HOW CAN HE CLING ON?
Furious backlash as Hancock refuses to quit after breaking Covid rules for affair with aide
BORIS Johnson was facing an overwhelming clamour to sack Matt Hancock last night.
The health secretary sensationally admitted breaking lockdown rules after being pictured in a clinch with an aide at work.
Despite championing draconian restrictions on ordinary citizens, he kissed and embraced Gina Coladangelo on May 6 – eleven days before the ban on hugging was lifted. Both are married with three children.
Mr hancock had put Miss Coladangelo, a friend from university, on the public payroll only last year. he made no comment on claims he was having an affair with the 43-year-old but added: ‘I have let people down and am very sorry.’
astonishingly, however, he refused to resign and, after crisis talks in No 10, the prime Minister personally backed
him to stay on and said he ‘considered the matter closed’.
The decision prompted fury last night across the political spectrum, among members of the public and even from business leaders enraged by the Health Secretary’s hypocrisy. Tory whips were bombarded with complaints from their MPs.
A Savanta ComRes snap poll found the public wanted Mr Hancock to quit by a margin of 58 to 25. A separate YouGov survey had the margin at 49 to 25.
Support for the 42-year-old was ebbing even in Downing Street, with one senior figure saying his conduct was ‘gross’ and describing the apology he offered yesterday as ‘pathetic’.
Sayeeda Warsi, a former Conservative Party chairman, attacked the failure to sack Mr Hancock, saying: ‘It’s a bad decision by Matt and a bad decision by the PM.
‘He’s got a huge amount of questions to answer in relation to Covid contracts, access to parliament, giving out jobs. Is there any
‘Treated the bereaved with contempt’
thing anybody could do any more which would make them resign?’
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘It will all be down to public opinion – it’s the only thing No 10 cares about. They’re polling, focus-grouping all the time and if that starts showing the public want him out then he could be gone by Monday.’
Another Conservative MP said: ‘It’s getting like Animal Farm: all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.’
Hannah Brady, of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: ‘Hancock has treated bereaved families with contempt. He’s got to go.’ In a letter to Mr Johnson the campaign group said that Mr Hancock’s continuing presence in the Cabinet was ‘an embarrassment to the Government’.
Labour also called for the Health Secretary to go and branded the Prime Minister ‘spineless’ for failing to sack him.
Party chairman Anneliese Dodds said: ‘The charge sheet against Matt Hancock includes wasting taxpayers’ money, leaving care homes exposed and now being accused of breaking his own Covid rules. His position is hopelessly untenable. Boris Johnson should sack him.’ On an extraordinary day:
Mr Hancock was accused of breaking the ministerial code, which calls for ‘proper and appropriate’ working relationships; Downing Street refused to comment on whether he had broken the law as well as social distancing guidance;
Mr Johnson was said to be considering moving Mr Hancock to a low-profile role;
Tory MPs stepped up calls for the scrapping of ‘authoritarian’ lockdown rules promoted by Mr Hancock;
Ministers faced questions about the role played by Miss Coladangelo, a millionaire former lobbyist married to the founder of the Oliver Bonas retail chain;
An investigation was launched into how security camera footage of Mr Hancock kissing Miss Coladangelo in his office was leaked to The Sun;
Mr Hancock’s wife Martha declined to comment, amid Whitehall rumours that she had thrown him out of the family home;
Scientists suggested Mr Hancock’s conduct could undermine compliance with remaining Covid restrictions;
Former top aide Dominic Cummings stepped up his attacks on Mr Hancock, saying his ‘negligence’ during the pandemic had ‘killed people’.
There was no on-camera apology to the public from the Health Secretary yesterday despite questions over whether he had lost his focus on the pandemic.
When Neil Ferguson, a key government adviser, resigned for breaching lockdown rules last year, Mr Hancock said he was right to go and the police should investigate.
Last September Mr Hancock told people not to start romantic relationships because of the risk it could spread Covid.
And on May 16, ten days after his clinch with Miss Coladangelo, he said people should be ‘careful’ about the new freedom to hug – and suggested they should do so only outside with people who had been
fully vaccinated. Liberal Democrat health spokesman Munira Wilson said: ‘Matt Hancock is a terrible Health Secretary and should have been sacked a long time ago for his failures.
‘This latest episode of hypocrisy will break the trust with the British public. He was telling families not to hug loved ones, while doing whatever he liked in the workplace.
‘Rules for them and rules for us is no way to run a country.’
Mystery surrounds the recruitment of Miss Coladangelo, who met Mr Hancock while volunteering at the student radio station at Oxford University in the 1990s. She worked on Mr Hancock’s failed Tory leadership campaign in 2019 and was secretly taken on as an unpaid adviser at the Department of Health last year before being made a nonexecutive director on a £15,000 contract.
A Tory source said the pair had become inseparable, adding: ‘They always appeared to be incredibly close. Her status was always slightly mysterious but she went everywhere with him. She was in every meeting.’
The Health Secretary was grilled about his conduct by senior figures from the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team before Mr Johnson decided he would stand by him. The Prime Minister, who was sacked by Michael Howard for lying about an extramarital affair, is said to have been reluctant to hand the media a scalp.
Downing Street refused to comment yesterday on whether Mr Hancock had offered his resignation at any point.
The episode echoes the infamous lockdown-busting trip to Durham made by Mr Cummings last year.
Paul Charles, founder of The PC Agency, a travel consultancy, said: ‘Most people in the country will be asking themselves why they should listen to advice on travel and social distancing when the Health Secretary isn’t even following the rules. The sector has been so badly hit, it’s even more galling now to see ministers in such positions.
‘Most people will be questioning whether Matt Hancock has any position of authority.’
In its letter to the Prime Minister, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice said: ‘If Matt Hancock is unable to find the decency to do the right thing and resign his position it is paramount that you relieve him from it.’
eVen in the worst of political scandals, a shred of dignity may be salvaged if the guilty party shows remorse and falls willingly on his sword.
When they try to brazen it out in a pitiable bid to hold on to their job, things never end well. They compound their own guilt and taint those around them.
And this contamination is at its most dangerous when the sinner is a senior Cabinet minister.
every day they remain in post, the Government’s authority seeps away and the Prime Minister looks weak for not sacking them.
They invariably have to go in the end, anyway. The only question is how much damage they do in the intervening time.
having been caught in flagrante with a female colleague in breach of his own social distancing rules, Matt hancock has been exposed as the worst kind of hypocrite.
As a result, he’s a now a busted flush – and a severe liability to his boss, his colleagues and above all, his country.
The health Secretary has been the greatest lockdown zealot of them all, ordering police to be ruthless with even minor rulebreakers and bringing in swingeing £10,000 fines.
he threatened those who dodged quarantine with 10 years’ imprisonment – more than the average sentence for rape and armed robbery.
And of course he famously forbade people to hug their grandparents, even when they were ill or dying, causing untold heartbreak.
Yet behind the public piety, we now know Mr hancock was privately doing rather more than hugging a woman who was certainly not a member of his household. Indeed both are married to others.
Furthermore, he employed her as an adviser at public expense following a recruitment process that was far from transparent – adding cronyism to the charge sheet. Anyone with a sliver of integrity would have held up their hands and quit at such revelations. To Mr hancock however, this is not a resigning matter.
Which makes one wonder if anything ever would be. either he doesn’t have the self-awareness to realise his credibility is shot, or is so arrogant that he just doesn’t care. how can he now expect the public to do anything he says in future, when they know that he’s a charlatan?
This is nothing to do with sexual morality, much as one might sympathise with his wife and children.
It is a rank deception which pierces the very heart of the Government’s Covid message.
Are we all in this pandemic together, or not? Does everyone have to obey the rules, or are ministers exempt?
Interestingly, when Scotland’s chief medical officer resigned after being caught breaking lockdown rules, Mr hancock applauded her decision, saying: ‘We couldn’t be clearer that social-distancing rules are there for everyone.’
everyone but him, apparently.
There are echoes here of the Dominic Cummings fiasco, when the PM’s senior aide flouted Covid travel restrictions by driving his family 260 miles to County Durham, then came up with a cock-and-bull story to cover his tracks.
But this is far worse.
Though unquestionably powerful, Mr Cummings was a backroom schemer. Before his Barnard Castle jaunt, few people even knew who he was.
Mr hancock, by contrast, has been the Government’s coronavirus poster boy.
Sermonising, cajoling, threatening, hectoring, Mr Bossy has been front and centre since the crisis began.
his ministerial performance, especially on care homes, PPe and Test and Trace, has sometimes been woeful.
Mr Johnson once described him in a text message as ‘f***ing hopeless’. But patchy as his record was, few can have known he was such an arrant fraud.
The common factor in the Cummings and hancock cases is that Mr Johnson didn’t have the guts to fire either of them, richly though both deserved the sack.
They had flouted laws and shamelessly breached public trust, yet they were allowed to keep their jobs.
What does that say about Mr Johnson’s style of government? Where’s the discipline?
This paper backs the Prime Minister and is fully behind his mission to unite and level up the country. But appearances matter. Probity matters. honesty matters.
Thanks to the vaccine miracle, he is currently riding high in the polls and may seek to dismiss this affair as a media concoction which will quickly pass. he is wrong. Polls can be fickle and there are many trials to come as he and his Government try to rebuild our Covid-ravaged economy.
If he’s to succeed in his task, Mr Johnson needs to maintain authority, Cabinet discipline and public faith. As long as Mr hancock remains in position, that will be impossible. he should go without delay.