Matt Hancock knows that Dominic Cummings has made him unsackable

The danger to the health secretary came not from Dominic Cummings – or from Jonathan Ashworth, his Labour shadow – but from his own complacency. He came to the House of Commons to answer a question from Ashworth, with Cummings’s taunt of “liar” echoing in the nation’s ears.

But Matt Hancock knew that the venom of Cummings’s attack had made him unsackable. The prime minister could hardly be seen to be giving in to his former chief adviser’s campaign of revenge. Boris Johnson hadn’t sacked Hancock when Cummings repeatedly demanded it while he was at the heart of government; it would look much weaker for him to do as Cummings demanded now.

So Hancock’s challenge was to avoid looking smug. He started off well, with a serious manner, mindful that one of the charges levelled against him is that he was jointly responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

“Throughout, we have been straight with people and with this House,” Hancock intoned, without otherwise referring to the allegations against him at all. Ashworth put them to him. The most damaging is that Hancock knew that hospitals were discharging patients to care homes either with coronavirus or without testing them to find out. This is not a new claim, although Cummings added the charge that Hancock had kept this information from the prime minister.

Hancock said he had dealt with the subject many times before, which is not an answer, and that it was all very difficult at the start of the pandemic because testing capacity was so limited, which isn’t a very good answer. Labour MPs repeatedly pressed him on the failure to protect care homes, to which his next defence was that “we followed clinical advice” and, as the government learned more about asymptomatic transmission, “we changed the protocols over the summer”.

Cummings’s other main charge is that Hancock had “lied” about getting hold of enough personal protective equipment (PPE). This was easier for Hancock to brush aside because the l-word immediately deprives the accuser of the moral high ground. Again, Hancock’s main defence was that the situation was difficult and confused in the early phase of the pandemic.

Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, was the first of many Conservative MPs to rush to Hancock’s defence, saying that until Cummings provides evidence “we should regard such allegations as unproven”.

As Tory MPs queued up to support him, Hancock kept slipping into the danger zone, but became increasingly unsuccessful at preventing himself from smiling, joking and sounding pleased with himself.

Peter Bone, the MP for Wellingborough, asked him if “the only mistake the prime minister made in this pandemic is that he didn’t fire Dominic Cummings early enough”. Hancock said he was “very grateful” for that question “and I will continue to compliment him while I think of how to respond”.

When he had thought of how to respond, he said: “The honest truth is that from the start I have been totally focused on how to get out of this pandemic. It is absolutely true that the operation and functioning of government has got easier this last six months and I think all the public can see that.” Everyone in the chamber knew that the last six months is the period since Cummings’s departure from No 10 in November.

Every friendly question from a Tory MP was alternated with a hostile one from an opposition MP, however, and Hancock had to switch back repeatedly to his serious face. When Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP, asked about coronavirus deaths, he said how sad he was about “what has happened in her family as it has happened in mine” (his step-grandfather died of coronavirus).

He defended himself against the “unnecessary deaths” charge without referring to it, or to Cummings, directly. He knows that Cummings’s charge is made with the full luxury of retrospective vision. As The Sun front page had it this morning: “Do You Need a Hindsight Test, Mr Cummings?” And that Cummings accepted yesterday that he was just as responsible for any unnecessary deaths as anyone else in government.

So he said: “You take decisions in government based on the information you have at the time.” He is right about that, but he allowed himself to look just a little too delighted with his good fortune in having Cummings’s “napalm” fall harmlessly miles away from its target.