 The most brutal attacks in the whole of Dominic Cummings' seven-hour testimony to the Health and Science Select Committee were reserved for Health Secretary Matt Hancock. He said Matt Hancock should have been fired multiple times. I think that the Secretary of State for Health should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody in multiple occasions, in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly. He should have been fired 15 or 20 times. The claim there he should have been fired for lying in public and in private. Now the co-chair of the committee, who is Greg Clark, asked Cummings to clarify exactly what lies he was talking about. In numerous examples, I mean in the summer he said that everyone who needed treatment, who got the treatment that they required, he knew that that was a lie because he'd been briefed by the chief scientific advisor and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak. We were told explicitly people did not get the treatment that they deserved. Many people were left to die in horrific circumstances. Is that the basis of your assertion? Is that the basis of your assertion or are there other pieces of evidence that you base that charge on? Yes, I mean in mid-April, the just before Prime Minister and I were diagnosed with having COVID ourselves, the Secretary of State for Health told us in the cabinet room, everything is fine on PPE. We've got it all covered, et cetera, et cetera. When I came back, almost the first meeting I had in the cabinet room was about the disaster over PPE and how we were actually completely sure that hospitals all over the country were running out. The Secretary of State said in that meeting, this is the fault of Simon Stevens, it's the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it's not my fault. They've blocked approvals on all sorts of things. I said to the cabinet secretary, please investigate this and find out if it's true. The cabinet secretary came back to me and said, it's completely untrue. I have lost confidence in the Secretary of State's honesty in these meetings. The cabinet secretary said that. The cabinet secretary said that to me and the cabinet secretary said that to the Prime Minister. So very, very damning there. One is saying he lied to the public when he said people didn't die because of lack of care. I mean it was quite clear from the outside that that was the case, that care had to be rationed because so many people were sick and they hadn't locked down early enough and they hadn't increased the capacity of the NHS quite fast enough. Obviously, everyone in the NHS was working incredibly hard. This is a problem with the government of not locking down soon enough, not having the proper preparation. He's also saying they're very, very significant. He's saying he lied on PPE, he said PPE would be sorted, then he blamed it on other people when it was actually his fault. Those are the words of Cummings, of course, but he says the cabinet secretary also agreed. Now, according to Cummings, those weren't the only lies told by Matt Hancock. Another incredibly serious allegation that would have cost lives again involved care homes, because asked about how it could possibly have happened that COVID patients were discharged into care homes, Cummings answered the following. When we realised in April that this happened, the Prime Minister said a less polite version of what on earth are you telling me? But when he 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? We were told categorically in March that people will be tested before they went back to care homes. We only subsequently found out that that hadn't happened. Now, all the government rhetoric was we put a shield around care homes and blah, blah, it's complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with COVID back to the care homes. In the same way no one thought about how to produce the details of what to do on shielding, and therefore I had this terrible meeting on the 19th on shielding, I just think that the whole thing around care homes was the same, that just fundamentally it had never been properly dug into. And what happened was in the crisis environment of complete chaos in that week of around the 16th, as we were heading towards lockdown, people just said, well, we've got no alternative to do this. And why on earth Hancock told us that everyone was going to be tested? I've absolutely no idea. So we've got quite a lot of allegations piling up there. He lied to the public about people dying without proper care. He lied to his colleagues about PPE and now he's lied to his colleagues about people being tested before they go into care homes. Now that decision to send people into care homes without being tested, which ceded COVID-19 to precisely those groups of people who were most vulnerable, that would have cost tens of thousands of lives. So an incredibly serious charge from Dominic Cummings there. I don't know if you'll be surprised to know but it goes on. There are more allegations leveled at Matt Hancock from Dominic Cummings. This one involves the test and trace system. This is not so much about lying. It's in a way more serious. He's saying that Matt Hancock screwed up the test and trace system purely so he could be seen to meet arbitrary targets. In my opinion, disastrously, the Secretary of State had made, while the Prime Minister was on his near death bed, had made this pledge to do 100,000 by the end of, by the end of April. Now, this was really, this was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we'd already had that goal internally. We'd already had conversations 10 days earlier to say, instead of cancelling testing, we should be ramping up testing. And it shouldn't just be 100,000, we should be heading for a million tests a day and more. But that means building the kind of architecture and the foundations to do all this properly. What then happened when I came back around the 13th was I started getting calls and number 10 were getting calls saying, Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he's telling everybody what to do to maximize his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month. So we had half the government with me and number 10 calling Brown frantically saying, do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the median term. And we had Hancock calling the wall saying, down tools on this, do this whole tests back so that I can hit my target. Now, in my opinion, he should have been fired for that thing alone. And that itself meant that the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways, completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say, look at me my hundred K targets. It was criminal disgraceful behavior that caused serious harm. Criminal disgraceful behavior that caused serious harm. Quite the challenge. It was also particularly noticeable that he was saying those arbitrary targets were set when Boris Johnson was on his deathbed and Cummings was out of action. Now, you'll remember from the time those targets were quite ridiculous and the government was clearly bending the rules and doing lots of accounting tricks to make it seem as if they had been met. But they were counting a test is done if they just sent it in the post, counting many of them multiple times. So there was a lot going on. It did seem like the government were essentially distracting themselves with the desire to meet targets instead of actually do what was functional and useful. And he is saying the person who bears personal responsibility for that is Matt Hancock. He also accused Matt Hancock of using the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Advisor as a shield basically to cover for his own mistakes. It would be interesting to see how they respond to that allegation. He also said, and this is probably the most extraordinary one, he said, the top civil servant personally told the Prime Minister that he should fire Matt Hancock because, and these are Cummings words, the British system is not set up to deal with a secretary of state who repeatedly lies in meetings. So he's saying the top civil servant, someone who is not necessarily a factional maneuver who we presume doesn't just hate Matt Hancock because he's got personal grudge and wants to replace him in the cabinet or has an ally who wants to replace him in the cabinet, whatever. We'd assume they have some objectivity. They're saying this guy lies so much that the British system cannot survive with him being secretary of state, very, very extreme. All of this obviously poses the question as to why Boris Johnson kept the lying incompetent health secretary in post. Cummings was asked that precise question and this was his answer. It's definitely the case that the Prime Minister was told that country to my view, I said sack him, I said sack him almost every week, sometimes almost every day. He was told though that you should not sack him, you should keep him there because he's the person you fire when the inquiry comes along. I thought, my counter argument to that was, if you leave him there, we're going to have another set of disasters in the autumn and that's the critical thing. Forget the inquiry. God knows when that will bloody happen. We've got to get rid of this guy now because every single week things are going disastrously wrong. He was saying that Boris Johnson was told objectively this is someone who you should fire but he listened instead to advice which said, no, keep him on because there's going to be a public inquiry which is going to be very critical and you're going to need someone to fall on their sword when that happens and Matt Hancock is a good candidate. Now Moira, obviously there are a lot of questions here. Should we trust Dominic Cummings here? Does he have an axe to grind? I mean, we know he does have an axe to grind but how much should that affect how much we believe of his testimony? If we do accept it though, who comes off worse here? Is it Matt Hancock or is it Boris Johnson? Well, first of all, I think that we should, for the majority, probably accept this testimony. Cummings has nothing to lose apart from being penalized further than the inquiry. I think he's trying to get ahead of the story, he's trying to get it out now but from what we've seen it does seem to ally with what we were told about. What we witnessed with our own eyes, not what we were told, what we witnessed with our own eyes during the first half of the pandemic. As for who's to blame, well, I'd say it seems to be like a true meeting of turds really because I would say the majority of the blame lies with Johnson. Ultimately, he's the prime minister. If he had the power to stave off the lockdowns, if he had the power to say, no, we're not going to implement this system yet because the British public won't take to it the way the Taiwanese public has, he has the power to also enact those systems on the flip side. The portrayal of the Boris Johnson in Cummings' testimony and what I thought was most interesting was that he was a weak man because most of the time Boris tries to portray himself as this like, you know, if not a leader, just someone who does what he wants, when he wants, whenever. And this was a weak man, a weak man surrounded by more weak men. And I think the buck ultimately stops with the person at the top of the tree. You have Matt Hancock and put in these positions of power by the likes of Boris Johnson. And not he doesn't remove him, whether that's to protect his own background inquiry, which you know, he might have, he's responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people, just to protect himself. That's a long term sort of outlook that is purely about self serving like narcissism. And so ultimately, if the person who put Matt Hancock in the position where he could have been able to make those decisions where he could have been able to lie to that degree, and also probably knew that he was a liar, because I was looking around earlier and I found stories about Matt Hancock being accused of lying to a degree where people noticed it as late, like as early as 2013, he was he appeared on this pro he once skipped an interview. And he said, I was I was 30 minutes 30 seconds late, they wouldn't let me on and the producer was like, no, you are you were in bed when we called you this was a flagship TV show that he wouldn't turn up to come and defend his like skills policy. And they were just shocked, even by the level of government that we have, they were shocked that a minister just would not get our bed to come and defend his own skills policy on this TV program and then lied about it so blatantly. So the signs of Hancock, I feel like you kind of work with this man and put him in that position if you did not know who's a liar, you have these two, you know, your aid, your cabinet secretary telling you this man is a lie, he's going to kill tens of thousands of people. And you keep him on. Well, where's the blame stopping that it's going to be with Boris Johnson. PF with five euros says, how much should we believe Cummings on his word? All of this seems plausible, but I wouldn't put it past him to bend the truth to get back at Johnson. We know that Dominic Cummings is actually I say we know that Dominic Cummings is good at weaving a story. We also know that he can be incredibly bad at weaving a story as he did in the Rose Garden when he tried to justify going to Durham. But we also know that he can, he can at times weave a good story. And here he has told a convincing one. But also it could be politically motivated. And I think on this issue of Matt Hancock, this is particularly relevant because I do actually believe most of his criticisms of Matt Hancock. I believe that he's an incredibly dishonest person. At the same time, there was a clear bias in Dominic Cummings testimony against Matt Hancock and potentially Boris Johnson. And in favor of Rishi Sunak, who he only had glowing praise for, even though we know that when it came to the second wave and as we've, you know, as I've already said, more people died in the second wave than the first wave. It was people like Rishi Sunak who were pushing against a lockdown and people like Matt Hancock who were pushing for one. So for all his faults, when it came to that crucial key argument at that key moment, Matt Hancock was on the right side of history and Rishi Sunak, who, you know, Dominic Cummings seems to be allied with still was on the wrong side of the argument. So while, to be honest, I find all of these criticisms of Matt Hancock completely believable, I find the fact that he's saying he is responsible for all of the bad things. Rishi Sunak is responsible for all of the good things. As is Dominic Raab, as is Michael Gove, I find that completely unbelievable. So I can, I can believe that whilst the faults about Matt Hancock are real, he's potentially blamed things for Matt Hancock that are actually shared by people who are his allies and it's convenient to concentrate all of the problems on one person. He veered away totally from being any sort of like apportioning any blame to Rishi Sunak. But what I thought was interesting is that he did, he did say in the second lockdown Matt Hancock was on his side and Matt Hancock decided that we did need to lock down and Matt Hancock was actually one of the voices saying that which made it more credible the sort of accusations he leveled elsewhere. But at the same time he is a man with an axe to grind. He has got motivations. I don't know whether that's to get back into government or just so that he can get back at the people he thinks messed up his project. You know, this was a man who delivered Brexit. He delivered taking back control. He delivered Boris Johnson's majority and this pandemic came along and it turns out the man he's put into this huge power got this huge mandate is a moron who's killed hundreds of thousands of people. I can imagine that rankles when you think that you've dedicated all of your sort of Machiavellian tricks to putting this person to power and be like I'm going to do this for you and then the way they repay you is by bungling it. That's a guilt to carry and I think I do think that he's maybe offloading some of that guilt by giving what he sees as just unfettered testimony and of course it's going to be affected by bias because he's dominant Cummings and we are all affected by bias to some degrees but this is a man who is very clear sort of like he thinks of himself as a libertarian like he wouldn't say this but he thinks of himself as you know individualist this libertarian who has no political alliance but clearly does. He believes in eugenics. He loves to see Sunak like there's there's clear allegiances there. But I think he's offloading his guilt. Ultimately I think that's why he's decided to be radically honest and talk about this openness. He's offloading the stain of what he's been involved in and that's why I'm prone to believe him but that's also why we have to just be so analytical and critical about the testimony because there's gaps he will not fill because he perhaps doesn't he's too scared to even think about his role in this.