Cummings staged ‘power grab’ at start of pandemic, Hancock tells Covid inquiry

Dominic Cummings created a “culture of fear” inside Downing Street and attempted to exclude ministers and even Boris Johnson from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response, Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry.

Hancock, who was the health secretary for the bulk of the crisis, said Johnson’s then chief adviser had staged “essentially a power grab” in February 2020 by circumventing the government’s emergency response system with his own structure.

Cummings organised a meeting based around his own office every morning and invited “a subset” of the necessary people, Hancock said, but not including him.

“He didn’t invite any ministers,” Hancock said. “He didn’t regard ministers as a valuable contribution to any decision-making as far as I could see in the crisis or, indeed, any other time.” Cummings, Hancock added, advised at the time that decisions “don’t need to go to the prime minister”.

This system, which replaced the system of using Cobra emergency meetings, and lasted until the establishment of a network of ministerial action groups, actively hampered the response to the virus at the time, Hancock said.

“It inculcated a culture of fear, whereas what we needed was a culture where everybody was brought to the table and given their heads to do their level best in a once-in-a-generation crisis,” he said. “The way to lead in a crisis like this is to give people the confidence to do what they think needs to happen. And it caused the opposite of that.”

Hancock described Cummings as “a malign actor” in No 10 who instigated the culture of fear by effectively forcing out Sajid Javid as chancellor in February 2020 in a row over special advisers.

In other evidence to the inquiry, Hancock pushed back against criticisms that the health department he led in 2020 was chaotic and apt to overpromise, saying it was often just doing work other parts of government had neglected.

However, under questioning from Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry counsel, Hancock struggled to justify documents and messages from early 2020 in which he repeatedly told colleagues that a cohesive plan was in place for Covid, or to provide evidence for a claim he urged Johnson to call an early lockdown.

Hancock said his version of events was accurate. “From the middle of January [2020] we were effectively trying to raise the alarm, trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem,” he said. “Getting the machine at the centre of government up and running was incredibly hard and took a huge amount of effort.”

Hancock was shown extracts from the diary of Patrick Vallance, the government’s then chief scientific adviser, which cited Vallance and various other senior figures discussing the “operational mess” in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), saying it had “no grip” and was “ungovernable”.

Hancock said that while it was clear the DHSC made mistakes, and that it was the role of the Cabinet Office and Downing Street to be “sceptical” of departments, Johnson’s No 10 had an “unhealthy toxic culture”.

“We rubbed up against this deep unpleasantness at the centre,” he said. “It was unhelpful in assuming that when anything was difficult or a challenge therefore there was somehow fault and blame. Some of these exhibits [from Vallance’s diary] demonstrate a lack of generosity or empathy in understanding the difficulty of rising to such a challenge.

Asked by Keith if the DHSC had taken on too much and been almost hubristic, Hancock said this was largely a factor of other departments being too slow to act, meaning it had to launch policies not in its remit, such as shielding and school closures.

“The rest of Whitehall was slow getting going, we had to get up and do it,” Hancock said.

Under subsequent questioning, Keith repeatedly pushed Hancock about whether he had incorrectly assured colleagues that his department had a plan in place for the pandemic, citing examples such as a WhatsApp message to Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, in January 2020, where Hancock said “full plans” existed.

The inquiry also saw minutes from a cabinet meeting on 6 February 2020 when Hancock was quoted as saying: “The central point to make was that the government had a plan to deal with this issue.”

Keith quizzed Hancock about this, saying that a Covid-specific plan was not even commissioned until four days later. Hancock replied that he was referring to “a whole series of different plans”, including a 2011 plan for pandemic flu.