A defence of Matt Hancock – a man in an impossible situation, haunted by Jeremy Hunt’s legacy

Matt Hancock was never a politician I really warmed to. He always reminded me too much of the late David Frost before the broadcaster acquired some of the gravitas that came with age. The resemblance was partly visual, but more a matter of a certain glibness and bumptiousness in his manner.

That he was one of the few cabinet ministers Boris Johnson reappointed when he took over from Theresa May and kept on again after he won his big majority last December seemed to say less about Hancock’s competence than Johnson’s need for a referendum Remainer in his team and that the health and social care portfolio – a poisoned chalice even at the best of times – was not at the forefront of Johnson’s priorities.

What a difference, as they say, a few months make. By late February, with a new disease believed to have originated in China running rampage through Italy and Spain, Hancock and his department were in the spotlight as never before. They have remained under the increasingly harsh glare of political and public attention ever since.

Hancock became a regular at the daily Downing Street press briefings – as, given his responsibilities, of course, he had to – but he had also shed much of his irritating offhandedness and gained plaudits for his sombre and generally well-informed presentations. To his detractors, his success was in large part relative – relative, that is, to the parade of much poorer performers. But he won an additional measure of sympathy after he contracted the infection and bounced back and gained in authority, too.

Now, it seems as though the wheels could be starting to come off Matt Hancock’s chariot. Last weekend reports surfaced of a rift between Boris Johnson and his health secretary, with Hancock pleading with his boss to “Give me a break”. He snapped at a fellow MP and doctor to “consider her tone”, and has recently given vent to his exasperation in interviews in a way that even the most elementary media training would strongly advise against.

Such abruptness does not necessarily lose him public sympathy – there is ample evidence that, on coronavirus, audiences are also losing patience with journalist inquisitors. But I doubt he takes such risks on the off chance that the public will like him better. It speaks rather of the tensions seething just beneath the surface of a government that is trying to cope with a full-on emergency, and of an individual in the hot seat who has occasionally allowed some of the stress to show.

Which is why, for once, I am not going to join government or Hancock critics in piling on the opprobrium. Instead, to borrow and reverse John Major’s famous dictum on crime, might it not be better to understand a little more and condemn a little less? Rather than beating the health secretary again with all the same sticks, perhaps we should pause for a moment to marvel that he is still turning up for work every day and taking the flak.

Matt Hancock has a totally impossible job. It is not just the normal impossibility of the health secretary brief. Coronavirus is at once a national and international emergency. It requires all the resources of government and the civil service and the public. It is an emergency – like a war – where the prime minister has to become the coordinator of the national effort and ensure that everything is directed towards agreed objectives.

Boris Johnson’s majority, and his character, allowed him to exercise that authority. But then he fell ill. For a crucial three weeks, the business of government seemed to drift. As an identifiably medical emergency, the pandemic was seen once again first and foremost as the responsibility of the health secretary. It was he, in the prime minister’s absence, who had to plead and cajole for the cooperation of practically every other government department and a host of outside interests besides. Now Johnson has returned, but with his energy clearly diminished and perhaps his authority, too. The health secretary still stands largely alone.

The job of health secretary, of course, has often seemed just that bit beyond the capabilities of the incumbent. But it is questionable how far the position in its current specification is doable at all. Jeremy Hunt was unusual in staying in the post for more than five years and for taking on the powerful junior doctors’ lobby and (almost) winning. His tenure might be considered almost as close to success as it is possible for a health secretary to come.

But Hunt never faced anything like the multiple crises that now confront his successor. Indeed, Hunt has the luxury of offering what he (but probably not Hancock) might see as supportive criticism from his perch as chair of the Commons’ health select committee. What is more, in adding responsibility for social care to his department’s responsibilities, as he did six months before his elevation to the Foreign Office, Hunt unwittingly bequeathed the legacy that will probably haunt Hancock forever.

There are many reasons why the health portfolio presents such a challenge. One is the dual position of the NHS as at once a unifying national treasure – and so profoundly political – and a service that should simply be expected to provide healthcare as efficiently and to as high a standard as possible, as happens in most of Europe. Another stems from its labyrinthine structures and sometimes warring hierarchies. Procurement, for instance – including of the PPE which has so dogged the response to the pandemic in the UK – has been a government, not an NHS, responsibility in recent years as part of a drive to standardise equipment and keep down bills.

Bringing social care into the department’s prime responsibilities introduced a whole new dimension, as care is the responsibility not of the NHS, but of local authorities, many of which have in turn contracted it out to a multiplicity of private companies. The purpose was to streamline provision. But the hard, practical decisions were never taken, so the intended “integration” never happened. That central government was seen to give the NHS priority for capacity and supplies early on in the coronavirus crisis – at the expense, it would appear, of social care – means that relations between the two sectors are now as bad as they have ever been. The still unfolding disaster in care homes may finally prompt reform, but there will be a price for ministers to pay.

The battlelines are already being drawn up for the inquests and inquiries that will surely come and, as secretary for health and social care, Hancock will be at the front of the firing line. He may well anticipate the inevitable and resign before he is dismissed – if Boris Johnson allows him that dignity. But his fate appears sealed. To have had the misfortune to be in this role at a time when a pandemic left the UK with one of the highest per capita death tolls in Europe is not a defensible record.

But when all is said and done, it would be unjust in the extreme if Hancock were left to take all the blame alone. Indeed, in at least one respect, he deserves credit. The UK avoided the harrowing scenes of overwhelmed medics and hospitals that were seen in Italy and elsewhere. Maybe that particular objective dominated all others to the point that other imperatives were neglected: the protection of people in care homes and the treatment of other potentially fatal conditions, such as cancer and heart disease. Another health secretary might perhaps have done better; many would probably have done worse.

It is too early to judge the success or otherwise of the UK’s response to coronavirus. But if it comes to be seen as the colossal failure it now appears, it will be a failure made by many hands. To single out Matt Hancock would be to neglect the serious questions that the pandemic has raised in relation to the health and social care sectors, as well as to the working of the whole government machine. It would also let far too many others off the hook – from scientists and health and care executives through civil servants, right up to the prime minister himself.