Hancock tells Covid inquiry of ‘toxic culture’ in Johnson’s government

Photograph: UK Covid-19 Inquiry/PA

Matt Hancock has hit out at the “toxic culture” at the centre of Boris Johnson’s government in which some senior officials appeared more focused on attributing blame than working cohesively to combat the arrival of Covid in the UK.

Testifying to the official inquiry into the pandemic, Hancock pushed back against criticisms that the health department he led in 2020 was chaotic and overwhelmed, saying it was often just doing work other parts of government had neglected.

“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,” the former health secretary said.

“Getting the machine at the centre of government up and running was incredibly hard and took a huge amount of effort.”

Hancock, who resigned as health secretary in June 2021, 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”.

Responding to Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry counsel, 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.

“Anything that went wrong was seen as almost an intentional failure,” Hancock said, adding that some people in government, who he did not name, made this culture even worse by spreading “misinformation” to Johnson.

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 policies over closing schools.

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

Up to late February 2020, Hancock said, No 10 was far too slow to react to Covid, meaning he chaired early meetings of the government’s Cobra emergency committee about the pandemic rather than Johnson. Hancock said he was initially blocked from holding a Cobra meeting on the issue.

“Under another regime, under another cabinet secretary, the centre would have chaired those early Cobras,” he said.

Part of this, he said, was an institutional failure of the department-led model to handling policies, which worked for smaller or medium-size crises but “does not work if this is a whole-of-government, indeed a whole-of-society crisis”.