Pandemic Diaries
The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle against Covid
Matt Hancock and Isabel Oakeshott Biteback Publishing, £25
As health secretary for just under three years from July 2018 to June 2021, Matt Hancock was one of the main figures in the UK government’s response to the Covid pandemic. His legacy, however, will be forever defined by revelations of an affair with an aide at a time when he was still telling the public to socially distance, which led to his resignation. Pandemic Diaries, co-written with political journalist Isabel Oakeshott, is his attempt to make the case for the decisions that he took during the 18 months from the emergence of the virus in China to his departure.
The book is nominally based on a diary he kept during this period, but it has clearly been edited and rewritten to portray him in the best light possible. One of the big themes is that he was supposedly quick to pick up on the danger posed by the outbreak of a mystery disease on the other side of the world when everyone else was being complacent. Hancock, we are led to believe, was way ahead of the scientists who repeatedly advised against taking basic precautions until it was too late, and of Downing Street, who saw the virus as a distraction from Brexit.
“The big villain of the book is Dominic Cummings, who is portrayed as arrogant and untrustworthy”
The big villain of the book is Dominic Cummings, who is portrayed as arrogant, powerhungry and untrustworthy, first dismissing Covid as unimportant before doing an about-turn and trying to micromanage the government response, in the process creating more problems and chaos. As for the PM, Hancock clearly remains fond of Boris Johnson on a personal level, but paints a picture of him as disorganised, inconsistent and easily swayed – an assessment not too far from that given by Cummings too. Hancock is also unimpressed by what he sees as the slow pace of the civil-service bureaucracy.
Hancock spends quite a bit of the book defending his record when it comes to the provision of personal protective equipment, claiming that the fault lay with outdated stockpiles and bottlenecks in distribution. Similarly, he argues that the “test and trace” system functioned better than is thought, and improved to the point where it could quickly detect people with individual variants. We are still waiting for the promised public enquiry into the whole affair, but Hancock’s account seems unconvincing.
Yet despite its flaws and selective use of evidence, Pandemic Diaries is surprisingly captivating. It provides the reader with an insight into the debates that took place at the highest levels of government and gives an idea of how it felt to be the man charged with responding to one of the worst public-health crises in more than a century.