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TThere must be many times here when Matt Hancock wonders what he has done in a past life to deserve his current one. Now that I think about it, there are many times most of us have to wonder what we have done in a previous life to deserve Matt Hancock. The health secretary’s life is now a continual misery, where he is asked to explain things about the coronavirus that are little more than hope and guesswork on his part. On Monday alone, on what he had imagined to be a day off, he was forced to improvise for Boris Johnson at the Commons for 45 minutes when the Downing Street communications powerhouse fell silent.
On Tuesday, Hancock returned for a two-hour “lessons learned” debriefing. Sadly, this was not going to be an extended therapy session for the deepest existential questions of Door Matt’s psyche. So we never knew if he had learned the lesson of arrogance and would never again allow his ambition to exceed his capabilities. Just when the country needed a truly capable health secretary, we have someone whose enthusiasm and style would have led him to become the manager of a luxury car showroom.
It’s not that Matt isn’t a tester. No one can deny that he means well, even when it’s clearly out of reach, and that’s what makes him such a pathetic figure. But even Hancock is starting to fray. In the past, he could be trusted to be a Tigger, full of boundless optimism and energy, but now he’s starting to look defensive and shattered; torn between not wanting to be thought of as a failure and longing for the day when the prime minister takes him sideways to a less stressful job.
So the first exchanges between Jeremy Hunt, the chairman of the select committee, and Door Matt were decidedly irritable. After a brief acknowledgment that hope was on the distant horizon in the form of three possible vaccines, Hunt asked Hancock if he had always followed science. “I’d rather say that we always go by science,” said Matt.
“But you used to say you followed science,” Hunt observed.
“He was just being conversational on those occasions,” Hancock snapped.
Now we were slipping down a semantic rabbit hole. One in which it was unclear whether the government was following science when it got it right and was guided by science when it screwed up. Or vice versa. Even Door Matt couldn’t think of how to get out of that one, as his answer to if we closed too late in March was that we had actually closed it earlier on the curve compared to some European countries.
Which didn’t really answer the questions of why some Asian countries handled the pandemic without a lockdown using a community testing, track and trace work system and why we hadn’t taken the growing number of body bags in Italy as a species. warning. act before. He has a feeling that to Hancock it remains a complete mystery why the UK has the highest mortality count in Europe.
The health secretary also went to great lengths to explain why Sage had described the test and trace system, which had already cost £ 12 billion, as having only a marginal effect. The best thing he could think of was that Sage must have been talking about one rogue tracker in particular and that it would be wrong for someone to necessarily create the statistics his own department released.
“One of the lessons we’ve learned is to attack the disease hard and do it early,” Door Matt said hard. At the time, most of the people gasped, because it was too obvious that this was something that neither he nor the government had done. Rather than accept Sage’s advice from a two-week breaker in September, it had persisted with a three-tier regional approach that had proven ineffective.
Hancock soon got into trouble: first he argued that a two-week breaker wouldn’t have been enough, then he sulkily insisted that the four-week-later lockout was definitely going to work, even if it didn’t and had been introduced as well. late. At this point, it was again unclear if Matt was following science or being guided by it. Or if he was following incompetence or being guided by it.
Like the loyal Tories that they are, neither Hunt nor the chairman of the joint committee, Greg Clark, were too keen to explore whether one of the lessons learned could be that handing out expensive contracts to friends of friends could be a waste of money. government during a pandemic. , so this topic was largely avoided. Though Hancock reasonably said he has no regrets spending £ 44,000 on pizza for the 24-hour staff. It’s a shame he didn’t take the same human stance on free school meals during the holidays.
Conservative Luke Evans was eager to finish the session on the best. Surely there must have been some good things we have learned from all this unfortunate mess. We had kept the schools open the second time, Door Matt said. Well, everyone nodded. Anything else? “Yes,” Hancock yelled. It was time for the British to kick the habit of working as soldiers and learn to take more time off. So once the coronavirus pandemic was under control, he wanted to keep all the testing centers open so that even someone with a hint of a cold could come along and be diagnosed with a cold and taken on sick leave. I’m not sure that’s the lesson the NHS hoped to learn from the pandemic.
