot be disputed: if a man stays in them long enough, they nearly always reveal him for what he is, and he tends to get not only what he deserves, but to find in his fate the reflection of his own strength and weakness.”
Hancock, only 44 years old, has already revealed much of what he is.