Matt Hancock appeared before the Covid-19 inquiry yesterday to school us in one particular trick he is yet to perform in the jungle for money — the art of taking no responsibility by taking full responsibility.
Here’s how you do it. The narrower and more specific the question — “did you, Matt Hancock, personally fail to update the UK’s plan for a pandemic?”, for example — the broader and fuller your responsibilities must become. Of course you take full responsibility, you say, for any mistakes that other people have made. You are very, very sorry about those. You take responsibility for the fact that others still failed to inform you about these mistakes. And, finally, you take full responsibility for the structures of government that made it impossible for you to take responsibility. That is a source of profound regret. You hope the public can eventually forgive you.
As Hugo Keith KC, the lawyer questioning Hancock, prowled through the evidence — in this module of the inquiry we were looking at pandemic preparedness before Covid-19 struck — Hancock’s sense of responsibility grew and grew.
Why, for example, was the UK’s entire pandemic plan confined to a threadbare document from 2011? Why were the flaws found by a 2016 simulation called Exercise Cygnus not acted upon? And why did Hancock, told of this problem when he started the job in 2018, not ask his civil servants to sort it out?
Well, there were many things that Hancock took accountability for here. The 2011 document which preceded his tenure — that document was flawed, and he was very angry about it. He took responsibility too for the mistakes of Cygnus, which was sending the UK in entirely the wrong direction — concentrating on clearing up the bodies after a pandemic, rather than stopping the spread. He was passionate about these mistakes. And he was very sorry about the errors made by the World Health Organisation, which had assured him that the UK was “one of the best countries in the world for responding to a pandemic”.
The errors made by others, he said, his voice cracking, were why he felt so strongly about the inquiry itself
He wished, on reflection, that he had spent his “short period as health secretary changing our entire attitude to how we respond to a pandemic” — which put like that seems like an impossible act of hindsight, but still. And he was sorry for the errors of the many unnamed people who had kept him, generally, in the dark — reassuring him, repeatedly, that “everything was in hand”.
Keith gently cut him off. He was secretary of state. If he had asked his civil servants to update the UK’s pandemic planning, they would have done so. Why didn’t he?
Hancock took a deep breath and started again. Yes, he took full responsibility. It was his department. Whatever other people had done, ultimately the buck stopped with him.
We learned that resources had been shifted away from pandemic preparedness and towards a no-deal Brexit, leaving the UK fatally unprepared. Whose fault was this? The Permanent Secretary and Chief Medical Officer. They had instructed Hancock to do it. He would always feel regret about this. It was their decision, he said, but still, “I signed off that decision and I take full responsibility.”
We learned that there was no plan for social care in case of a pandemic. Why? Local authorities had failed here, and the former secretary for the Department for Health and Social Care took responsibility for their failings.
(“Mr Hancock, what was the name of your department?” Keith asked).
At points the extent of Hancock’s responsibilities seemed to overwhelm him. The errors made by others, he said, his voice cracking, were why he felt so strongly about the importance of the inquiry, and why he was so “emotionally committed” to “full transparency and total brutal honesty in answering your questions to get to the bottom of this”.
“I am profoundly sorry for the impact that had, I am profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred. I also understand why for some it will be hard to take that apology from me — I understand that, I get it.”
These errors were “doctrinal”, he said, even “global”, he said. Ultimately, he took responsibility for the entire world.
Where did his responsibilities stop? Where they stopped, Mr Hancock explained, was at the point there was something he could have actually done.
