EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT: 'How can we justify all this paralysis?' - Matt Hancock ... trends now

In the first week of April 2020, the whole country was in a state of high anxiety as worldwide cases of Covid passed one million. This instalment of Matt Hancock's Pandemic Diaries begins with Boris Johnson in hospital in an intensive care bed fighting for his life. 

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Boris is out of intensive care! More good news: the chief veterinary officer has advised that the risk of transmission from felines to humans is low. At least we're not going to have to kill anyone's cats.

Saturday, April 18

Hundreds of businesses are approaching the department offering to manufacture this or that. Half the time nobody returns their calls, even with big companies such as Primark.

The problem is weeding out time-wasters and chancers – of which there are many – without missing opportunities. One company with a good product got so p***ed off they sold everything to the Scottish NHS. 

Even the Labour Party is writing in with suggested names of companies and individuals who could help – apparently without doing any due diligence on the offers.

Monday, April 20

Crunch week for hitting my testing target of 100,000 tests done by May 1. There's an uncomfortable amount of speculation about my career depending on it. [Dominic] Cummings is itching for me to fail.

Friday, April 24

Downing Street called my office saying I needed to schedule a quick call with the PM. I was looking forward to it, until I switched on Zoom to find the PM at Chequers flanked by Cummings and about a dozen other advisers. Rishi [Sunak] was there, looking sheepish. I realised instantly what was going on: an attempted ambush.

Boris opened with some gentle warm-ups, then Cummings started the shelling, subjecting me to a barrage of questions about my department's response: on PPE, testing, NHS capacity, ventilators. Every so often, one of the others would pile in. Most questions seemed to be based on inaccurate media reports.

It was utterly exhausting, but I've lived this for months now, 18 hours a day, pretty much every day, so I am on top of every detail.

When they finally ran out of ammunition, I pressed 'Leave Meeting', sat back in my chair, checked my body for shrapnel wounds and saw that I was broadly intact. Next?

Friday, May 1

We did it, and with a very comfortable margin. 122,347 tests! Let the naysayers put that in their pipe and smoke it! I'd be lying if I didn't say I enjoyed my moment, given how desperately certain people were willing me to fail.

Sunday, May 3

Boris thinks Australia's decision to cut itself off from the world might be the way forward for the UK. 'A prize for the best 100-word explanation for why the UK has 28,000 deaths and Australia has 100,' he said, laying down the gauntlet to me, Cummings, [Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick] Vallance and the Prof [Chris Whitty, the Government's Chief Medical Officer].

I told Boris: 'Coronaviruses are seasonal and don't transmit as much outdoors.

'It is striking that no part of the southern hemisphere has seen such a significant outbreak.'

This seemed to do the trick.

We still haven't figured out what to do about borders. [Dominic] Raab, [Grant] Shapps and Sunak all want to keep the borders open. Crucially, they're supported by the Prof. On the other side, Priti Patel and I are in favour of far tougher measures, as is Boris.

Monday, May 4

Tonight, Nicola Sturgeon announced a 'summer push to elimination [of Covid]', a policy which has about as much hope of working as Chairman Mao's attempt to eliminate sparrows by getting the Chinese population to bang pots and pans.

Much as I'm sure Nicola would love to build a Trump-style wall between her fiefdom and the rest of Great Britain, we're all in this together. One person who's clearly not keen on a hermit lifestyle is Prof Neil Ferguson [who was advising the Government on its Covid response]. 

I wasn't particularly sympathetic when I heard he'd been caught breaking the rules [by meeting with his lover]. He's issued a grovelling apology, but it was obvious he couldn't continue to act as a Government adviser.

Friday, May 15

The PM came over [in the Downing Street garden.] Like me, Boris had just got his results from the antibody test. I had medium to strong antibodies, but his were off the charts. He's so competitive that even winning on the strength of his antibodies cheers him up. He went back to the group he was sitting with, grinning all over his face.

Friday, May 22

Westminster is abuzz with claims that Cummings broke lockdown rules, going to stay with his parents while he had Covid, which looks like a mega breach.

Saturday, May 23

Downing Street called asking if I'd do some media [to support Cummings], but I'm uneasy. Despite all the reassurances, it feels off.

In the end, I issued a supportive tweet, saying he was right to find childcare for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill.

George Osborne messaged me this evening warning me not to stick my neck out for Cummings again. 'Lie low' was his advice.

Sunday, May 24

I spent much of the day fielding angry messages, many of them questioning why the PM is still standing up for Cummings. The answer is that he rules through fear and intimidation, squashing those who dare to challenge him or get in his way.

Monday, May 25

Cummings tried to draw a line under the Barnard Castle affair by holding a press conference in the Downing Street garden. He sat behind a table, squinting awkwardly into the sun, looking like a sulky teenager who'd been sent outside to do his work for disrupting the class.

Afterwards, I found myself feeling strangely sorry for Boris.

Cummings has only one setting – divide and destroy – and now the boss is having to say some pretty stupid things as he machetes his way through the resulting mess.

The only thing for it was to keep backing Cummings – silence from me would only create an unhelpful story – so this evening I tweeted that I welcome the fact that Cummings 'has provided substantive answers to all the questions put to him'. Apparently it got me some credit in No 10, but I can't say I felt good about it.

Away from the Cummings s*** show, we had a Cabinet meeting to discuss plans for easing restrictions. It was a bizarre Cabinet, held on Zoom without a single mention of the Cummings-shaped elephant in the room. 

In fact, an absurd amount of bandwidth was occupied by a discussion about whether – when we allow two households to get together outside – people should be permitted to walk through a house to get to a friend's garden. 

It's fine by me, but are people going to ask whether they will also be able to go inside to use the loo? 'If they're quick and disinfect the handle?' the Prof replied.

Who could believe that under a Conservative government, the long arm of the State would find its way into people's loos?

Monday, June 1

A bad start to the day as No 10 omitted to invite me to a high-level meeting with the PM about coming out of lockdown. Probably Cummings's doing.

Thursday, June 4

Boris messaged me at 6.43am saying he was 'going quietly crackers' about not testing enough people. He told me he sees it as our 'Achilles heel'. He was in a proper flap. 'What is wrong with our country that we can't fix this?' he complained. 

I tried to calm him down. 'Don't go crackers,' I said. 'We now have the biggest testing capacity in Europe.' Tempting as it was, I refrained from saying we did this against the obstruction of his own No 10 operation.

Monday, June 15

It seems that a drug that's been around for 60 years can make a huge difference to the most poorly Covid patients. It's called dexamethasone, and can reduce the chances of a patient on a ventilator dying by about a third. Bingo!

Tuesday, June 16

My dyslexic brain finds new words very hard to learn, and I was beginning to panic about fluffing 'dexamethasone' when we made the announcement today. I paced around my study, saying it again and again. 

Eventually, I felt I'd mastered it – only to learn that Boris had decided at the last minute to make the announcement himself. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't annoyed to be stripped of my moment to shine.

Wednesday, June 17

In an embarrassingly crude power grab, [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen is trying to wrest control of vaccine research and procurement from EU member states.

Never mind that health is a matter for individual countries: the woman who once sent German army units on manoeuvres with broomsticks – because they didn't have any rifles – wants to move responsibility for scientific development and manufacture into the sticky paws of Brussels bureaucrats.

I may have voted to Remain, but it's enough to make a Brexiteer out of anyone.

Wednesday, July 8

Rishi's announced a new Eat Out To Help Out initiative. I did my best to sound supportive, but in truth I'm worried that it might backfire and lead to a spike in cases.

Tuesday, July 14

Alastair Campbell, who's presenting Good Morning Britain this week, was mouthing off about Nadine [Dorries, Mental Health Minister], asking when was the last time anyone heard or saw her talking about mental health. 

She is already extremely sensitive about not being on TV/radio as often as she would like and it clearly touched a nerve. She thinks No 10 prefers to wheel out younger Ministers who went to Oxford University and made it clear she wants to do more.

Saturday, July 25

Anyone coming back from Spain from midnight tonight will have to self-quarantine for 14 days. This is very bad news for a lot of British holidaymakers.

Department for Transport officials kept pushing for 24 hours' notice for the Spain decision, which I thought was curious – Grant Shapps is normally an 'action this day' Minister – until I discovered that Grant and his family had just flown there on holiday. The officials were trying, perhaps too hard, to protect their Minister.

In Cobra meetings, Nicola Sturgeon's political games have become incredibly debilitating and significantly limit scope for open discussion. She sits like a statue, lips pursed like the top of a drawstring bag, only jolting into life when there's an opportunity to say something to further the separatist cause.

The minute someone presses 'End Meeting', you can almost hear her running for a lectern so she can rush out an announcement before we make ours. We now chew over big decisions elsewhere and relegate formal meetings to rubber-stamping exercises.

Monday, July 27

Downing Street is in a semi-panic about a second wave.

Tuesday, July 28

Sturgeon is on manoeuvres again, trying to persuade us all to sign up to her impossible and anti- scientific zero-Covid plan.

Sure, we'd all love zero Covid, but that's about as realistic as a bagpipe-playing unicorn.

She just wants to look and sound tough, then blame us when her policies don't work.

I can hardly bear to watch her on TV any more.

Wednesday, July 29

Testing is a continuing concern. We still haven't sorted procurement for what Boris calls 'Operation Moonshot'. The idea is to carry out literally millions of Covid tests a day to keep the economy going.

Monday, August 3

To ram home his point about how complicated the Covid rules have got, Boris went round the [Cabinet] table asking everyone to set them out simply. We had endless different answers, and he got them all right. 

'I hope colleagues feel I have justified my general reputation for mastery of detail by being RIGHT this morning about the rules. It's two households inside and six outside,' he said triumphantly.

Friday, August 7

Boris is having a sugar rush about DIY Covid testing, which he believes could lead us to what's he's dubbed – in emphatic capital letters – 'COVID FREEDOM DAY'. I have no idea who he's been talking to, but he's very fired up.

He thinks rapid home tests are the way to 'get Whitehall and the whole British army of bludgers and skivers' back to the office and 'douse all remaining embers of the disease'. Today, I'm on a short break in Hay-on-Wye. When we got to the pub, there was great excitement. I'm not used to people recognising me, so the universal recognition is a bit of a shock. Something I'll have to get used to, I suppose.

Tuesday, August 18

[Hancock has announced plans to abolish Public Health England.] On reflection, I should have been more brutal earlier. It wasn't fit for purpose, and I should have cleared out senior figures who blocked the expansion of testing, basically because they didn't want the private sector involved.

In response, Angela Rayner [deputy Labour leader] has been tweeting the usual tripe about Tories wanting to privatise the NHS by stealth. Does anyone seriously listen to this c**p any more?

The truth is, we wouldn't stand a chance of winning this fight against Covid if it wasn't for support from business. From manufacturing tests to developing the vaccine, the private sector – alongside the NHS and

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