The truth about Matt Hancock | The Spectator - Isabel Oakeshott:
"Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common.... [I]mportantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic.... How then could I have worked with him on his book about the pandemic? Some of my lockdown confidantes suggested it was a betrayal.... Quite the reverse. I wanted to get to the truth. What better way to find out what really happened – who said what to whom; the driving force and thinking behind key policies and decisions; who (if anyone) dissented; and how they were crushed – than to align myself with the key player?....
"In the event, Hancock shared far more than I could ever have imagined.... Published this week, co-authored by me, Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries are the first insider account from the heart of government of the most seismic political, economic and public health crisis of our times. I am not so naive as to imagine that he told me everything. However, since he still does not believe he did anything wrong, he was surprisingly inclined to disclosure. In an indication of how far he was prepared to go, the Cabinet Office requested almost 300 deletions and amendments to our original manuscript. Under pressure from me and out of his own desire that the book should be both entertaining and revelatory, to his credit, Hancock fought hard to retain as much controversial material as he could.... Here then – based not only on what is in the Pandemic Diaries but on every-thing I saw in the process of putting the book together – are what I consider the key lessons.
"The crusade to vaccinate the entire population against a disease with a low mortality rate among all but the very elderly is one of the most extraordinary cases of mission creep in political history. On 3 January 2021, Hancock told The Spectator that once priority groups had been jabbed (13 million doses) then ‘Cry freedom’. Instead, the government proceeded to attempt to vaccinate every-one, including children, and there was no freedom for another seven months.... Why did the goalposts move so far off the pitch? I believe multiple driving forces combined almost accidentally to create a policy which was never subjected to rigorous cost-benefit analysis.... Given the unprecedented speed at which the vaccine was developed, the government might have been expected to be extra careful about recording and analysing any reported side-effects. While there was much anxiety about potential adverse reactions during clinical trials, once it passed regulatory hurdles, ministers seemed to stop worrying....
"One of the most striking themes to emerge from internal communications is the scale of concern about Scotland.... Throughout the pandemic, far-reaching policy decisions, especially international travel restrictions and the timing of lockdowns, were distorted by what Sturgeon was doing or what No. 10 feared she might do. Hancock describes her move to mandate mask-wearing in secondary schools in late August 2020 as ‘one of her most egregious attempts at one-upmanship to date’, admitting the UK government was left ‘scrabbling around to formulate a response’. The UK government’s own guidance on face coverings had specifically excluded schools. Faced with an unpleasant choice between wheeling out the chief medical or scientific officer to say that the Scots were wrong or performing a U-turn, Downing Street chose the latter. That, rather than any medical reason, is why millions of schoolchildren were forced to spend months with grubby bits of material stuck to their faces....
"As far as Hancock was concerned, anyone who fundamentally disagreed with his approach was mad and dangerous and needed to be shut down.... Such was the fear of ‘anti-vaxxers’ that the Cabinet Office used a team hitherto dedicated to tackling Isis propaganda to curb their influence. The zero-tolerance approach extended to dissenting doctors and academics. The eminent scientists behind the so-called [Great] Barrington Declaration, which argued that public health efforts should focus on protecting the most vulnerable while allowing the g eneral population to build up natural immunity to the virus, were widely vilified: Hancock genuinely considered their views a threat to public health.... Anti-lockdown protests were quickly banned. When, in September 2020, the Cabinet Office tried to exempt demonstrations from the ‘rule of six’, Hancock enlisted Michael Gove to ‘kill it off’, arguing that marches would ‘undermine public confidence in social distancing’. Gove had no qualms about helping.....
"The accusation that he blithely discharged Covid-positive patients from hospitals into care homes, without thinking about how this might seed the virus among the frail elderly, or attempting to stop this happening, upsets and exasperates him. The evidence I have seen is broadly in his favour.... It later emerged that the primary source of new infection in these settings was in any case not hospital discharges, but the movement of staff between care homes.... Hancock knew he would be accused of ‘blaming’ hardworking staff if he emphasised the link (which is exactly what has now happened). He is on less solid ground in relation to the treatment of isolated care-home residents and their increasingly desperate relatives..... Behind the scenes, the then care home minister Helen Whately fought valiantly to persuade him to ease visiting restrictions to allow isolated residents some contact with their loved ones. She did not get very far. Internal communications reveal that the authorities expected to find cases of actual neglect of residents as a result of the suspension of routine care-home inspections.
"Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical face masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus. People were made to wear them anyway because Dominic Cummings was fixated with them; because Nicola Sturgeon liked them; and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency. As early as 3 February 2020 – long before anyone outside the Department of Health was taking the prospect of a pandemic seriously – ministers were told the masks make no significant difference. In April 2020, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) reiterated this advice. At the end of that month, the Sage committee said much the same thing, telling ministers that it would be unreasonable to claim a large benefit. An ‘obsessed’ Cummings was the driving force behind mandating mask-wearing in all healthcare settings – and then in retail and hospitality. On 28 June he messaged Hancock to complain that the government was being insufficiently ‘aggressive’ on the issue and demanding that they be compulsory in shops and for restaurant staff....
"There is no doubt that Hancock worked phenomenally hard to do what he felt was best, based on all the information available at the time. Day after day, he was forced to make tremendously difficult judgments, balancing sharply competing interests.... While vast sums of public money were wasted and the collateral damage from lockdowns and other Covid policies was enormous, I do not believe there was any kind of conspiracy, still less any malign intent on the part of our political leaders during the crisis. They may have been misguided; and got some things catastrophically wrong, but mistakes were made in good faith. Whether or not those errors will be forgiven by a public only just beginning to realise the full consequences is another question."
Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-truth-about-matt-hancock/
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