Inside the Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings feud

Inside Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings’ feud as ex-Health Secretary accuses No 10 Svengali of ‘total idiocy’ in early days of pandemic

• Click here to read Part One of Matt Hancock’s explosive pandemic diaries and watch the full video exclusively on The Mail+ 
• Ex-Health Secretary accuses adviser of ‘total idiocy’ early in the pandemic
• He says Mr Cummings had ‘complete contempt for elected politicians’

Matt Hancock has revealed details of his extraordinary feud with Dominic Cummings – accusing the former No 10 adviser of ‘total idiocy’ in the early days of the pandemic.

Going public with a series of searing accusations, the former health secretary paints Boris Johnson’s ex-chief of staff as a menace who used petty tactics to frustrate the Covid effort.

In his pandemic diaries, which are being serialised on Mail+ from today and in tomorrow’s Daily Mail, Mr Hancock claimed he was forced to fight against hostile briefings and office power moves even as the virus threatened to overwhelm the NHS.

He says Mr Cummings had ‘complete contempt for elected politicians – the Prime Minister included’, and that it was ‘astonishing that Boris gives so much power to Cummings’.

Matt Hancock has revealed details of his extraordinary feud with Dominic Cummings – accusing the former No 10 adviser of ‘total idiocy’ in the early days of the pandemic

The animosity towards his former colleague is a thread running through Mr Hancock’s diaries, right up until Mr Cummings’s shock departure from No 10 in November 2020.

It comes after Mr Cummings targeted Mr Hancock in his ‘Domshells’ – his shocking claims about how the pandemic was handled in Downing Street – saying the former health secretary ‘should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things’ for his ‘criminal, disgraceful behaviour’.

Click here to read Part One of Matt Hancock’s explosive pandemic diaries exclusively on The Mail+ 

When Mr Cummings entered No 10 in 2019, he was best known for his role masterminding the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU referendum and coming up with the ‘Take Back Control’ slogan.

But following the election of Mr Johnson, he became the most high-profile and notorious adviser since the Blair years.

Mr Hancock has thrust Mr Cummings’s role in the early days of the pandemic back under the microscope, claiming his power-hungry and domineering approach hindered the Government’s response.

He claimed that Mr Cummings saw Covid as a ‘distraction’ from more important topics, such as the UK’s official withdrawal from the EU – even as the Chinese city of Wuhan was being shut down in January 2020.

The No 10 chief of staff ‘finally turned his attention to coronavirus’ on February 24, Mr Hancock writes, around a month before the first UK lockdown.

In what the former minister labelled ‘an act of total idiocy’, he ordered advisers and officials on to a Zoom call at the same time as the health secretary’s daily meeting, immediately double-booking everyone.

Mr Hancock adds: ‘He’s made it very clear that he expects this to be the ‘decision-making meeting’. He has a complete contempt for elected politicians – the Prime Minister included.’

He also pursued a ‘long-standing mission to get rid of NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens’, Mr Hancock claimed, despite the fact ‘we’re about to be hit by a pandemic’. 

Left to right – Lee Cain, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson, Jack Doyle, Chris Whitty and Matt Hancock

Mr Cummings has also been forthright in his criticism of Mr Hancock, blaming him for moving Covid-positive patients from hospitals to care homes, resulting in thousands of deaths.

In a select committee hearing last year, Mr Cummings said that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because of mistakes made by leaders and officials.

He told MPs that Mr Hancock lied in meetings and used chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and chief medical adviser Chris Whitty as a ‘shield’ for government failings in the televised news conferences.

Mr Cummings attracted national opprobrium when he broke lockdown rules by travelling with his wife and child from London to County Durham when he had Covid.

He was forced into doing a humiliating press conference in the Downing Street Rose Garden, when he tried in vain to fend off bruising questions from the media.

He claimed then to have driven his family 30 miles to beauty spot Barnard Castle to check his eyesight.

• Click here to read Part One of Matt Hancock’s explosive pandemic diaries exclusively on The Mail+ 

Source: Read Full Article