Matt Hancock’s casual dismissal of the climate emergency and A&E targets isn’t leadership – it’s complacency

If the health secretary’s interview on Radio 5 Live was supposed to be part of the government’s tactic of avoiding the ‘Today’ programme and getting an easier ride, it failed

Matt Hancock is a remarkable politician. There are few on the current front bench who can rival his ability to not only mess up their own policy brief, but to range so destructively across so many other departments’ responsibilities. Mr Hancock’s capacity to drop a pitch-perfect gaffe recognises no boundaries.

Yesterday, it was the turn of the transport and the business departments to feel the chill of the Hancock effect. Grant Shapps and Andrea Leadsom, hardly superstars themselves, had managed to get through the embarrassing spectacle of bunging a huge, environmentally damaging subsidy to a private business, Flybe, without too much political fallout. The green backlash had been muted. Enter Mr Hancock, who took to the airwaves to reassure people that flying less was not, as common-sense might suggest, an answer to the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gasses – air travel (and short-haul flights being worst of all). Rather, according to the health secretary, the answer lies in technology and, specifically, the electric passenger aircraft. “I’m told that electric planes are on the horizon if that’s not pushing the metaphor too far,” he said, speaking to Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5 Live.

Mr Hancock certainly pushed the credulity of his audience too far. He revealed, all too carelessly, that he and his government are not taking their pledges on the climate crisis seriously. He did not have to declare that he had “flown from London to Aberdeen” and “would again if it was necessary”. Not for the first time, Mr Hancock will have left his colleagues wondering what he is doing sitting at their top table, just as a radical cabinet reshuffle approaches...

As it happens, the British public now “gets it”. They have accepted that the climate emergency is a real human-made problem that can, among many other rather more important things, wreck the Australian Open tennis tournament. The climate emergency deniers, led by Donald Trump, who spouts comical nonsense about windmills, sound increasingly out of touch. But the climate emergency protesters, in truth, do not need to glue themselves to Tube trains to “raise awareness”; what they and anyone else who cares about life on Earth needs to do is to connect the public’s acceptance of the problem with the actions they personally must make to help arrest climate change. Sacrifices, some painful, will be required to avert a catastrophe. Despite some enthusiasm for recycling and avoiding single-use plastics, the public has proven stubbornly unwilling to give up their long-haul flights, their cars or to go vegan for more than a token week or two.

The job of politicians is not to passively approve of such complacency, Hancock-style, but to challenge it and be frank with the voters that saving the planet will mean some unwelcome lifestyle changes. That is what is meant by political leadership. While it comes as no great surprise, Mr Hancock is plainly no good at it.

It is almost an afterthought to observe that Mr Hancock’s defence of his day job was just as sickly. When asked by the BBC’s Mr Campbell about the government failing to hit its NHS targets, Mr Hancock opined that they were “bad” targets, and he favoured different, “good”, targets, ones that were clinically justifiable. The sceptical audience will conclude that these are the targets that the government will find easiest to meet, and will help protect the Conservative Party’s electoral health. If Mr Hancock’s interview was supposed to be part of the government’s new tactic of avoiding the Today programme to get an easier ride elsewhere, it failed miserably. It cannot be easy to be laughed at live on air. Listening to the interview was like observing an operation in A&E go horribly wrong; the Hancock ECG eventually stopped beeping and emitted a long continuous dead note.

Once, Mr Hancock was the eager puppy of the Conservative government. But in the Tory leadership campaign (he, incredibly, received 20 votes from fellow MPs) and in the general election he seemed to be able to do nothing more than mindlessly repeat soundbites. When he was culture and digital secretary, he famously created the Matt Hancock App, which suggested some spark of creativity, though it was ridiculed. He even suggested that he could be replaced by a hologram of himself. It could hardly do a worse job.