High court strikes out part but not all of Bridgen’s case and orders him to pay Tory MP’s costs
The MP Andrew Bridgen has been ordered to pay Matt Hancock more than £40,000 in legal fees after an early stage of their libel battle.
The MP for North West Leicestershire is bringing a libel claim against the former health secretary regarding a January 2023 message on X that followed Bridgen posting a comment about Covid-19 vaccines.
Continue reading...Lords back amendments saying bill must comply with international law, on classifying Rwanda as a safe country and independent monitoring
Yesterday I covered quite a lot of comment on the Rachel Reeves’ Mais lecture based on a three-page press release sent out by Labour with advance extracts. The full speech runs to 8,000 words and it is certainly worth a read. Here is some commentary published after the full text was made public.
Paul Mason, the former economics journalist who is now an active Labour supporter, says in a blog for the Spectator that Reeves is proposing an approach that should make it easier for the government to justify capital investment. He explains:
Reeves effectively offered markets a trade-off. She set out the same broad fiscal rule as the government: debt falling at the end of five years and a deficit moving towards primary balance. She will make it law that any fiscal decision by government will be subject to an independent forecast of its effects by the OBR. But, she said: “I will also ask the OBR to report on the long-term impact of capital spending decisions. And as Chancellor I will report on wider measures of public sector assets and liabilities at fiscal events, showing how the health of the public balance sheet is bolstered by good investment decisions.”
Why is this so big? Because the OBR does not currently model the ‘long-term impact of capital spending decisions’. It believes that £1 billion of new capital investment produces £1 billion of growth in the first year, tapering to nothing by year five. Furthermore, since 2019 it has repeatedly expressed scepticism that a sustained programme of public investment can produce a permanent uplift in the UK’s output potential.
George Eaton at the New Statesman says the Reeves speech contained Reeves’ “most explicit repudiation yet of the model pursued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments”. He says:
In her 8,000-word Mais Lecture, delivered last night at City University, the shadow chancellor offered her most explicit repudiation yet of the model pursued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments. Though she praised New Labour’s record on public service investment and poverty reduction, Reeves warned that the project failed to recognise that “globalisation and new technologies could widen as well as diminish inequality, disempower people as much as liberate them, displace as well as create good work”.
She added that the labour market “remained characterised by too much insecurity” and that “key weaknesses on productivity and regional inequality” persisted. This is not merely an abstract critique – it leads Reeves and Keir Starmer to embrace radically different economic prescriptions.
Mais lecture is the most intellectually wide-ranging speech Rachel Reeves has given. Worth reading for takes on Lawson, austerity, New Labour, link between dynamism & worker-security, and how geo-politics changes our national growth story (& more besides)
Continue reading...Former prime minister also admits he should have worked more closely with devolved administrations
Hugo Keith KC is questioning Johnson.
He asks if Johnson’s approach has been to give all relevant material to the inquiry.
I understand the feelings of these victims and their families and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and suffering of those victims and their families.
Continue reading...Health secretary during pandemic returns to inquiry after saying tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if UK had locked down earlier
Gordon Brown has said political briefings against Alistair Darling in 2008 were “completely unfair”, as he paid tribute to his former chancellor following his death aged 70.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former prime minister said Darling was a “compassionate politician who wanted to get things done” but was “always very quiet in the way he did it”.
Continue reading...Ex-health secretary has described Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by ‘culture of fear’
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the UK had locked down three weeks earlier, Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry, as he described the operation of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by a “culture of fear”.
The former health secretary said his staff were abused by Dominic Cummings and that Johnson’s then chief adviser attempted to exclude ministers and even Johnson himself from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here
Hancock is now deploying the defence previewed in the Observer on Sunday. (See 9.58am.)
He says from the middle of January the DHSC was “trying to effectively raise the alarm”. He says:
We were trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem and this wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be addressed only from the health department. Non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot be put in place by a health department. A health department can’t shut schools. It should have been grasped and led from the centre of government earlier. And you’ve seen evidence that repeatedly the department and I tried to make this happen.
And we were on occasions blocked, and at other times our concerns were not taken as seriously as they should have been until the very end of February.
Continue reading...Levelling up secretary breaks away from evidence at Covid inquiry to apologise for ‘errors I and others made’
Gove breaks away from the line of questioning to issue an apology.
I want to take this opportunity, if I may, to apologise to the victims who endured so much pain, the families who’ve endured so much loss, as a result of the mistakes that were made by government in response to the pandemic.
And as a minister, responsible for the Cabinet Office, and who was also close to many of the decisions that were made, I must take my share of responsibility for that.
Continue reading...Covid tier system introduced in October 2020 and imposed different restrictions on English regions in effort to contain spread of virus. This live blog is closed
At the Covid inquiry Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said that he was not getting information from the government in February about Covid. He said he was “disappointed” by that.
In late February and early March he was getting information from other cities around the world instead, he said. He said this happened even though his foreign affairs team consisted of just three people.
The government generally does give us information about a variety of things happening. I’m disappointed the government weren’t giving us information in February about what they knew then.
Continue reading...Ex-cabinet minister set to hit back at inquiry after being made a scapegoat for government failings
Matt Hancock and his officials bombarded Downing Street with early warnings about Covid-19 but were treated with ridicule and contempt, according to senior Whitehall figures, who believe that the former health secretary is unfairly being made a scapegoat by civil servants and scientists during the official inquiry into the pandemic.
Attempts by the Department of Health, in mid to late January 2020, to raise the alarm were dismissed out of hand by senior staff working for the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, because they believed Hancock was mainly seeking publicity and exaggerating the dangers, the insiders say.
Continue reading...Former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance revealed there was ‘complete lack of leadership’ at times in crisis
Vallance says that some of what he was doing during Covid would have been done by anyone else in the post of government chief scientific adviser (GCSA).
But he says because of his medical training, and his knowledge of vaccines (he had worked for GlaxoSmithKline before taking the GCSA job), he was probably more involved than another GCSA might have been.
Continue reading...Prime minister says he finds prospect of march ‘disrespectful’ but says freedom includes ‘right to peacefully protest’
Keith is only now asking about Covid. All the questions so far have been about process.
Sedwill says, when concerns about Covid arose, he did not agree to a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee taking place immediately. He wanted to ensure that the meeting was prepared for. And he was concerned that having a Cobra meeting might alarm people.
I felt that a Cobra which might have been convened primarily for communications purposes wasn’t wise. Two days later I was advised there was a genuine cross-government basis for it and I agreed.
May we be plain please as to what you mean by communications purposes. Were you concerned that the Cobra was being called by the DHSC [the Department of Health and Social Care] for presentation purposes, that is to say to make a splash about the role of DHSC, perhaps its secretary of state [Matt Hancock], and that’s why you initially hesitated.
Continue reading...‘Fortunately this horrible dilemma never crystallised,’ former NHS England head Simon Stevens tells inquiry
Former health secretary Matt Hancock told officials that he – rather than the medical profession – “should ultimately decide who should live or die” if the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the Covid inquiry heard.
“Fortunately this horrible dilemma never crystalised,” the former head of the NHS, Lord Simon Stevens, said in his evidence to the inquiry on Thursday.
Continue reading...Former deputy cabinet secretary tells Covid inquiry Hancock’s plans never materialised despite assurances
Back in the inquiry, O’Connor presents another extract from MacNamara’s witness statement in which she quotes an account by Dominic Cummings who recalls her coming into the office on Friday 13 March saying that the country was “absolutely fucked” and that thousands of people were going to die. Cummings has cited this as a very positive intervention that helped to trigger an urgent rethink.
MacNamara says this is an accurate account. She said she had been in meetings that day, including a briefing for the opposition, and that she had been “more alarmed rather than reassured” by what she had heard from the government side. She says it was alarming.
And it was a sense of foreboding, like I hope nobody sitting in that office ever has that again. Actually, it was a very, very scary experience. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind at that point that we were heading for a total disaster. And what we had to do was do everything in our power to make it impact as little as possible in the time we had available in the circumstances.
Helen right that the Cabinet Office has failed to follow the orders given in 2020 to keep records of everything. I asked for this to happen. So did Helen. Yet the Cabinet Office has destroyed a lot of documents – eg some documents that I have accidental copies of do not show up in official records.
Agree with Helen that the ‘world-beating’, ‘we’re best prepared in world’ etc mindset was a nightmare, delusional. I’d go further than has and say this general approach definitely undermined an effective response. But also important to note – this was not just Boris, this was the attitude of *DHSC and Cabinet Office* on pandemic preparations too.
MSM largely useless coverage of Inquiry, obsessed on trivia, determined as always to ignore management/structures & how power worked & still works … I’ll post updates on Inquiry, other witnesses etc
Continue reading...Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser denies contributing to an atmosphere of misogyny at No 10, saying he was ‘much ruder about men’
Heather Hallett, the chair, intervenes at this point. She asks Cain if he is defending the 10-day gap. She says she finds that curious if he is.
Cain says locking down the country is a huge, huge undertaking. In government terms, that is government acting at speed. But it was “longer than you would hope”, he says.
Do I understand from what you said earlier that you would defend the 10-day gap between the decision taken that there had to be a national lockdown and actually implementing that decision? Because I find that curious.
As I said, I think it is longer than you would like, but I think it’s important just to emphasise the amount of things that had to be done and the amount of people we had to take with us to deliver a nationwide lockdown.
It’s a huge, huge undertaking and to be honest, from my understanding of government, that is government moving at a tremendous speed – which maybe says more about government than other things.
Continue reading...Geza Tarjanyi barged into former health secretary on train while shouting conspiracy theories
An anti-vaccine protester who accused Matt Hancock of murdering people during the coronavirus pandemic has been found guilty of harassment.
The former health secretary feared being pushed down an escalator by Geza Tarjanyi, 62, of Leyland, Lancashire, who shoulder-barged him and “shouted ridiculous conspiracy theories” on two separate occasions on 19 and 24 January.
Continue reading...Nick Timothy chosen as Tory candidate in West Suffolk constituency set to be vacated by former health secretary
A man seen as one of the key architects of Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 election campaign has been selected by the Conservative party to fight Matt Hancock’s seat at the next general election.
Nick Timothy abruptly resigned from his post as May’s chief of staff when MPs put pressure on her to get rid of him, shortly after the party lost its majority in the 2017 vote and had to turn to the DUP to form a government.
Continue reading...Video footage shows Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng discussing pay rates after being duped by campaigners
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
Continue reading...Some advisers and civil servants speaking to the Guardian say an ‘anti-lockdown filter’ has been placed on events
The mass leaking of thousands of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages have laid bare in the starkest terms the extent of the divisions inside the cabinet and among advisers and civil servants handling the deadliest pandemic in modern times.
But some who worked in Number 10 and across Whitehall, as well as bereaved families, have been angered by what they see as a rewriting of history by some cabinet ministers and by the framing of some of Hancock’s texts.
Continue reading...Former health secretary was asked to make clear in Pandemic Diaries that he was not reflecting government’s view
Matt Hancock was instructed by the Cabinet Office to tone down claims in his memoir that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak in China, according to leaked correspondence.
Officials warned it would “cause problems” if Hancock repeated the claim in his Pandemic Diaries and insisted he must make clear he was not reflecting the government’s view, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Continue reading...UNHCR says bill extinguishes the right to seek refugee protection in the UK for those who arrive irregularly
Downing Street has said that Rishi Sunak is going to Dover to meet frontline officers dealing with small boat crossings. He will then return to London for a press conference later in the afternoon.
One of the questions raised by Rishi Sunak’s small boats bill – or illegal migration bill, to give it its formal name – is to what extent ministers believe it will work, and to what extent they are not that bothered about whether it works because they believe that, if it fails, they will be able to use this in election campaign against Labour.
Unlike Labour who have voted against taking action on this issue, this government has a plan to break the business model of people smugglers.
A plan to do what’s fair for those at home and those who have a legitimate claim to asylum – a plan to take back control of our borders once and for all.
Labour and others who oppose these measures are betraying hard-working Brits up and down the country - they don’t have any answers themselves but they will still seek to block us in parliament.
Continue reading...