Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Matt Hancock has insisted that he broke only Covid guidelines rather than rules in kissing his aide and friend in his ministerial office, events that forced his resignation as UK health secretary after CCTV images of the clinch emerged.
Hancock also said his decision to step down more than 24 hours after the pictures were published was made after people he knew and respected got in touch to remind him they had been unable to see dying relatives because of Covid regulations.
Dozen UK companies given VIP fast-track contracts to supply PPE to NHS paid idled staff at taxpayers’ expense
Companies handed a combined £1.3bn in controversial fast-track Covid contracts with minimal scrutiny also claimed at least £1m in furlough grants, it can be revealed.
Analysis of the accounts of companies that won lucrative emergency contracts to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) to the NHS during the height of the pandemic shows 12 also claimed funds to put staff on furlough at taxpayers’ expense.
A list of the 47 companies referred to the government’s VIP fast-track lane for contracts to supply PPE has been revealed. These are five of the significant political figures whose referrals ended up with the companies winning contracts.
As No 10 ham-fistedly let the scandal spread, was this about saving an old Brexit ally or protecting the PM himself?
A Conservative MP who entered parliament in 2010 began to receive what he described as a series of “unusually persistent” texts from his Tory whip last week. The member in question had been part of the Conservative intake that followed the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009.
The arrival of this new group at Westminster – many of them with impressive previous careers outside politics – was supposed to demonstrate, as David Cameron said at the time, that his party was reforming its ways, ridding itself of sleaze.
Former health secretary will no longer become special envoy for UN’s economic commission for Africa
Matt Hancock, the former UK health secretary, will no longer become a special envoy for the United Nations, after the job offer was withdrawn.
Hancock said on Tuesday he was “honoured” to be working with the UN’s economic commission for Africa (UNECA) to help the continent recover from the pandemic.
Incoming secretary of state faces daunting task while mastering his new position in the Department of Health as quickly as possible
Sajid Javid may have already served in two of the most testing offices of state, as chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary. But on Saturday he walked into what is now arguably the biggest and most challenging of all: the job of health secretary.
Not only does Javid have to steer the country out of what will hopefully be the final stages of the pandemic, ensuring we reach the end of what Boris Johnson has called the “irreversible road to freedom”.
Reversal of fortune sees former Tory leadership candidate return to cabinet after run-ins with Dominic Cummings
Sajid Javid’s appointment as health secretary sees him return to a Cabinet he abruptly left in shock fashion 16 months ago.
Javid was just six months into his role as chancellor, and less than a month away from delivering his first budget, when he quit after being told he must sack all his advisers if he wanted to keep his job.
Ex-chancellor Sajid Javid is made health secretary but Boris Johnson’s authority suffers blow from resignation
Matt Hancock has resigned as health secretary after Tory MPs, ministers and grassroots Conservatives defied Boris Johnson and demanded he be dismissed from the government.
The minister fell on his sword after a day that began with senior Tories observing a deliberate silence over Hancock’s future – seemingly to test public opinion in their constituencies – before many later broke ranks to insist he had to go.
The health secretary tells the House of Commons that the spread of the variant led the government to delay step four of its roadmap for easing restrictions in England. He said it spread more easily than the Alpha variant, and that there was some evidence that the risk of hospital admission was also higher
Boris Johnson described Matt Hancock as “totally fucking hopeless” during the early stages of the pandemic, concerned by the health secretary’s promises on testing, text messages published by Dominic Cummings have revealed.
Writing on Substack, the prime minister’s former chief aide published a slew of texts and documents from emergency Cobra meetings that he said would combat what he called “lies” from Downing Street and the health secretary about the initial handling of the pandemic.
The new Delta variant of coronavirus appears to be about 40% more transmissible than the variant it has largely replaced, Matt Hancock has said, making government decisions about whether to ease restrictions in England on 21 June “more difficult”.
Saying that under-30s in England will be called to begin vaccinations from next week, the health secretary confirmed it was still possible the reopening programme could be delayed or some rules kept in place.
Vaccinating children in the UK against Covid-19 will take priority over donating doses to other countries around the world, Britain's health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on Friday 4 June.
Hancock was speaking after health ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) rich countries met at the University of Oxford, where AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine was invented, and which comes before a leaders' meeting next week
Dominic Cummings will be asked by senior MPs this week to produce evidence that Matt Hancock lied repeatedly about policy on Covid-19 before the health secretary’s appearance in front of a parliamentary committee early next month.
Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, the chairs of the joint select committee which took seven hours of explosive testimony from Cummings last week, will write to the former adviser to the prime minister in the next few days asking that he produce the evidence within the next fortnight.
After more than two and a half hours of extraordinary testimony from Dominic Cummings to a Commons committee last Wednesday morning, Greg Clark, the former cabinet minister who had chaired the explosive morning session, called a short lunch break. He and his co-chair – the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt – had, like the other 20 MPs who were due to ask questions, been left stunned, appalled and riveted in equal measure by what they had just heard.
Expectations had been set high in advance of the appearance of the highly combustible Cummings. The ex-adviser had been forced out of Downing Street last November in a power struggle that had involved the prime minister’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds. Downing Street was on edge because Cummings had been firing off ominous preparatory salvoes on Twitter for days. But after a morning in the witness chair he had already exceeded his billing, unleashing accusations of such gravity that at times the MPs (and presumably much of the public watching on TV) found it all but impossible to keep up.
At first minister’s questions in Edinburgh Nicola Sturgeon suggested that Boris Johnson’s failure to act swiftly at certain times in the pandemic had led to “loss of life”. As the Herald reports, Sturgeon said:
Sometimes I’m afraid, in the interests of health and human life, it is necessary for people in leadership positions like me to take very quick decisions because, as we know from bitter experience over this pandemic, it’s often the failure to take quick and firm decisions that leads to loss of life.
And anybody who’s in any doubt about that only had to listen to a fraction of what Dominic Cummings outlined about what he described as the chaotic response of the UK government at key moments of this pandemic.
New absence figures published by the Department for Education reveal that 60% of pupils in England were kept out of school for Covid-related reasons at some time last autumn.
The national data for the term that began when schools reopened in September shows that pupils missed 33 million days in the classroom because of Covid, through having to self-isolate or for shielding reasons. That sent the overall absence rate to nearly 12% for the term, compared with less than 5% in a normal term.
The government’s refusal to give schools any flexibility to finish in-school teaching early before Christmas, which was accompanied by threats of legal action, made matters even worse.
The prime minister’s former senior adviser spoke yesterday of the government’s shortcomings in the handling of this crisis and it is certainly the case that schools and colleges were badly let down by government leadership during the autumn term.
The Covid variant first detected in India is set to be the dominant strain in the UK within days, experts have said, with the government and health teams struggling to contain cases, which have risen by more than 75% since Thursday.
With the rapid spread of the more transmissible B.1.617.2 variant threatening to reverse moves to ease lockdown, the government faced intense pressure to more fully explain the delay in adding India to the so-called red list of countries.
The majority of people in hospital with Covid in Bolton were eligible for the vaccine but have not had it, Matt Hancock has said, saying that health authorities would go “door-to-door” offering jabs.
His comments came as concern mounted over increased cases of the B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India, particularly in the north-west and parts of London, which could affect the future easing of lockdown restrictions.
British ministers and officials did not deny that more than 700,000 shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine were secretly dispatched from the UK to Australia a few weeks ago as the EU blocked the drug’s export.
EU leaders backed “global value chains” rather than support Brussels in using new powers to block Covid jab exports to highly vaccinated countries, despite being told that 21m doses had been sent to the UK.
At a virtual summit, attended briefly by Joe Biden, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, highlighted the large shipments sent over the Channel, amounting to two-thirds of the jabs given in the UK.