How much trouble is Matt Hancock in after Dominic Cummings’s claims?

The health secretary will have to fight to restore his reputation after he was accused of ‘criminal, disgraceful behaviour’. Adam Forrest looks at the battle ahead

Matt Hancock is due to appear before the Health Select Committee next month (Getty)

Government ministers and their top officials have been nervously wondering for several weeks where exactly the most damaging “Dom bombs” were going to fall.

It’s now clear that Dominic Cummings had Matt Hancock in his sights – singling out the health secretary for heavy and repeated bombardment during Wednesday’s testimony to the joint inquiry of MPs examining the government’s response to the pandemic.

Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser accused Hancock of “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” by interfering with the fledgling test and trace system and claimed that the minister fell “disastrously below” the standards expected during a public health crisis.

The maverick political strategist said Hancock should have been fired for “at least 15 to 20 things”, including “repeated lying” both to the public and fellow ministers.

The health secretary may try to bat away Cummings’s criticisms as the ravings of a bitter and cantankerous ex-official who was only around for part of the long and challenging pandemic.

Facing questions in the Commons on Thursday, he will be able to point to the fact that Cummings conceded he made some major mistakes of his own, including the admission he did not “tell the full story” about his lockdown trip to Durham.

Hancock and his officials will be busy sifting through Cummings’s deluge of claims in great detail, checking their own records, texts and WhatsApp messages during the events of 2020, in an effort to salvage his reputation.

When the health secretary is grilled by MPs on the joint committee in a fortnight’s time, he will face a series of very serious questions about his actions in the crucial early months of the crisis.

Hancock will have to get his story straight on coronavirus testing. Cummings told MPs that the health secretary had set a “stupid” target of 100,000 daily tests for the end of April 2020.

He claims that Hancock tried to divert officials’ attention away from the task Cummings had set them – which was to build a workable test and trace scheme from scratch – all while the prime minister was laid up in hospital with Covid-19.

“In my opinion he should have been fired for that thing alone,” said Cummings. “[It] meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways … It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”

Dominic Cummings giving evidence (PA)

Hancock will also be grilled about his role in the debacle that saw hospital patients with Covid sent back to care homes. Johnson was said to be furious when he came back to work after his own stint in hospital to find untested patients had been discharged.

Cummings said Hancock had reassured everyone they would be tested. “When [Johnson] came back after being ill, ‘What on earth has happened with all these people in care homes? Hancock told us in the cabinet room that people were going to be tested before they went back to care homes – what the hell happened?’”

Then there are all of Cummings’s claims about lies. Cummings told MPs that Hancock was “completely wrong” to tell the public that herd immunity was never part of the government’s plan.

Cummings also claimed Hancock was guilty of “constant, repeated lying” about personal protective equipment (PPE) and had tried to deflect the blame on procurement problems on to the head of NHS England, Sir Simons Stevens.

Cummings said his claims could be backed up by the then cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill – who, he said, had told Johnson “the British system is not set up to deal with a secretary of state who repeatedly lies in meetings”.

Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Health Select Committee, is unlikely to leave these claims alone. He told Cummings these were “very serious allegations” and urged him to provide evidence of his claims before Hancock’s appearance next month.

If Cummings has details of his meetings with the former cabinet secretary – or if Sedwill were to back up his claims – it would go a long way to showing the concerns that senior people at Downing Street had about Hancock’s behaviour.

Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson at a cabinet meeting in September 2020 (PA)

Is Hancock in serious trouble? Could Johnson even decide to sack him, if enough shifty behaviour was substantiated?

It would be very difficult for the prime minister to pretend to be shocked by any of Hancock’s activities, if Cummings’s testimony is anything to go by. Cummings says he pushed for the health secretary to be replaced, and claimed that Johnson even “came close” to firing Hancock last April.

The health secretary’s reputation may have taken a knock from Wednesday’s lurid headlines, but the prime minister will be reluctant to lose him now and be forced to admit that the response to the Covid crisis was mired in incompetence and infighting.

Hancock will carry on for now. But he faces a huge challenge in restoring his status among Tory MPs and party members as someone worthy of high-level roles in government in the years ahead.