The Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips has recalled the recent funeral of his daughter to highlight anger at Matt Hancock’s behaviour.
Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality who presents the channel’s Sunday morning political show, was interviewing the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis.
He questioned why it had taken Hancock so long to resign after footage emerged of him kissing his aide Gina Coladangelo in his office, a clear breach of Covid regulations. Boris Johnson has been criticised for not sacking the health secretary and quickly declaring the matter closed.
“Over the past two days every cabinet minister, including you, has come out to essentially defend the prime minister and Matt Hancock,” Phillips said to Lewis.
“The pictures that we saw were of an encounter on 6 May. On 11 May, my family buried my daughter who had died, not of Covid, but during the lockdown.
“Three hundred of our family and friends turned up online. But most of them were not allowed to be at the graveside, even though it was in the open air, because of the rule of 30. Because of the instruction by Mr Hancock.
“Now the next time one of you tells me what to do in my private life … explain to me why I shouldn’t just tell you where to get off?”
Lewis said he understood and accepted the frustration and “even the anger people have, having been through the situations they have been through”.
Hancock had acknowledged that what he had done was wrong “and it is ultimately why he has taken the decision that his position was untenable and distracting from the wider work we’ve all got to do, to move forward in the pandemic and out of the pandemic”, Lewis said.
By resigning Hancock had “put his family and indeed all of us across the UK first”, he said.
Phillips’ daughter Sushila died in April after living with anorexia for 22 years. She was 36.
