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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

Matt Hancock resigns: Sajid Javid vows to get country ‘back to normal’ as he takes over as health secretary – as it happened

Early afternoon summary

  • Sajid Javid has said that seeking to ensure that life can return to normal after the pandemic “as quickly as possible” will be his most immediate priority as the new health secretary. (See 10.58am and 2.33pm.) Given some of his previous comments, there is speculation that Javid will be more comfortable easing Covid restrictions than his predecessor, Matt Hancock, who was seen as more cautious on this front than some of his cabinet colleagues. (See 12pm.)
  • Boris Johnson has been criticised for allowing Hancock to wait until Saturday evening before resigning, instead of sacking him on Friday morning, when the Sun revealed he had broken Covid restrictions by kissing an aide in his office. (See 8.21am and 9.16am.) Labour’s Lucy Powell said that Johnson had “a very dangerous blind spot when it comes to issues of integrity and conduct in public life”.
  • Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, has said that Hancock made the right decision by putting the national interest first and resigning. But Labour has criticised Lewis for saying that Hancock deserved “credit” for the move. (See 11.22am.)
  • The government will be launching an internal investigation into how CCTV footage of Hancock was leaked, Lewis has said. (See 8.46am.)
  • Labour has demanded an investigation into reports that Hancock used a private Gmail account to conduct government business. (See 12.20pm.)
  • Brandon Lewis has said that the EU must back up its words about showing flexibility on the Northern Ireland protocol with actions. He told the Andrew Marr show:

We’ve got to make sure that we are delivering for people in Northern Ireland, that we get the flexibility so that people in Northern Ireland have the same experience as they would anywhere else in the United Kingdom in terms of being able to receive products and goods. Now that’s a two-way thing and the EU needs to show the flexibility that they keep talking about.

  • Prof Sir Peter Horby, chairman of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), has said that it would be a mistake for the government to lift all remaining restrictions for England on Monday 5 July (a week tomorrow). The government has held open the option of going ahead with full lockdown easing on 5 July, but it has said that 19 July is the most realistic date. A final decision is due to be announced tomorrow. Asked if he would back full re-opening on 5 July, Horby told the Marr show:

No, I wouldn’t do that. I think it was a very sensible move to put it back by four weeks and I don’t think we should rush into anything.

  • Andrew Marr, the BBC presenter, has revealed that he got a “nasty” bout of Covid after attending the G7 summit, despite being fully vaccinated. The Independent has the full story.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

Sajid Javid speaking to reporters today following his appointment as health secretary.
Sajid Javid speaking to reporters today following his appointment as health secretary. Photograph: Simon Dawson/No10 Downing Street

Updated

Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, has just issued a statement through the press office at the Department for Health and Social Care. It echoes what he said in his TV clip earlier. (See 10.58am.) In the new statement he said:

I’m incredibly honoured to take up the post of health and social care secretary, particularly during such an important moment in our recovery from Covid-19. This position comes with a huge responsibility and I will do everything I can to deliver for the people of this great country.

Thanks to the fantastic efforts of our NHS and social care staff who work tirelessly every day, and our phenomenal vaccination programme, we have made enormous progress in the battle against this dreadful disease. I want our country to get out of this pandemic and that will be my most immediate priority.

UPDATE: The Sun’s Harry Cole points out that this statement is not quite the same as the one issued earlier (see 10.58am), and that the more idealistic line about life returning to normal has been left out.

Updated

These are from Beth Rigby, Sky’s political editor, on Sajid Javid’s appointment as health secretary.

Dame Una O’Brien, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Health between 2010 and 2016, told the World at One that “rarely, if ever” had anyone been appointed health secretary “with the depth and breadth of experience that Sajid Javid brings”. And there has never been a health secretary who has previously been home secretary and chancellor, she said.

(Javid’s other three previous cabinet jobs were: culture secretary, business secretary and communities secretary.)

O’Brien said Javid’s experience was “just what we need at this very difficult time”.

As well as being a former chancellor, Javid held two junior ministerial posts in the Treasury. O’Brien said that “that knowledge and understanding of how your adversary [ie, the Treasury] thinks about the funding of the NHS” would be very valuable to Javid. She said that was bound to be an advantage to the Department for Health in discussions about the funding of social care.

Here is a round-up of some of the more interesting comment on Matt Hancock’s resignation, and his replacement by Sajid Javid, from today’s papers and blogs.

Why is personal character now so irrelevant, when it used to be what really mattered? Read the ministerial code and nearly all of it is a joke: of the seven principles of public life, Hancock has breached every one in this incident alone. No “high standards of behaviour” for him; no being “professional” with colleagues; no being transparent about the people who are working for you when you’re shipping in your old Oxford mates for shags in the office.

  • Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer says the slowness of Hancock’s departure reflects badly on Boris Johnson.

The prime minister’s initial assumption was his default one about scandals: media storms will blow themselves out and most of the public have as little interest in integrity in government as he does. So the ethics invigilator can judge Priti Patel guilty of breaching the ministerial code on bullying civil servants and she remains as home secretary. Robert Jenrick can be found to have expedited an unlawful planning decision that saved a Tory donor a lot in tax and continue in cabinet. Gavin Williamson can be a serial incompetent and still draw a ministerial salary. Under the same twisted doctrine of non-accountability, the prime minister’s first instinct was that Mr Hancock could cling on as health secretary.

He may have gone now, but the slowness of his departure leaves the continuing impression that Boris Johnson’s government thinks there is one rule for us and no rules for them.

  • Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome says the return of Javid makes the succession to Johnson more complicated.

Conspiracy theorists will claim that by building Javid up, the Prime Minister is inching Rishi Sunak down. After all, the new Health Secretary is a former leadership contender himself. The potential succession to Johnson is now just a little bit more complicated.

We’re not at all sure that Javid would have got the job in the bigger shuffle. Work and Pensions, Education or even the Foreign Office were, on balance, more likely.

Sajid Javid returned to the cabinet as health secretary last night, a Lazarus-like political revival for a key ally of Carrie Johnson.

The former chancellor had been angling for a return to the top table almost from the moment he resigned in February 2020 after Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, then Johnson’s senior aides, demanded the removal of his political advisers.

Javid’s appointment to replace Matt Hancock represents a final, symbolic, turning of the page from the Vote Leave regime that dominated Downing Street for Johnson’s first year in power, and proof that the “first lady” has triumphed in the power struggle that gripped No 10 for much of last year.

  • James Forsyth in the Spectator says Johnson should now delay the departure of Simon Stevens, the outgoing chief executive of NHS England.

The decision on the new head of the NHS is one of the most consequential decisions that Sajid Javid will make as health secretary and asking a newcomer to the brief to make this decision straightaway is unwise, especially as there is such a divide in opinion about who the best candidate for the job is. Stevens continuing would provide some continuity and allow Javid to make a decision once he had time to determine what the health service was most in need of.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign, which has been campaigning for a public inquiry into the pandemic starting now, welcomed the resignation of Matt Hancock in a Twitter thread last night. It starts here.

The group also said Hancock should have gone earlier.

In her column for the Mail on Sunday Sarah Vine, who is married to the Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, has used the Matt Hancock affair to reflect on why political marriages often end up in difficulty. She says that it is hard to do a “high-level, high-pressure, high-stakes” job, like being a minister, unless you have a partner prepared to look after everything else. This means “you become so entrenched in your respective roles that you begin to drift apart”, she says.

She goes on:

Ministers are surrounded by people telling them how brilliant they are. Their departments treat them like feudal barons. Their every whim is treated as law. No one ever says No to them.

They certainly don’t get asked to unload the dishwasher. And after a while, it changes them. It becomes increasingly difficult for anything to compete with the adrenaline of power.

How can anyone be expected to put the bins out when they’ve just got home from a day saving the world? Domestic life can seem dull and dispiriting by comparison.

And so they begin to avoid it. So much easier to stay late or say Yes to a fundraiser, or show your support at a fellow MP’s drinks party.

Westminster is a place of myriad distractions for the politician seeking refuge from his or her home life.

And when you feel disconnected like that, and because power is such an aphrodisiac, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how you can go from being happily married to the kind of person who gets caught so unfortunately on CCTV.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, has described the Sunday Times revelation (paywall) that Matt Hancock used a personal email address for government business when he was health secretary as “very serious”. She is demanding an investigation.

In his story Gabriel Pogrund reports:

Since March last year the former health secretary has routinely used a private account to conduct government business, concealing information from his own officials and potentially the public, according to documents obtained by The Sunday Times.

It means that the government does not hold records of much of Hancock’s decision-making, including negotiating multimillion-pound PPE contracts, setting up the £37 billion test and trace programme and overseeing the government’s care homes strategy.

Pogrund says Hancock’s use of a personal account is disclosed in minutes of a meeting held at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in December. Pogrund reports:

The minutes record that David Williams, the department’s second permanent secretary, had warned about Hancock’s conduct, saying that he “only” deals with his private office “via Gmail account”. He stated that “the SOS [secretary of state] does not have a DHSC inbox” ...

Since the meeting, Hancock has been given an official email account, although two Whitehall sources said that he still preferred to use Gmail. This is considered to be a less traceable form of communication.

The DHSC told the Sunday Times that “ministers understand the rules around personal email usage and only conduct government business through their departmental email addresses”.

Sky’s Rob Powell has posted dug up a quote from Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, from an interview last year that suggests Javid will be more inclined to side with the lockdown-sceptics in cabinet debates than his predecessor, Matt Hancock.

Anti-Hancock placards being waved by protesters in London yesterday attending an anti-lockdown ‘freedom march’.
Anti-Hancock placards being waved by protesters in London yesterday attending an anti-lockdown ‘freedom march’.
 Photograph: Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

Here is a random selection of tweets about Sajid Javid’s appointment as health secretary from opposition politicians. There have been plenty of supportive tweets too from his Conservative colleagues (some of which may have just been posted out of routine politeness or sycophancy, but some of which reflect the fact that he is popular with colleagues).

Here are four critical, policy-focused comments

From the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

From the Labour peer Stewart Wood

From the Labour MP Zarah Sultana

From the Sinn Féin MP Chris Hazzard

And here are two more friendly, personal comments.

From Humza Yousaf, the Scottish government’s health minister

(Yousaf, like Javid, is of Pakistani heritage. Both men have been pioneers as politicians from Muslim families reaching high office in the Scottish and UK governments respectively.)

From Jonny Oates, a Lib Dem peer and chief of staff to Nick Clegg when he was deputy PM in the coalition government

Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party chair, has criticised Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, for saying Matt Hancock deserves “credit” for resigning. (See 8.44am.) In a statement she said:

It speaks volumes about the total lack of integrity at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government that a minister could think Hancock deserves credit for resigning.

Hancock’s record includes wasting huge sums of taxpayers’ money, leaving care homes exposed and breaking his own Covid rules.

If Boris Johnson had any backbone, he would have removed him.

Here is the full quote from Lewis. He was responding to a question from Sky’s Trevor Philipps about why it took Hancock and Boris Johnson so long to realise Hancock’s position was untenable. Lewis said:

I do think it was right that the prime minister and Matt were focused, even in the last couple of days, in making sure that experience, that knowledge gained through the last year and a half or so in dealing with the pandemic, was there to be able to focus on the pandemic.

And I don’t think that is in any contradiction at all to Matt also taking the opportunity to look at the situation and to reflect and decide that his position was distracting from the work that has come out of the pandemic.

And I think, credit to Matt, that his focus is not just on his family but on the wider country and the best interests of the UK.

Prof Linda Bauld, professor of public health at Edinburgh University, told Sky this morning that Boris Johnson’s decision to support Matt Hancock, even for just 48 hours, was “very unfortunate”. She said:

I think the problem in the behavioural messaging is: we can’t have one rule for them and another for us.

That divides the country. And if the government is asking people to change their behaviour, as they still are, and comply with public health guidelines, they need to do it themselves and lead by example.

Javid says his priority as new health secretary will be ending pandemic and getting life back to normal 'as soon as possible'

Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, has recorded a brief clip for broadcasters. He said that his priority would be trying to ensure that people can return to normal, in terms of seeing Covid restrictions lifted, as soon as possible.

Here is the full quote.

I just want to start by saying I think Matt Hancock worked incredibly hard. He achieved a lot, and I’m sure he will have more to offer in public life. [This is also what the PM said to Hancock - see 8.15am.]

I was honoured to take up this position. I also know that it comes with huge responsibility. And I will do everything I can to make sure that I deliver for the people of this great country.

We are still in a pandemic and I want to see that come to an end as soon as possible, and that will be my most immediate priority - to see that we can return to normal as soon and as quickly as possible.

Now, I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m sure you appreciate that. And if you can excuse me, I’d like to get on with it.

It is a fairly innocuous quote, although a health minister with more than 12 hours’ experience might not have phrased it quite like this. Most health experts think a full return to “normal” is still some way off; they tend to talk instead of life returning closer to normal.

Updated

In his interview on the Andrew Marr Show Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Commons health committee, said he thought the intelligence agencies would want to find out how a cabinet minister was filmed inside his own office. Hunt said:

It’s completely unacceptable from a security point of view that ministers are being filmed inside their own offices without their knowledge.

And so there’ll be issues that our intelligence agencies will want to look at very, very carefully.

But there’s also another issue which is that ministers do need to have the ability to have frank, private conversations with their senior officials to debate things, so that they can understand issues, and know that those conversations will remain private if they’re going to be able to go through the thought processes that enable them to make the right decisions and so I think that will also be something on the minds of government ministers today.

As a former foreign secretary, Hunt used to oversee MI6.

Jeremy Hunt on the Andrew Marr Show
Jeremy Hunt on the Andrew Marr Show Photograph: Jeremy Hunt/BBC

Labour is demanding an inquiry into how classified defence documents came to be found at a bus stop in Kent. In a statement John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said:

The loss of classified documents that cover a wide range of vital areas of national security is as embarrassing as it is worrying for ministers.

It’s vital the internal inquiry launched by the Secretary of State establishes immediately how highly classified documents were taken out of the Ministry of Defence in the first place and then left in this manner.

Ultimately Ministers must be able to confirm to the public that national security has not been undermined, that no military or security operations have been affected and that the appropriate procedures are in place to ensure nothing like this happens again.

Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, leaving home this morning
Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, leaving home this morning Photograph: Reuters

Hunt praises Javid's honesty and integrity, in apparent dig at Hancock

Andrew Marr is now interviewing Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the Commons health committee, a former health secretary - but not the next one. There was some speculation that he might get the job last night, but he didn’t.

Hunt says Sajid Javid is an “excellent” appointment. He says Javid is someone who “says the same in private to what he says in public”, and that this is “a very good virtue in politics”.

Hunt made a similar point in a tweet last night.

It is not entirely clearly to what extent these are just subtle digs at Hancock (who in this episode has not acted with integrity, and matched what he did in private with what he said in pubic), and to what extent Hunt is making a wider point about others in the cabinet.

Updated

Q: Will you accept that your tweet earlier this year about there being no Irish Sea border was wrong?

Lewis says that tweet has not aged well. But he says the intention was to ensure there was not one. He says there has been a problem with how the Northern Ireland protocol has been implemented.

And that’s it. The Lewis interview is over.

Updated

Lewis confirms that the DHSC is investigating how Matt Hancock was filmed.

Q: Was there a breach of the Official Secrets Act?

Lewis says he does not know, but he says this must be investigated.

Q: How serious is the loss of confidential naval documents?

Lewis says this is serious. There will be an investigation.

Q: Will Sajid Javid be the third secretary of state to fail to come up with a plan for social care?

Lewis says the government will publish a plan before the end of this year.

As a former communities secretary, in charge of local government (which is in charge of social care), Javid has a good understanding of this, Lewis says.

Andrew Marr is interviewing Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, now.

Q: Did Matt Hancock resign because he thought he had done something terribly wrong, or just because of the reaction to it?

Lewis says Hancock resigned because he thought it was the right thing to do. He says Hancock thought he had become a distraction.

Andrew Marr says had 'quite unpleasant' bout of Covid after G7 despite being double-vaccinated

Andrew Marr is now interviewing Sir Peter Horby, chair of he New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), and he says that when he caught coronavirus recently (at the G7 summit - see 9.23am), he had been double vaccinated. Was he just unlucky?

Hornby says that people who are double vaccinated can get coronavirus, but the fact that Marr was not seriously ill, or hospitalised, suggests the vaccine made a difference.

Marr says his illness was “really, really quite unpleasant”.

Andrew Marr interviewing Sir Peter Horby
Andrew Marr interviewing Sir Peter Horby Photograph: BBC

Updated

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, told the Andrew Marr Show that London would be in a position to fully re-open on 5 July if allowed. But he also said he expected a full re-opening on 19 July.

The government is in theory keeping open the option of ordering a full re-opening for England on 5 July, but ministers have always said that that is unlikely, and that 19 July is now the realistic date for re-opening.

A formal announcement is due tomorrow. It will be given by the health secretary in the Commons, and one reason why it would have been so hard for Matt Hancock to remain in office is that he would have to face MPs in person at a time when even many Tories wanted him to go.

Updated

On his BBC show Andrew Marr has just revealed that he has recently had coronavirus. He says he thinks he caught it in Cornwall, when he was covering the G7 summit.

Alan Johnson, the former Labour health secretary, has just told Trevor Phillips on Sky that he thinks Sajid Javid is a “good appointment” at health. In “a cabinet of sycophants”, Javid will stand out, because last year resigned rather than accept a No 10 attempt to stop him appointing his own advisers, Johnson said.

Labour says PM's reluctance to sack Hancock shows he has 'very dangerous blind spot' over integrity

Lucy Powell, the shadow housing secretary, was interviewed on Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday for Labour.

  • Powell said it would be “pretty disgusting” if Matt Hancock were to receive the usual severance payment offered to cabinet ministers when they leave the government. According to the Sun, the payment would be worth around £16,000. “We will certainly be calling that out and asking the prime minister not to give him that,” Powell said.
  • She confirmed that her Labour colleague, Fleur Anderson, has written to the police asking if Hancock committed an offence. (According to the Observer, the Metropolitan police has said it will not be launching an investigation into Hancock.)
  • Powell said Boris Johnson had a “very dangerous blind spot” over issues of integrity and conduct in public life. Repeating Labour’s point that Johnson should have sacked Hancock immediately (see 8.21am), she said:

I’m afraid it feels to me like the prime minister has a very dangerous blind spot when it comes to issues of integrity and conduct in public life. And that’s a really big problem. It’s an even bigger problem when you’re in the middle of a pandemic and you’re asking the public to also have integrity and conduct in the way that they go about with their own lives.

  • She said there was a need for a further investigation into what happened. She said:

At the time, you’ll remember, when this video was taken, we were all told that we could only have close contact with those that we were in a bubble with, they were our bubble, and that was the only people we could have close contact with, that was the law at the time.

It now turns out that Matt Hancock was actually in two bubbles at the same time, unbeknown to other people in that bubble, and that is how infection spreads. So yes, there are serious issues here which need further investigation. And we will be looking at those because of course, you know, Matt Hancock was the first to say that Neil Ferguson and others should have resigned when they broke the rules and that other people needed to abide by them.

So you can’t have the rule maker also being the rule breaker, people want to know there’s accountability in that.

Lucy Powell on Trevor Phillips on Sunday
Lucy Powell on Trevor Phillips on Sunday Photograph: Sky News

Updated

In his Sky interview Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, confirmed that the Department for Health and Social Care is investigating how Matt Hancock was filmed in his private office. (See 8.46am.)

According to a story by Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times (paywall), Hancock was filmed with a CCTV camera hidden inside a smoke detector. Shipman reports:

The working assumption of security chiefs is that a government contractor obtained access to a feed from the camera and either downloaded it or filmed the monitor with his phone to pass to The Sun.

And in the Mail on Sunday Glen Owen says a whistleblower was involved in offering the video footage to the media. Owen reports:

The footage of Mr Hancock kissing Gina Coladangelo was caught on a CCTV camera in his office on May 6, and secretly recorded by a member of his department’s staff.

After allowing a month to elapse, the whistleblower approached lockdown sceptics and asked them to help sell the incendiary footage to the media.

Trevor Phillips says Sajid Javid is expected to speak to the media this morning.

Q: Is this a hospital pass for Javid?

Lewis says the Tories are fortunate to have “such a depth of talent” in the party. Javid knows how to run a department, and he will be supported by “a phenomenal team”.

Q: Will Javid tell us what the government wants to do on social care?

Lewis says the PM has said he will be announcing plans before the end of the year.

This is a complicated area. There is a huge amount of work to do.

And that’s it. The interview is over.

Lewis confirms DHSC investigating how Hancock filmed in private office

Q: Will the government be undertaking an urgent security review? How is it possible that what happens in a ministerial office can be revealed like this? For Hancock, this was embarrassing. Elsewhere this could be lethal.

Lewis says the government needs to get to the bottom of this. He says the Department for Health is investigating it.

It’s something we need to get to the bottom of.

Quite rightly what happens in government departments can be sensitive and important.

So yes, I do know that is something the Department of Health will be taking forward as an internal investigation.

Q: Sensitive documents about the movement of warships were discovered at a bus stop in Kent.

Lewis says the Ministry of Defence is investigating this.

Updated

Trevor Phillips says on 11 May - five days after Matt Hancock was filmed embracing his aide - he had to bury his daughter. There were 300 people at the funeral online. But they could not all be there because of the rules. The next time the government tells us what do do, why shouldn’t we tell you where to get off?

Lewis says Hancock accepts what he did was wrong.

Q: Why did it take two days to get to this point? It feels like Hancock only stood down because he lost support; not because he realises what people feel about this.

Lewis says “credit to Matt” that he looked at this again and decided, on reflecting, it would be a distraction if he stayed in his job.

Q: If something like this happened in your department, it would not take you so long to get rid of someone, would it?

Lewis says he does not answer hypothetical questions because every situation is different.

Q: The government is being accuses of hypocrisy, cronyism and waste. Are you about to squander the credit you have got with the public?

Lewis says the vaccine rollout has been a great success.

Q: You have told me that five times.

Lewis says the government will continue with this work.

On Sky News Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, is being interviewed by Trevor Phillips.

Lewis says he thinks Matt Hancock made the right decision to go.

Q: Hancock spent his time shaming people who broke the rules, like Prof Neil Ferguson. Then he spent two days trying to stay in office. He does not get it, does he?

Lewis says Hancock did not want his case to distract from the government’s important work. The vaccine rollout has been a phenomenal success, he says.

Q: This was not just forgetting his mask in a shop; Hancock was having a relationship and doing things he told the rest of us not to do.

Lewis says Hancock has accepted what he did was wrong. He has apologised.

Q: For 48 hours Hancock and Boris Johnson treated this as a minor slip. It seems Hancock went not because he thought what he did was wrong, but because other people thought that. Are Hancock and Johnson the only people in the country who cannot see what was wrong.

Lewis says Hancock should be proud of his record at health.

Even in the last few days, Hancock and the PM wanted to keep that knowledge in government. After reflection, Hancock decided he was a distraction.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, questioned last night whether Sajid Javid was the right person to be the next health secretary. In a statement Ashworth said:

Sajid Javid failed to reverse the previous eight years of social care cuts or deliver the investment our NHS needed in his time as chancellor of the exchequer.

He now needs to explain how he will bring down sky high waiting lists, ensure people get the cancer care they need, get young people vital mental health support and crucially fix social care, which has suffered swingeing cuts under the Conservatives.

Given that Javid was the first chancellor since Iain Macleod in 1970 to be in office for so short a period of time that he did not get to deliver a budget, Ashworth’s criticism of his record in the job may seem harsh.

Johnson criticised by opposition parties for not sacking Hancock

The opposition parties have criticised Boris Johnson for not sacking Matt Hancock as soon as it became clear he had breached his own lockdown rules.

This from Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader.

Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, said in a statement last night:

This is a massive failure of leadership on Boris Johnson’s part. Matt Hancock should have been sacked - not given the opportunity and time to resign over the weekend.

And this is from Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader.

Sajid Javid begins role as new health secretary

Good morning. We’ll be following all the reaction to Matt Hancock’s resignation last night. The key developments include:

  • Hancock abandoned attempts to cling on to his job following the revelation in a Sun story on Friday morning that he had embraced his close aide, Gina Coladangelo, in his office on 6 May, in breach of Covid regulations. It has also been reported that he has told his wife their marriage is over and left the family home.
  • Sajid Javid has been appointed to replace him as health secretary. Javid was chancellor when Boris Johnson became prime minister, but resigned in February 2020 when No 10 insisted on having a veto over the aides allowed to work for him.
  • The Sunday Times (paywall) has reported that Hancock is facing an investigation after using a personal email account instead of an official address during the pandemic in a breach of government guidelines.
  • Boris Johnson has used his response to Hancock’s resignation letter to suggest Hancock may return to government one day. Johnson ended his letter saying: “I am grateful for your support and believe your contribution to public service is far from over.”
  • Dominic Cummings, who was Johnson’s senior adviser until he resigned last year and who is now a fierce public critic of the PM’s, has claimed he tricked Johnson into sacking Javid last year. He posted this on Twitter last night.

Here is the Observer’s overnight splash.

Today I will be following the latest developments, and bringing you analysis too. A major resignation is never welcome news for a government. Often it can be very destabilising. But, over time, the impact is over not as bad as the headlines suggest, because a resignation can remove the source of a grievance. What damaged the government’s reputation with the public most last year was probably not a resignation but a non-resignation; Cummings’s failure to quit after his lockdown-busting excursion to Barnard Castle.

Here is the line up for the two main political programmes this morning.

I’m afraid we are not able to open comments at the moment, but we hope to be able to do so later.

In the meantime, if you want to message me, you can use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com

Updated

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WrestleMania 42 is live this weekend across two nights and 13 matches. I've been watching WWE for 30 years, and I've gone through every match on the card, given you my prediction, and picked out the best merch to buy before the bell rings.
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