For a cabinet minister under siege, it was not a good omen for Matt Hancock that he needed to be protected from a grilling by his own activists. With his career hanging by a thread on Friday night, facing a series of unanswered questions over hypocrisy and propriety following the exposure of his affair with an aide, he faced an online meeting with 70-odd members of his local Tory party - and they weren’t happy.
They may be loyal party supporters, but having seen Hancock’s now infamous office clinch with aide Gina Coladangelo, captured in leaked footage in excruciating detail, some members of the West Suffolk Conservative Association were angry. “He broke the rules when many of us weren’t allowed to see people we love dearly,” said one member. “Everyone is shocked. There is a lot of grievance. We were not seeing family. He’s told us to do that and we’ve followed him, and then you find out rules don’t matter to him.”
The embattled Hancock duly appeared at the Zoom meeting, but was spared an uncomfortable questioning by a friend. Members said that chair Rachel Hood, a Hancock supporter who donated £10,000 to him in 2018, did not allow any questions after he had given them all an update, largely on local issues. While Hancock was able to escape the meeting without having to address his conduct, it was an early sign that the revelations were not simply a preoccupation of opposition parties determined to make a dent in the Tory poll lead. Much like Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle, it risked a major breach in public trust that could cause serious long-term problems for the whole government.
By Saturday morning, the pressure continued to grow on Hancock, again in his own backyard. One local paper, the Eastern Daily Press carried the headline, “A complete and utter hypocrite”. Duncan Baker, a Norfolk MP, became the first Tory to call for his resignation. Meanwhile, there was also growing anger in the NHS, with influential figures amazed that Hancock had, at first, opted to stay and fight it out. “It is really difficult to see how somebody who has done what he has done can lead with credibility and authority,” said a senior NHS source.
By the time he sent his resignation letter to the prime minister on Saturday evening, it was an admission that even if he had weathered the initial storm, he had lost crucial credibility. “We owe it to the people who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic to be honest when we have let them down,” he wrote.
It concluded a frenetic 48 hours. With the department’s press office newsdesk number ringing off the hook on Friday, officials sat tight. “Their reaction was to bunker down and try to weather the storm,” explained an insider.
After hours of silence on Friday morning, the verdict from Downing Street was to defend Hancock. While he apologised for breaking guidance over social distancing that still applied on 6 May when the footage was taken, Hancock said nothing about whether he had broken the law. His office encounter would need to have been “reasonably necessary” for work purposes to stay on the right side of the law.
Downing Street’s hopes of simply closing down the issue were stymied by obvious questions. Coladangelo, a PR expert who was a director of a lobbying company, was hired last year first as an unpaid adviser, and then as a paid non-executive director at Hancock’s department. Those appointments came with no public fanfare, while there was seemingly no independent process for her appointment as a director.
Meanwhile, more revelations emerged. Last night, government sources confirmed that Coladangelo accompanied Hancock to the G7 meeting of health ministers in Oxford earlier this month, with the department paying costs. The source said she was there in her capacity as a non-executive director with board oversight for international policy, and that the department paid for the whole delegation. Insiders suggest that she was acting more as a special adviser.
There are already a series of demands for inquiries over how Coladangelo was appointed, including how she came to have a parliamentary pass sponsored first by Hancock in 2019 and then by health minister Lord Bethell. Labour has asked the Lords standards commissioner to examine it. Then there were questions around the ministerial code, under which Hancock is supposed to flag up any potential conflicts of interest. Lord Geidt, Boris Johnson’s new adviser on the ministerial code (the last one resigned after Johnson ignored his advice), had the power to at least ask if he could begin an investigation. He can now rest easy.
In reality, many in the health service and political world concluded on Saturday morning that the growing charges against Hancock would simply weigh him down in the job. He had faced accusations of lying from the prime minister’s former aide Dominic Cummings, who has suggested Hancock’s handling of the pandemic, especially over PPE, testing and care homes, meant he should have been sacked several times over. Further revelations from Cummings last week revealed the prime minister despairing of Britain’s pandemic response last year. Hypocrisy is the other glaring charge, most obviously in relation to Hancock’s conclusion last year that scientist Neil Ferguson had no choice but to resign from the government’s science advisory committee over breaking lockdown rules. It left him few friends in the scientific and health fields.
Then there are the imminent health service reforms that Hancock was due to present to some cabinet colleagues on Monday, before introducing them in the Commons. Like all changes to the NHS, they are proving controversial, but the main bone of contention is the extra powers that will flow to the incumbent health secretary. Insiders were already asking if the new bill should proceed as planned. “It feels a bit rich that on the one hand, he should be asking for extra power, and then on the other, basically showing behaviours that are completely incompatible with the increased power that he’s asking for,” said a senior NHS figure.
Michael Gove, the cabinet office minister, and Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, are seen as the obvious candidates to replace Hancock. Some Tories thought Hancock could survive but, as the encounter with local Tory party members suggested on Friday night, it is hard to survive a political storm without allies.
