UK
The lesson from Matt Hancock’s WhatsApps is this: these clowns can’t govern, their only skill is covering tracks
Zoe Williams
Hancock ‘told to tone down China Covid lab leak claims’Zoe Williams
THE GUARDIAN
Wed, 8 March 2023
Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images
What is the public interest value of Matt Hancock’s huge cache of WhatsApp messages? They tell us a fair amount about him and his vanity. He has a laser-like focus on claiming credit. “I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO,” he writes in shouty caps, to an aide, about the plan to cut the approval time for a vaccine. “This is a Hancock triumph.” His tone is jokey and casual, his response to criticism querulous and brittle. “What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are,” Hancock texts, to which the then education secretary, Gavin Williamson, replies: “I know they really really do just hate work.” Hancock replies with two laughing emojis and a bullseye. They do not sound remotely like government ministers making high-stakes decisions: they sound like the thick two out of The Inbetweeners, moaning about their head of year and backslapping each other for their bons mots.
Hancock has a pretty high tolerance for situations that should have been intolerable to a health secretary: the “eat out to help out” policy, for example, was thought to have been driving infections – but not to worry, because he’d “kept it out of the news”. There is plenty to tease out about the man’s character, but how much of it didn’t we know already from I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here? He’s already said that he won’t be seeking re-election; his fitness for public office is now a footnote.
The professionalism and impartiality of the head of the civil service, Simon Case, have been called into question, and Michael Gove’s giant ego marvelled at. The banter, the callousness, the internecine rivalries, the chaos: it all suggests a general contempt for the public. Would we have wished it otherwise? Sure, government by mature public servants would have been more reassuring. Given what we already knew, however, from the Downing Street parties to the test-and-trace fiasco, little of this comes as a huge surprise. It’s hardly a smoking gun that Case called Boris Johnson a “nationally distrusted figure” – that distrust was palpable and often voiced.
We may see it all as our clearest view yet into the operating practices of government in this Tory era. The WhatsApps leaked to the Daily Telegraph do seem to confirm all the dark fears we had that the superficial, press clipping-driven approach apparent in public also underpinned the way inadequate ministers did their jobs in private during one of the most challenging periods of recent history.
Yet the medium really is the message, here: when policy is made over WhatsApp and transparency is delivered via a leak, a democratic debt opens up that cannot be easily be repaid. It can be serviced only by counterleak, by more gossip.
This has put the entire narrative in the hands of a newspaper fascinated by the rights and wrongs of lockdown, and whether the messaging around that time was fair or fearmongering (realistically, probably both – there was plenty to fear). Of course there are lessons to learn about the balance between civil liberties and public health, but this isn’t the way to hold Johnson and his ministers to account. Nobody was asking them to meet a completely unprecedented pandemic with perfect judgment on abstruse and novel questions such as “How serious is this new strain of the virus?”, or “Should non-cohabiting couples be allowed to see one another?”. What we could legitimately ask for was probity, coherence and the proper use of public funds, and those questions have been lost in the cacophony of a rightwing editorial agenda.
It doesn’t matter so much whether Hancock did “snogging and heavy petting” with Gina Coladangelo, or whether he broke his own social distancing rules. It’s far more important to follow the money: did the government break its own rules on procurement, and to what purpose – was it simple chumminess that saw vast sums finding their way to the likes of Michelle Mone or Pharmaceuticals Direct, a firm linked to the Conservative donor Samir Jassal? What were the criteria to get into the “VIP lane”, whether to supply PPE or focus group services?
Related: A (partial) defence of Matt Hancock: leaders must be free to discuss policy in private | Simon Jenkins
What will it take to get full details of all government Covid-related contracts? Without those, it simply isn’t possible to inquire into the pandemic response, either informally by the press or formally by committee. We don’t know whether the contractors were qualified, and we can’t gauge the quality of what they supplied; we won’t know whether NHS staff, carers and other public sector workers could have been better protected had PPE been supplied in better time, and been of better quality. We know money was wasted, of course, but we have no way of knowing how much. We can’t easily tell the difference between incompetence and corruption.
“The use of private communications,” wrote the Good Law Project, seeking an appeal hearing in the supreme court, “has not only put our national security at risk, but led to the deletion of crucial records and information that should be available for public scrutiny.” That case was denied in December, when the court of appeal ruled that courts should not control ministers’ use of private phones and messaging services, even when they were using those to negotiate commercial deals with VIPs, in breach of their own policy.
The Lockdown Files delivered one important lesson, but not for us, unfortunately: rather for cabinet ministers, who are now purportedly putting their WhatsApps on auto-delete, prompting a warning from the information commissioner . Far from opening up the pandemic period to greater scrutiny, Hancock’s messages have merely flagged to his colleagues the importance of evading it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Wed, 8 March 2023
Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images
What is the public interest value of Matt Hancock’s huge cache of WhatsApp messages? They tell us a fair amount about him and his vanity. He has a laser-like focus on claiming credit. “I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO,” he writes in shouty caps, to an aide, about the plan to cut the approval time for a vaccine. “This is a Hancock triumph.” His tone is jokey and casual, his response to criticism querulous and brittle. “What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are,” Hancock texts, to which the then education secretary, Gavin Williamson, replies: “I know they really really do just hate work.” Hancock replies with two laughing emojis and a bullseye. They do not sound remotely like government ministers making high-stakes decisions: they sound like the thick two out of The Inbetweeners, moaning about their head of year and backslapping each other for their bons mots.
Hancock has a pretty high tolerance for situations that should have been intolerable to a health secretary: the “eat out to help out” policy, for example, was thought to have been driving infections – but not to worry, because he’d “kept it out of the news”. There is plenty to tease out about the man’s character, but how much of it didn’t we know already from I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here? He’s already said that he won’t be seeking re-election; his fitness for public office is now a footnote.
The professionalism and impartiality of the head of the civil service, Simon Case, have been called into question, and Michael Gove’s giant ego marvelled at. The banter, the callousness, the internecine rivalries, the chaos: it all suggests a general contempt for the public. Would we have wished it otherwise? Sure, government by mature public servants would have been more reassuring. Given what we already knew, however, from the Downing Street parties to the test-and-trace fiasco, little of this comes as a huge surprise. It’s hardly a smoking gun that Case called Boris Johnson a “nationally distrusted figure” – that distrust was palpable and often voiced.
We may see it all as our clearest view yet into the operating practices of government in this Tory era. The WhatsApps leaked to the Daily Telegraph do seem to confirm all the dark fears we had that the superficial, press clipping-driven approach apparent in public also underpinned the way inadequate ministers did their jobs in private during one of the most challenging periods of recent history.
Yet the medium really is the message, here: when policy is made over WhatsApp and transparency is delivered via a leak, a democratic debt opens up that cannot be easily be repaid. It can be serviced only by counterleak, by more gossip.
This has put the entire narrative in the hands of a newspaper fascinated by the rights and wrongs of lockdown, and whether the messaging around that time was fair or fearmongering (realistically, probably both – there was plenty to fear). Of course there are lessons to learn about the balance between civil liberties and public health, but this isn’t the way to hold Johnson and his ministers to account. Nobody was asking them to meet a completely unprecedented pandemic with perfect judgment on abstruse and novel questions such as “How serious is this new strain of the virus?”, or “Should non-cohabiting couples be allowed to see one another?”. What we could legitimately ask for was probity, coherence and the proper use of public funds, and those questions have been lost in the cacophony of a rightwing editorial agenda.
It doesn’t matter so much whether Hancock did “snogging and heavy petting” with Gina Coladangelo, or whether he broke his own social distancing rules. It’s far more important to follow the money: did the government break its own rules on procurement, and to what purpose – was it simple chumminess that saw vast sums finding their way to the likes of Michelle Mone or Pharmaceuticals Direct, a firm linked to the Conservative donor Samir Jassal? What were the criteria to get into the “VIP lane”, whether to supply PPE or focus group services?
Related: A (partial) defence of Matt Hancock: leaders must be free to discuss policy in private | Simon Jenkins
What will it take to get full details of all government Covid-related contracts? Without those, it simply isn’t possible to inquire into the pandemic response, either informally by the press or formally by committee. We don’t know whether the contractors were qualified, and we can’t gauge the quality of what they supplied; we won’t know whether NHS staff, carers and other public sector workers could have been better protected had PPE been supplied in better time, and been of better quality. We know money was wasted, of course, but we have no way of knowing how much. We can’t easily tell the difference between incompetence and corruption.
“The use of private communications,” wrote the Good Law Project, seeking an appeal hearing in the supreme court, “has not only put our national security at risk, but led to the deletion of crucial records and information that should be available for public scrutiny.” That case was denied in December, when the court of appeal ruled that courts should not control ministers’ use of private phones and messaging services, even when they were using those to negotiate commercial deals with VIPs, in breach of their own policy.
The Lockdown Files delivered one important lesson, but not for us, unfortunately: rather for cabinet ministers, who are now purportedly putting their WhatsApps on auto-delete, prompting a warning from the information commissioner . Far from opening up the pandemic period to greater scrutiny, Hancock’s messages have merely flagged to his colleagues the importance of evading it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
UK
Tory MP lobbied NHS chief on behalf of firm that paid him £1,600 a month
The Lockdown Files Team
Wed, 8 March 2023
Brine message
The chairman of the health select committee lobbied the head of the NHS on behalf of a firm paying him £1,600 a month, The Telegraph can reveal.
Steve Brine, a former health minister, told Michael Gove he had been “trying for months” to convince the NHS to hire anaesthetists through Remedium, a recruitment company he worked for.
A WhatsApp message seen by the Telegraph reveals Mr Brine contacted Simon Stevens, then chief executive of NHS England, as well as the Department of Health to suggest they use the company, in an apparent breach of two lobbying rules.
The message, which was forwarded to Matt Hancock by Mr Gove on Feb 2, 2021, said:
MPs condemned Mr Brine’s conduct as “disgraceful” on Wednesday and called for his resignation from the health committee.
It has previously been reported that, earlier in the pandemic, Mr Brine suggested that Mr Hancock use Remedium to hire staff to work in Nightingale Hospitals.
At the time in March 2020, he was working as an ad-hoc consultant for the firm, at a rate of £800 per day.
Mr Brine denied any wrongdoing and said he had merely passed on a letter to the then health secretary, and had not lobbied him.
The letter was dated six months and 15 days after his last payment from Remedium, which placed him outside of the restricted lobbying period for MPs.
However, in July 2020, the firm then began paying him £1,600 for eight hours' work each month – an arrangement that continued until the end of December 2021.
Steve Brine
The latest revelations from the WhatsApp message show Mr Brine claimed he had spent “months” trying to persuade both the Department of Health and Lord Stevens that they should use Remedium to hire anaesthetists.
He has since been elected chairman of the health and social care select committee in Parliament.
The message could mean Mr Brine has breached two different lobbying rules.
Under the first rule, set by the Government, former ministers are banned from using contacts from their time in government to lobby for two years after they return to the backbenches.
When Mr Brine requested advice on the role from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, the lobbying watchdog for former ministers, he was told that for two years after leaving office in March 2019, he should not “become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government/NHS organisations on behalf of Remedium Partners” or use “Government and/or Whitehall contacts…to secure business on behalf of Remedium Partners”.
Under the second rule, set by Parliament, MPs are not allowed to lobby for an organisation from which they are receiving “a reward” for six months after receiving a payment.
The message shows that Mr Brine was lobbying in favour of the firm to both ministers and NHS organisations within this period.
Request passed to NHS England
Separate messages between Mr Hancock and his team show that Mr Brine's request was passed to NHS England via Allan Nixon, the health secretary’s special adviser:
“I told him team were sorting it and he hasn’t come back to me about it since,” Mr Nixon said.
The adviser then appeared to complain about the volume of requests Mr Brine had sent to the Department of Health.
“Steve’s being a nob right now and I’ve no idea why. Been chasing my tail trying to sort loads of stuff for him (not least his hospital) and he still acts like this.”
The next day, Feb 3, 2021, Mr Nixon said that “Prerana’s team” had been in contact with David Green, the CEO of Remedium.
It is thought Mr Nixon was referring to Prerana Issar, the NHS’s Chief People Officer.
Anneliese Dodds, chairman of the Labour Party, said: "While NHS heroes and other key workers battled the virus, and the British people did their bit by staying at home, it's disgraceful that a Conservative MP appeared more interested in making a fast buck out of the pandemic.
"If Steve Brine has broken lobbying rules he must face the consequences. Rishi Sunak has been too weak to stand up to his party or his Cabinet. Will he take the appropriate action in this case?"
Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, said Mr Brine should resign from the committee pending an investigation.
"These messages suggest Steve Brine was desperate to help his corporate employers whilst the country was pulling together during a pandemic and leaves him with serious questions to answer,” she said.
"Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Rishi Sunak should launch an independent investigation into this damning evidence immediately."
Mr Brine told the Telegraph: "This was about responding in the national interest to an urgent public call from ministers and the NHS in a national crisis even if, ultimately, it led nowhere let alone secure any business for Remedium.”
The rule against MPs lobbying is regulated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who can recommend sanctions, including suspension from the House of Commons for a fixed period.
The rules on paid advocacy were broken in a widely publicised way by Owen Paterson, the former MP for North Shropshire, who received support from Boris Johnson, then prime minister, after the commissioner recommended he be suspended for 30 days.
The incident resulted in a major debate over standards in public life and caused a rift between Mr Johnson and his backbenchers that precipitated his downfall.
Tory MP lobbied NHS chief on behalf of firm that paid him £1,600 a month
The Lockdown Files Team
Wed, 8 March 2023
Brine message
The chairman of the health select committee lobbied the head of the NHS on behalf of a firm paying him £1,600 a month, The Telegraph can reveal.
Steve Brine, a former health minister, told Michael Gove he had been “trying for months” to convince the NHS to hire anaesthetists through Remedium, a recruitment company he worked for.
A WhatsApp message seen by the Telegraph reveals Mr Brine contacted Simon Stevens, then chief executive of NHS England, as well as the Department of Health to suggest they use the company, in an apparent breach of two lobbying rules.
The message, which was forwarded to Matt Hancock by Mr Gove on Feb 2, 2021, said:
MPs condemned Mr Brine’s conduct as “disgraceful” on Wednesday and called for his resignation from the health committee.
It has previously been reported that, earlier in the pandemic, Mr Brine suggested that Mr Hancock use Remedium to hire staff to work in Nightingale Hospitals.
At the time in March 2020, he was working as an ad-hoc consultant for the firm, at a rate of £800 per day.
Mr Brine denied any wrongdoing and said he had merely passed on a letter to the then health secretary, and had not lobbied him.
The letter was dated six months and 15 days after his last payment from Remedium, which placed him outside of the restricted lobbying period for MPs.
However, in July 2020, the firm then began paying him £1,600 for eight hours' work each month – an arrangement that continued until the end of December 2021.
Steve Brine
The latest revelations from the WhatsApp message show Mr Brine claimed he had spent “months” trying to persuade both the Department of Health and Lord Stevens that they should use Remedium to hire anaesthetists.
He has since been elected chairman of the health and social care select committee in Parliament.
The message could mean Mr Brine has breached two different lobbying rules.
Under the first rule, set by the Government, former ministers are banned from using contacts from their time in government to lobby for two years after they return to the backbenches.
When Mr Brine requested advice on the role from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, the lobbying watchdog for former ministers, he was told that for two years after leaving office in March 2019, he should not “become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government/NHS organisations on behalf of Remedium Partners” or use “Government and/or Whitehall contacts…to secure business on behalf of Remedium Partners”.
Under the second rule, set by Parliament, MPs are not allowed to lobby for an organisation from which they are receiving “a reward” for six months after receiving a payment.
The message shows that Mr Brine was lobbying in favour of the firm to both ministers and NHS organisations within this period.
Request passed to NHS England
Separate messages between Mr Hancock and his team show that Mr Brine's request was passed to NHS England via Allan Nixon, the health secretary’s special adviser:
“I told him team were sorting it and he hasn’t come back to me about it since,” Mr Nixon said.
The adviser then appeared to complain about the volume of requests Mr Brine had sent to the Department of Health.
“Steve’s being a nob right now and I’ve no idea why. Been chasing my tail trying to sort loads of stuff for him (not least his hospital) and he still acts like this.”
The next day, Feb 3, 2021, Mr Nixon said that “Prerana’s team” had been in contact with David Green, the CEO of Remedium.
It is thought Mr Nixon was referring to Prerana Issar, the NHS’s Chief People Officer.
Anneliese Dodds, chairman of the Labour Party, said: "While NHS heroes and other key workers battled the virus, and the British people did their bit by staying at home, it's disgraceful that a Conservative MP appeared more interested in making a fast buck out of the pandemic.
"If Steve Brine has broken lobbying rules he must face the consequences. Rishi Sunak has been too weak to stand up to his party or his Cabinet. Will he take the appropriate action in this case?"
Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, said Mr Brine should resign from the committee pending an investigation.
"These messages suggest Steve Brine was desperate to help his corporate employers whilst the country was pulling together during a pandemic and leaves him with serious questions to answer,” she said.
"Frankly, the whole thing stinks. Rishi Sunak should launch an independent investigation into this damning evidence immediately."
Mr Brine told the Telegraph: "This was about responding in the national interest to an urgent public call from ministers and the NHS in a national crisis even if, ultimately, it led nowhere let alone secure any business for Remedium.”
The rule against MPs lobbying is regulated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who can recommend sanctions, including suspension from the House of Commons for a fixed period.
The rules on paid advocacy were broken in a widely publicised way by Owen Paterson, the former MP for North Shropshire, who received support from Boris Johnson, then prime minister, after the commissioner recommended he be suspended for 30 days.
The incident resulted in a major debate over standards in public life and caused a rift between Mr Johnson and his backbenchers that precipitated his downfall.
Gavin Cordon
Wed, 8 March 2023
Matt Hancock
Matt Hancock was instructed by the Cabinet Office to tone down claims in his memoir that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak in China, according to leaked correspondence.
Officials warned it would “cause problems” if he repeated the claim in his Pandemic Diaries and insisted he must make clear he was not reflecting the Government’s view, The Daily Telegraph reported.
The changes to the book were made after he submitted the manuscript to the Cabinet Office for review last year – a procedure all former ministers are obliged to follow.
According to the Telegraph, which has obtained tens of thousands of the former health secretary’s messages, Mr Hancock had wanted to say that “given how cagey the Chinese have been” their official version of events should be treated with “considerable scepticism”.
“Global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation into what happened,” he wrote in the original manuscript.
In response, the Cabinet Office wrote: “This is highly sensitive and would cause problems if released.
“Must be clearer that it is supposition rather than revealing any confidential information received from inside government. Should also be clear that this is not HMG views or beliefs.”
It also expressed concern about proposed comparisons in the book between the Wuhan Institute of Virology – in the city where the virus first emerged – and the Ministry of Defence’s research laboratories at Porton Down.
Mr Hancock originally wrote it was “just too much of a coincidence” that the pandemic started in the same city as the institute.
“The only plausible alternative is that the virus was brought to Wuhan to be studied, and then escaped,” he wrote in one passage.
“The Chinese denials are a bit like us claiming that a random virus just happened to break out near a little place called Porton Down, perhaps because of some badgers. It just doesn’t fly.”
However the Cabinet Office expressed concern that it could be seized on by the Russians, who had previously claimed the novichok nerve agent used in the Salisbury poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal originated at Porton Down.
“The reference to Porton Down is damaging to national security – what is set up as a joke, is one of the attack lines Russia has used against us for the novichok poisoning, as it is only a few miles from Porton Down to Salisbury (which is entirely coincidental – as, we believe, it is that the Wuhan lab is so close to where the first Covid outbreak was recorded),” it said.
The disclosure comes after the head of the FBI said last week the agency had assessed that Covid was “most likely” the result of a lab leak.
In response to the Telegraph report, a Government spokesman said: “We would not comment on leaks or private discussions.”
A spokesperson for Mr Hancock said: “Matt will categorically not comment on national security matters.
“The release of this material shows yet again that this unlawful leak of partial information is motivated only by money and an attempt to spin a biased narrative.
“This is completely against the public interest, which will be served by the public inquiry.”
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