Dominic Cummings may be bitter and twisted — but what if he is right about Matt Hancock?

The Prime Minister has “full confidence” in Matt Hancock, we were told by a spokesperson two days ago. It has become increasingly obvious that this statement is untrue. That it can so easily be rolled off without comment shows the predictability of such inventions: the statement might as well not have been made, as it leaves us none the wiser about the prime ministerial mind. Unfortunately for him, the mind of one person is becoming increasingly clear — and vituperative — by the day. Boris Johnson’s hope is that most will deem that mind to be merely as deranged as it accuses the Government of being. 

Yet no one interested in how the country has and is to be run should ignore the crescendo in Dominic Cummings’ delirium tremens of accusations. The latest hit-piece, encased in a characteristically sprawling diatribe of an article, again focuses not so much on the leader he deserted as the minister he deems most guilty for the country’s lists of dead. The headlines are simple: Johnson thought in late March of last year that his Health Secretary, at the time of greatest medical emergency for the country in a hundred years, was “totally fucking hopeless”. Cummings claims to have warned his boss that a lockdown was the only possible strategy many days before the plan was seriously considered and eventually enforced. Hancock, still wary over the costs and paperwork involved in securing contracts for PPE and ventilators, dithered around getting the necessary supplies to hospitals. This makes him, in Cummings’ gravest claim, responsible for the needless deaths of many NHS doctors and nurses. This is the incompetence to which Cummings directs his fiercest ire. 

The accusation of incompetence is so often thrown around by commentators (including this one) that it tends to lose the adhesiveness needed when its most dangerous results become clear. If we are to take Cummings at his word, then this should be one such moment when the charge manages to stick. Fortunately for Hancock, believing Dominic Cummings is something few are prepared to do. For Hancock is replicating a great skill of his boss, and showing that there are some times and some people to whom the usual rules of political probity never apply. Even better, that the public is largely unusually willing at such times to take them at the word. 

Are we not all assured that our ministers have “tried their best” over their last year? The vaccine drive gives the lie to those who deride them for their incompetence. 

Indeed, if anyone looks guilty, it’s Cummings himself. The longer his ravings go on, the more deluded they look, and the more easily his targets are able to ignore them. Hancock is, in his own words, too busy “saving lives” to deal with such accusations. He and the Government of which he is part have a perpetual get-out clause. The “gloomsters and doomsters” are moralising while we’re getting on with it.

A persuasive argument, certainly, and it brings us easily onto Cummings’ second issue with Johnson, one of trust. Again, it is so frequently levelled at the Prime Minister that it has become hackneyed, throwing Johnson into the clear once more. Hancock, too, has learnt how to make his public inured to such charges against him. Cummings says that not only was the Health Secretary slow to recognise the virtues of a mass testing programme, but that, when he did, it was used not to save lives, but as a tool of political expediency. An expediency, it should be said, unparalleled in recent history, at least in Whitehall, given the cost of such moves. Hancock was, as Cummings repeatedly alleges, more interested in presenting his “nauseating spiel” at the daily press conferences than he was in the capability of Britains’ testing programme. When the target of 100,000 was met, Hancock was able to swan in front of the cameras to parade his own triumph. 

Much of Cummings’ inside accusations centre around the weeks after the first lockdown was announced, when Johnson, Cummings and Chris Whitty were down with the disease they were in place to control. This left Hancock, who had tested positive without symptoms before, in control of much of the messaging and decision-making of government. It was here that he belatedly set upon the testing goal, and, if Cummings is to be believed, “wrenched” the levers in Whitehall to “focus on his press conference” — leaving the incoming disasters in PPE supplies and care homes to fester. 

In his pique, Cummings spitefully rolls the charges of incompetence and mendacity into one. Hancock first failed to act on the supposed “cap” on Treasury spending on ventilators and protective equipment which, Cummings tells us, had been removed in March so that such needed contracts could be secured and supplies imported. Hancock claimed last week that it was he who asked for the cap to be removed, even though this was only on 11 April. Given the late date, this claim was “a lie that if true would show again he was useless”, says Cummings, exasperated again by the gullibility of the MPs who believed Hancock last week.

The tragedy for this embittered man is that deceit, manipulation, and expedience are precisely the labels that most people attach to his name whenever he appears in the headlines once again. Despite the accusations, many still deem it plausible that such a demonstrably undervalued minister should still be receiving the Prime Minister’s blessing and keep such control over our lives. That view of Matt Hancock seems as myopic as Dominic Cummings’ eyesight in that fateful tour of County Durham all those months ago. 

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