 When Matt Hancock appeared before the Health and Science Select Committee last week, the most helpful statement was made by Greg Clarke. He's the committee chair. Clarke informed the room that Dominic Cummings, who had spoken to the committee two weeks earlier, had provided no evidence to back up his attacks on the Health Secretary. Dominic Cummings has now responded by uploading screenshots of WhatsApp messages between himself and the Prime Minister, in which both privately express concerns about Matt Hancock's ability and honesty. Now the screenshots date from March and April last year. We're going to take a look at some of those in one moment. First of all, just to remind you, in his testimony to that select committee, Cummings accused Matt Hancock of incompetence when it came to testing and buying PPE and also accused him of lying about both. So that's what these screenshots are intended to back up. Now, the first message I want to show you is from Boris Johnson to Dominic Cummings on the 27th of April. Now a note here again, there are two conversations going on here, as is often the case on WhatsApp. So I'm going to read you the ones that are relevant to Matt Hancock. So in this exchange, Boris Johnson says, on PPE, it's a disaster. I can't think of anything except taking Hancock off or putting Gove on. Now in reply to that particular message, Dominic Cummings says, with the Cabinet Office such a total shitshow, I'm afraid this would have a severe risk of making it worse, not better. Boris Johnson replies, okay, what the F do we do? Another meeting with Matt and Stevens and Dayton and Co. Now here, Stevens is Simon Stevens, head of the NHS. Dayton is Lord Dayton. He was CEO of the Organising Committee, the London Olympics brought in as a PPE czar. Now, in reply to that Cummings, first of all, talks about problems with the civil servants in the Cabinet Office, things we've heard about in talk, a lot about. In the second, he says, with PPE, the real issues aren't about ministers. It's how many people with what expertise are led by who? How are they connected across wide-tool to other networks? What do they do when they hit barriers? How do we create visibility over problems and so on? In our system, only the Cabinet Office can dig into the truth, then move crap people and put in new people. Great people is totally critical and we have almost no power to move duffers and put in good. Only the Cabinet Secretary can do this. Hancock bullshits, but that wouldn't matter much if we actually controlled the Cabinet Office. So again, there you've got this classic Dominic Cummings line, which is essentially the bureaucracy is not letting us work as effectively as we would. The PM replies, Brill, I'm all ears. What's notable there is that within that critique of the civil service, Cummings says, Hancock bullshits. And he says that as if it's common knowledge, there's no pushback from the PM. So that to me does provide some evidence for Dominic Cummings claims in that select committee that essentially everyone had just stopped believing what Matt Hancock said in those first months of the pandemic. This conversation was on the 27th of March. So here, Dominic Cummings says, US has gone from 2,200 tests of fortnight to 27,000 a week ago to 100,000 yesterday. This is what we said we should do. Instead, we are still stuck on about 5k to 7k. And Matt Hancock saying today he's skeptical about getting to 10k by Monday, which he said would definitely happen on Tuesday. This means tens of thousands of NHS staff aren't at work over the next three critical weeks, apart from my earlier point, retesting being integral to escape plans. So he said Matt Hancock is not providing the testing we needed. And also he said last week we could get this number. Now he's saying it's going to be difficult to do classic Matt Hancock. We're lying, essentially. In response, and this is the real headline, Boris Johnson replies, totally effing hopeless. And you can also see that there's free missed calls from Boris Johnson to Dominic Cummings. Cummings explains in the blog that that was Boris Johnson trying to tell him he had tested positive for COVID-19. Dominic Cummings said he wasn't near the phone at that point in time. And we've got one more message, which is a lot like that one. But in this case, referring to ventilators, it's in fact the morning after the one we've just shown you where Boris Johnson calls Matt Hancock totally effing hopeless. Here Dominic Cummings says they've totally fucked up ventilators. I just heard officials admit we have been turning down ventilator offers because the price has been marked up. In reply, Johnson says it's Hancock. He has been hopeless. It's very, very clear there what Boris Johnson fix of Matt Hancock. Now, you might say this isn't hard and fast evidence of Matt Hancock being incompetent. This is actually just hard and fast evidence that both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson thought he was incompetent, right? Now, that to me does furnish his claims. It's always the case in any sort of evidential session that if you fought the thing at the time you were talking about, that's a stronger piece of evidence than if you're talking about it retrospectively. So I do think that counts for something. Dominic Cummings also, though, pointed to a part of Matt Hancock's testimony, which he thinks essentially proves the health secretary was terrible at his job at this point in time, especially when it comes to PPE procurement. Now, you might remember that Matt Hancock in his testimony suggested that one of the reasons it was difficult to procure PPE was because the Treasury had set rules where if you were charged a certain high price, you weren't supposed to buy it as a sort of method of cost control. Now, there were obviously big shortages of PPE at that period of time. So Matt Hancock needed to spend way above the odds. He was saying there were some rules that slowed that down slightly. Dominic Cummings is saying that was complete bullshit. It doesn't stack up. I want to go to this section of his blog. So Dominic Cummings writes, to MPs last week, Hancock claimed that, A, he decided to change the procurement rules that constrained the Department of Health. I requested the cap was removed, Hancock said. B, he went to the Chancellor about it because there was still a Treasury cap on the 11th of April. Cummings says this is false. This is an accidental admission of uselessness. If you believe Hancock's own account, he did not act on this issue until the 11th of April, weeks after it should have been dealt with. No PM pointed this out. Two, in fact, I and others in number 10 had already acted on this in March because of repeated insane meetings. In April, the Cabinet Secretary checked the paperwork, see below, and confirmed that the cap on the Department of Health had been removed in March as number 10 had insisted. So last week Hancock was both accidentally admitting being so useless that he did not act until the 11th of April and misleading MPs about what actually happened and blaming the Treasury still for delays in mid-April, when the Chancellor had sorted this out weeks earlier. Hancock's story to MPs is a lie that if true would show again, he was useless. So he's there saying, his account is I asked for this cap to be removed on the 11th of April. Dominic Cummings is saying, one, I know that not to be true. And two, if that were true, what the hell was he doing for the month and a half before that, when it was clear that we would need lots and lots of PPE? We did also get some more insight into the conduct of Boris Johnson. That includes this account of a meeting chaired by Dominic Raab. He was standing in at the time for the then hospitalised Prime Minister. So here Cummings writes, on the 20th of April, Hancock faced intense pressure. Under Raab, the meetings were less pleasant for everybody, but much more productive because unlike the PM, Raab can chair meetings properly instead of telling rambling stories and jokes. And B, he let good officials actually question people so we started to get to the truth. Unlike the PM, who as soon as things get a bit embarrassing, does the whole, let's take it offline shtick before shouting forward to victory, doing a thumbs up and pegging it out of the room before anyone can disagree. That's a very plausible account of how I can imagine Boris Johnson behaving in important meetings. Again, obviously, he hasn't provided concrete evidence for that, but it rings true. One more revelation about Boris Johnson, he suggests the public inquiry into the mistakes made during the COVID pandemic will be delayed so Boris Johnson can avoid dealing with the fallout. The public inquiry cannot fix this. It will not start for years and it is designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone. Unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election. He wants to make money and have fun, not go on and on. So we either live with chronic dysfunction for another circa five years or some force intervenes. So he's saying Boris Johnson, not a serious guy. He doesn't even want to be a prime minister for long because he wants to have some fun and make some money afterwards. Darlia, what do you think about this particular blog post? It's definitely interesting for us journalists to have someone who was at the top of government revealing all of these WhatsApp messages, making all of these claims about the actions of people at the top of the Tory party, people in positions of power. At the same time, this guy clearly has a grudge against Matt Hancock and no one really trusts him. Do you think these WhatsApp screenshots change anything? It's very mean girls, it's very tabloid friendly and it's almost being reported like it's entertainment. But when you actually get down to it, he's not telling us anything that is, you know, wasn't already quite easy to see. You know, it kind of reminds me of when that news came out about Boris saying, let the body's pile high and people were sort of got very tied up in questioning, you know, the context or whether or not that's exactly what he said. And the proof, you know, the proof was always in the pudding. I mean, he did let the body's pile high. So whether or not he said it in those exact terms, the facts doesn't really change. And similarly here, when you take away the kind of scandal of it, the sensationalized package that it comes in, it tells us something that's kind of always been obvious and should have been obvious to a journalist class whose job it is, or at least should be, to be insightful and to be analytical and critical of the government and, you know, read between the lines of government statements and of government leaks, rather than just sort of regurgitating them as fact, which is sort of the style of political journalism that, you know, particularly the BBC we are seeing. And the thing is, is that, you know, it tells us what we already sort of knew, which is that, you know, Matt Hancock, but also the government writ large was, you know, out of their depth in a moment where we couldn't afford to have a government that was out of its death than out of its depth. And we've lost, you know, thousands of precious members of our community as a result of that. You know, but if Trash Futures could, you know, before the Trash Futures podcast could, before Matt Hancock became health secretary, see that he was, you know, clownishly incompetent, you have to ask yourself why, you know, actual professional political media classes apparently couldn't see that or make that observation, or at least weren't, were deliberately not honest about it. And, you know, maybe it's because a sort of particular social contract has now developed between the political and, you know, the media class, which exchanges, you know, proximity and scoops for essentially discipline and boundaries that are very much set by the government. And what I think is sort of so depressing is that, you know, this is fatal, you know, and almost deliberate incompetence here that we're saying that we have seen and that Dominic Cummings is describing here, you know, that story about Boris Johnson, the way that Boris Johnson handles meetings is just like it's sickening. But why is this only actually, like I said, a lot of this is stuff that we could have gauged without these texts. Why are we only hearing about this? And why is this only being splashed on the front pages of newspapers when it can be done in the form of this sort of Westminster gossip, you know, in this kind of Shakespearean spectacle of, you know, the Prime Minister being betrayed by his closest confidant. You know, why is this the only time that the public are told in black and white that no, this isn't about, you know, apologism. This isn't about, you know, saying, oh, well, there's something of creating this false sense that the death toll was somehow inevitable, that the death toll of particularly people of color was somehow inevitable, or, you know, this kind of cruel negligence just being apologized for and sort of excused away. Why has that been how it has been so far? And then when it can be communicated in the through the medium of Westminster gossip that suddenly that's when we are sort of seeing it, that the public is seeing this in black and white. And not to mention that, you know, despite the government itself being aware that these deaths were not inevitable, but were a consequence of very bad decisions and bad infrastructure, yet where is the accountability and the change given that they've known this this whole time, like to look at that and say, oh, well, he's just fucking useless, you know, or it's a bit embarrassing, you know, that's the kind of language that you employ when like you're doing a school project and someone in your group isn't like pulling their weight. It's not when the public is putting their trust in you to manage during a pandemic. And when people right now have lost loved ones prematurely because you didn't get your act together. But I think like, you know, and I'm going to end this on the obvious point that this isn't just about kind of Boris Johnson, it's not just about Matt Hancock or Cummings, but it's the ways in which our media and political system rewards this kind of politics, it rewards this superficiality, it rewards performance over substance, sound bites over sort of clear vision and, you know, strategic relationships essentially over the truth. Like why has it come to be the case is it's probably a very long and multifaceted answer that is should be answered by someone with much more tools and knowledge than me. But the fact is that that is the reality that we seem to live in now.