Coronavirus: The trials and tribulations of Matt Hancock

The health secretary is virtually unsackable right now, writes Sean O'Grady, and his recent blunders seem only to prove that he knows that all too well

Tory figures have started to voice criticisms of the way ministers have handled the crisis (PA)

Given the coronavirus epidemic tearing through Britain’s care homes, and an overall fatality rate of about 50,000 (on the “excess deaths” measure, including indirect fatalities), the tribulations of Matt Hancock on breakfast television may seem trivial.

They are trivial, of course, even though one popular news website led its coverage of current events with the headline “Matt’s Morning Meltdown”. Hancock’s dismissive remarks towards broadcast journalists shouldn’t really bother anyone. They wouldn’t matter at all if, first, Meltdown Matt wasn’t the minister in charge of the NHS and the care sector during a deadly pandemic and, second, everything was otherwise tickety-boo.

So used is Hancock to being grilled by the media that it no longer seems to count as some sort of special event in his daily diet of stress. He now treats his broadcast appearances with the same casual insouciance as he might display telling off his six-year-old child, when Hancock Jr is making a mess and being especially peevish (clearly a trait in the Hancock family genome).

It’s not so much that iron seems to have entered the health secretary’s soul during this crisis, more that he doesn’t seem to care that much about the niceties anymore. Hence the recent episode when he told Labour frontbencher and part-time doctor Rosena Allin-Khan to mind her “tone”. Hence also Hancock telling the prime minister to “give me a break”, according to an unusually well-sourced hatchet job in The Mail on Sunday. Apparently, Boris Johnson made an internationally recognised rude sign as Hancock was leaving their meeting, one roughly cognate with the health secretary’s Downing Street nickname of “Handjob”.

Hancock’s interview yesterday with Phillip Schofield contained the following odd exchange:

Schofield: “Can I see my parents 10 minutes apart?”

Hancock: “Yes.”

Schofield: “Don’t you see that’s utterly bonkers?”

Hancock: “No.”

Hancock has also been the subject of an online lampooning by comic Michael Spicer for a particularly stilted performance in one of his many press conferences.

On the “mixed messages” in the coronavirus road map, the central event in the Meltdown Matt narrative, Hancock breezily replied that if that was the biggest complaint of (for example) the Today programme then things are going pretty well.

Except of course they are not, and it has been apparent for some time that, fairly or not, Hancock is being lined up as the fall guy for a collective failure by the government during the crisis. There is enough on the charge sheet to make him the perfect scapegoat: the ventilator shortage, the inadequate supply of personal protective equipment, the abandonment of the testing strategy, the farce of the testing target, the neglect of care homes, the hesitation about lockdown, the NHS action plan that came and went... all these add to his presentational shortcomings to make for a bleak career outlook.

Key Tory figures such as his predecessor Jeremy Hunt (now chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee), Greg Clark (chair of the Science and Technology Committee), and former Brexit secretary David Davis have started to voice some criticisms of the way ministers have handled the crisis. The Labour opposition is moving towards a more sceptical stance. And colleagues are briefing against Hancock. He looks and sounds like an over-promoted spad, straight from an episode of The Thick of It. He did, after all, serve as an adviser to George Osborne.

Hancock is looking increasingly friendless. He knows that he is virtually unsackable at this stage, but he will also have read the reports that he’s on borrowed time. So he will have to carry on working extremely hard, taking the knocks, wading through the shambles and taking the stress for months longer, knowing full well that his “reward” at the end of it all will be a move to the back benches or a demotion to the Environment Department or something. No wonder he’s melting.