In praise of Matt Hancock, secretary of state for the ‘smoking ruin’

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former adviser, criticised the health department as a ‘disaster zone’ – but, says John Rentoul, the minister in charge of it has been impressive

Cummings was notably absent from Hancock’s vaccine thank-you list (UK Parliament)

Matt Hancock has shown he can fight back. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former adviser, accused him yesterday of presiding over a department that is a “smoking ruin”.

Anonymous sources responded on his behalf to Politico this morning, saying of Cummings: “He typifies everything the public hate about politicians. He … claims credit he doesn’t deserve and plays stupid political games when we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Perhaps the prime minister’s poll bounce is less to do with the vaccine effect and more to do with Cummings not being there any more.” A second source added: “Some recollections may vary.”

The crucial recollection of the first source is that Cummings’s allies in No 10 suggested to journalists in the early stages of the emergency that Hancock “was obsessing over the vaccine when actually mass testing was the most important thing”. Yesterday, Cummings told the Science and Technology Committee a different story: that he was central to the early decisions that made the vaccine rollout a success.

It is not surprising that many people claim credit for vaccine policy, which has been so successful that it seems to have driven EU leaders mad. Hancock read out a list of people he thanked for it in the Commons today – a list that did not include Cummings.

There have been several credible accounts that ascribe its success to a combination of Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Hancock, Boris Johnson and above all Kate Bingham, former head of the vaccines taskforce. The most important decisions were to appoint her and to put vast sums of money at her disposal, followed by her bold bets on several candidate vaccines and the robust contracts she negotiated.

Cummings played a part in all this, and in particular, as he told the select committee yesterday, he supported the vaccine taskforce working out of the business department rather than the health department, which was probably the right decision, as Katy Balls of The Spectator argues. But Hancock’s role was more important.

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He grasped the possibility of vaccines being developed faster than ever before, early on, and he was responsible for pushing the University of Oxford into partnership with AstraZeneca (British-Swedish) rather than Merck (US), which was critical in ensuring early UK supplies.

Which means that now might be the time to note that Hancock is in fact one of the more impressive ministers in a government not over-endowed with talent. I don’t think that the government has handled coronavirus well, and I think a different prime minister might have asked more penetrating questions of the scientific advisers, and asked them earlier, than Boris Johnson did. But equally I don’t share the common view that Johnson ignored the science, acted too late and should go to jail.

The pandemic was an extraordinary challenge, and the prime minister followed the advice of the government’s scientific advisers, especially in the early stages. From the start, Hancock and Rishi Sunak were the two ministers who bore the brunt of the crisis, and in my view they both did a remarkable job in a dauntingly difficult situation. Sunak has reaped the benefit in the beauty contest of public opinion, partly because he has been handing out huge sums of money, whereas Hancock is largely unloved.

This is unfair. Hancock’s work rate has been Stakhanovite and his judgement generally good. He recognised the importance of vaccines early on, but he also drove the testing capacity from a standing start to one of the biggest in the world. He set demanding targets for the number of tests – targets that were met by some dubious double-counting and shortcuts, but the principle of using targets to drive up capacity was right.

It has turned out that testing wasn’t as magically effective as a lot of people assumed it would be (just as it turned out, in the very early stage, we didn’t need that many more ventilators, after Hancock moved heaven and earth to acquire them), but Hancock’s approach was to try everything and in the end it was the vaccines that succeeded.

Running a department is a huge and difficult job at the best of times. Running a department that has “arm’s length” responsibility for the NHS – the church of the national religion – at a time of a pandemic is almost impossible. Yet he has done it with some skill.

Dominic Cummings had his uses as a disrupter and challenger, but I would rather have Hancock in charge of a big public service department.