Why Matt Hancock’s weaselly apology isn’t going to win him forgiveness

The former health secretary talks a lot about his feelings – but has little understanding of how others feel about him, writes Tom Peck

As he left the inquiry, victims’ families turned their backs on him (AP)

You don’t really need to see Matt Hancock answering questions on why the UK wasn’t better prepared for a pandemic to know the answer.

The answer is right there: it’s Matt Hancock. If the question “Why did everything go so badly wrong?” either begins or ends with “Hancock”, then you already have the answer.

The very much former health secretary was taking the first of his many turns before the Covid inquiry on Tuesday morning. And you also won’t be shocked to learn that Mr Hancock’s answer was not that it was all his fault. Quite the opposite.

What had actually happened, on this little planet of ours, between the years 2020 and 2022, was that the world had just not managed to live up to Matt Hancock’s high standards. And for that – and only that – Matt Hancock was truly sorry.

“I am profoundly sorry for each death,” he said, turning as he did so to address the bereaved victims in the public seats. “I understand why, for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me – I understand that. I get it. But it is honest and heartfelt.”

It might have been heartfelt, but it certainly wasn’t honest. He was very sorry indeed, but also, you know, it really wasn’t his fault. The failures in his department were, in fact, “global”. They were more than global, they were “doctrinal”.

“I’m not very good at talking about how I feel,” he said at another point. People who aren’t good at talking about how they feel wouldn’t, for example, go on reality TV shows and talk about how they feel when absolutely no one has asked them to. They probably wouldn’t pretend to cry in the middle of a live interview either.

For someone who’s not very good at talking about how he feels, he has certainly worked out that it’s a lot easier to talk about how he feels than about what he did.

The inquiry is currently only investigating the failures in pandemic preparedness. The other, much larger failures will come later. But so desperate was he not to answer questions about today’s failures, that he tried several times to discuss tomorrow’s failures instead. When tomorrow eventually comes, no doubt he’ll try and avoid it by talking about yesterday.

We would hear, again, about Operation Cygnus, the big pandemic exercise of 2016 that concluded that no one had a clue what they were doing, after which they all went away and did absolutely nothing about it. Hancock looked furtively up from his de facto witness box and very performatively begged his inquisitors to forgive him for not doing enough to tell the world that he was right and they were wrong.

“This is why I am so emotionally committed to making this inquiry a success,” he said, wrongly imagining, as he so often does, that he lives in a world in which anyone cares about his emotions. “It is because of this huge error in the doctrine the UK and the whole of the Western world had in how to handle a pandemic.”

Before the pandemic, the Hancock theory goes, the whole approach was that the way to manage a pandemic was to work out how to bag up all the bodies and find somewhere to burn them before the descent into anarchy. And that was wrong. What should have happened is that there should have been a focus on how to prevent it; on how to stop people from dying.

This sort of stuff is about as slippery as it gets, but arguably, to Hancock’s credit, he is horrifically bad at it. I’m sorry on behalf of the entire world. Your average six-year-old wouldn’t dare that one.

At one point, he fully admitted that he had signed off on diverting resources away from pandemic planning and towards planning for a no-deal Brexit, which various Brexit ministers – and indeed prime ministers – had all openly admitted was simply a negotiating tactic. A negotiating tactic, we now know, that people died for. Matt Hancock has admitted that. It’s a startling admission.

To watch Hancock’s three-hour-long interrogation, by a procession of some of the nation’s brightest lawyers, was to be reminded of that old rule in football: that the wage bill always wins. It’s almost an exact science. Year after year, almost without exception, the Premier League table finishes in rank order of who pays their players the most.

The inquiry’s chief counsel, Hugo Keith KC, was, to take but one example, also lead counsel at the inquest into the 7/7 bombings. Seeing him go toe to toe with Hancock, it is hard not to conclude that only one of the two men would eat camel d*** for coins on live TV.

Of course, that’s not why Hancock did it. Of course not. He was, you may remember, after “a bit of forgiveness”.

Maybe he’s even earnt some. As he left the inquiry, victims’ families turned their backs on him, and in the street outside, anti-vax protesters shouted “murderer” at him. He’s not a murderer. He was merely found hopelessly wanting at a hopelessly impossible time.

But if he wants forgiveness, there does need to be some genuine contrition. Not a snivelling, weaselly attempt to broaden the blame and place it on the shoulders of the entire world.