Did I really want to think about Matt Hancock this morning? Would I on any morning? Probably not. But he has somewhat thrust himself into news agenda and so some thoughts on the affair that it is suggested by The Sun that he is having with Department of Health non-executive director Gina Coladengelo seem to be appropriate.
First, I am not worried about people's sex lives. What consenting adults get up to is not my business, or anyone else's, usually. It is only when relationships impact on other issues that they matter.
Second, I feel sorry for his wife and especially his children. This is going to be tough on them.
Third, this is an issue that is of political concern. Numerous questions arise.
First, how and why was Gina Coladengelo appointed without any scrutiny of the appointment? Was the relationship already in existence? We know she and Hancock are old friends; were there issues not disclosed?
Second, Covid rules were broken. Is that inconsequential for the Health Secretary?
Third, have any aspects of the ministerial code been broken? Alternatively are there rules about relationships with staff? I would be surprised if there were not. And, she was on his staff.
Fourth, she is a lobbyist. Did she or any client secure preferment? In particular, were there PPE contracts that she won for herself or clients?
And, fifth, when will full disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest be made?
The sex is inconsequential. Instead what matters is whether abuse of public funding has taken place. Hancock already has considerable form on that issue. I think it wholly appropriate to ask.
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I have no doubt a great number of rules have been broken but the Prime Minister will say all is well. Johnson is not in a position to condemn sexual impropriety, or the corrupt and nepotistic “chumocracy”.
The performance of several cabinet ministers has been so awful I’ve struggled to understand why they were there in the first place, let alone still in office.
Patel. Raab. Truss. Jenrick. Hancock. Shapps. Williamson.
But, first, they should be relatively safe as long as they are unwavering allies of the Prime Minister, and not potential threats. (Right up until *he* betrays *them* without a second thought when it suits his interests.) Second, the Prime Minister stands a little taller surrounded by a sea of nonentities. Third, they are bodyguards, taking the blame for bad decisions when fingers should really be pointed at their boss. And fourth he is saving their sacking until it is really necessary, so their last act is to take some heat away from him.
The two main exceptions are Gove, who is so slippery that Johnson could not afford to keep him close, and Sunak, who has a patina of quiet confidence. Both are potential threats.
The only reason they are there is their support for Brexit – not for any competence or knowledge or expertise- fifth rate all of them and appointed just because they hated the EU
Sorry, what I meant in my last paragraph is that Gove is so slippery that Johnson *has to* to keep him close.
I think this ‘breaking news’ is a convenient excuse to get rid of Matt Hancock. Sacking him for incompetence would be an admission of mismanagement of the pandemic leading to unnecessary deaths. Sacking him for having an affair and giving her a lucrative job is less damaging to the government. I expect that there will be some hand wringing, and sympathy for Hancock, and then a resignation.
Well that is a first for me – a correct prediction about a political outcome. Although I did think we’d have at least a week of hand wringing.
This sounds exactly like a remake of the old Major era classic ‘Back to Basics’ designed to change the public perception of the Tories and promotion of the fresh faced NuLabInc.
Mellor comes to mind as the first in a queue of willing scapegoats. A full salacious story with photos of mattresses and Chelsea strips rolled out almost as if was a press release by sophisticated PR execs.
There is a woman behind Hancock and the NHS that has been pulling the street NHS for years , but no one seems to be interested in that, her name i believe is Junkerman.
Hence I have no problem in calling this new narrative to be crafted to ease D**** H***** into the final sell-off the NHS, seat and to divert from the coming weeks of infections, hospitalisation, deaths, more cancellations of plans and rising anger at the reality of Covid mismanagement.
On which note has anyone come across any published results of Vaccine Effectiveness of the actual vaccines yet? The ONS study, appears to AVOID mentioning them and only states number of doses and time since jabs to infections.
Curious.
Will the useful idiots rise up, or will they just shrug their shoulders and congratulate themselves on voting for the crowd that “got Brexit done”?
I think that the arrival of 2500 plus UEFA fat cats may however be more important in forming public opinion, based on the muttering in the pub yesterday.
My thoughts when the story ’emerged’ were that they government has finally decided to get rid of Hancock. He’s been a useful shield for much of the pandemic, absorbing the flak for the many failings of the government as a whole, not just the many failings of his own.
I’m always very suspicious when it takes 6 weeks for incriminating footage/photos to ‘leak’ to a friendly newspaper in this sort of a manner. It seems unlikely that this is happening by ‘chance’, in much the same way that the indiscretions of Neil Ferguson were revealed by the anti-lockdown Telegraph.
Truth be told, I was expecting it to be another couple of weeks before we saw something appearing in the news to shift the blame or distract from the ever-escalating number of infections. The way Delta is going, we’ll most likely be on 50,000 new infections a day or thereabouts by the time 19th July comes around and, although numbers of deaths are unlikely to be catastrophic, it will be a very serious situation. I thought it likely probable that somebody would be falling on their sword around that time so perhaps the plan is for Hancock to brazen it out a few weeks in the face of escalating media attention/faux outrage? That would be the perfect squirrel for the tabloids if they finally get their man as we are sadly forced to kick ‘freedom day’ down the road a few more weeks.
What people do in private is up to them, but what sticks in the craw is that he appointed the woman and she is being paid with our money £15k to attend a few meetings and this is classed as “work” – that is the sort of sum many people earn for really hard work and have to survive on for a whole year !
Agreed….
From Cummings blog of today on hancock
I had returned to work on 13 April.
After a couple of weeks of meetings with Hancock, many people concluded that:
He had told us he was organising care home testing including asymptomatic.
There was no serious plan, operational delivery was terrible.
He was not telling us the truth around the Cabinet table.
We were therefore killing people we claimed to be shielding.
As is clear from this message, I and others thought government ‘NEGLIGENCE’ was killing the most vulnerable people and I was trying to get to the truth. The Cabinet Secretary had also told me that he’d lost confidence in Hancock’s honesty and operational grip. As you can see from the reply, the PM saw this – he cannot claim ‘nobody told me’. And this message was repeated to him many times.
The meetings over the next few days that resulted from the above message convinced me and others in No10 that our suspicions (1-4 above) were true.
This led to another insistence from me and others that Hancock be removed. On 7 May I told the PM that Hancock was ‘unfit for this job’ and him staying in place was ‘killing god knows how many’.
The PM agreed that Hancock’s failures were a catastrophe but refused to fire him.
The failures, the lies and the PM’s refusal to remove someone who had failed so badly are not just about Boris Johnson and Hancock.
The media and MPs inevitably focus on individuals but the real covid story is a story of system failure – a system that successive PMs, Chancellors and Cabinet Secretaries did not seriously analyse because they did not have the intellectual tools or relevant experience to do so. Heywood in particular – assuring everybody that Whitehall had ‘nothing to learn’ from the private sector on project management, procurement and data – was a great fixer but a lousy manager. The Cabinet Office that collapsed was mainly his creation.
The best explanation is that Hancock will be the fall guy when the report into the disastrous early Covid failings appear in a formal report. The real culprit – Teflon Johnson – will then say ‘Yes there were failings but the person responsible has been sacked so all is well’ And the gullible public will accept it.
The first thing I would say that your blog is too good to even feature something about this noveau-riche creature called ‘Hancock’.
But on the back of this you do wonder what ‘it’ was up to whilst ‘it’ was supposedly in charge of the NHS brief.
He should have been upholding his ministerial brief instead of dropping his own it seems.
Another thing that occurs to me as a member of the public sector is why an earth we allow MPs and even local Councillors to pretend that they are managers of services when they are not.
All they have to do is fund services as they promised to do in the post war period and let the local managers manage.
But they don’t do that hence the need to get involved and pretend that the public sector is ‘inefficient’ and ‘wastes money’ and that is a struggle to get things done.
It’s all bollocks. And we don’t tolerate it really – we’re just lied to continuously about what is actually happening. That’s why it persists.
If a citizenry is not better off for allowing a government to rule, the government should be removed. The last decade or so has led to the majority of people doing worse due to Government policies re austerity, brevity, covid. But who can remove them?
Hancock is no worse than the PM and the rest of the Cabinet, be it the sex or much more importantly the cronyism and corruption. The late lockdown decisions are more down to Sunak and Johnson (and the CRG, ERG headbangers) than to Hancock who reputedly has been the one pushing back.
I’m more inclined to see this, together with Cummings attacks, as Hancock being lined up to be dumped as a scapegoat in the hope that all the muck will stick to him. Not sure it will work – the cronyism and corruption label is sticking and a further wave of Covid will not help. Feedback from canvassers in Chesham and Amersham suggests that the huge swing was about more than just HS2 and house building. Tories abstaining or voting against as they have had enough. With no Corbyn ‘bogey’ to scare them with.
I sense Murdoch and Gove all over this ……
He may have gone but worse remain.
To quote James Dart on FaceBook:
“Matt Hancock: a short story.
He sold out his country (Brexit), his values (cronyism) and his family (affair) chasing power.
He helped put thousands of people in the ground needlessly and unapologetically through incompetence, arrogance and cronyism.
He gave out favours (Cheltenham festival) at the expense of our safety and multi-million pound contracts to his mates (again, at our expense), laughing off the Nolan Principles and fatally undermining standards in public life.
He has been orders of magnitude worse than Jeremy Hunt (who was orders of magnitude worse than previous Health Secretaries). He has been, arguably, the worst Health Secretary ever.
And yet, despite all of this… he’s been far from the worse minister in this kakistocratic government.
What does that tell us about where we are?
Hancock might have gone, but worse remain. Johnson, Patel, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Jenrick, Williamson, Raab, Truss- these people make Hancock look like a minor, low-level villain in comparison.
Yes, it’s right for him to have resigned (obviously), but this is a government of posh thugs and criminals. Whoever replaces him will likely be just as bad (or worse). The ERG represent the worse of us. This isn’t really a victory. This is just one worm being knived in the back by another. These machinations are about power. Swivel-eyed, entitled, private school power play.“
He has gone!
Stage-managed, wasn’t it?
Johnson leaks the internal camera footage, and now Doormat has to resign. Saves Johnson having to sack a fully supported minister.
What nasty person will replace him to agree on Dido?
I am late to this discussion and Hancock has fled. Nevertheless, to Dungroanin’s point about Ms Junkerman please click on https://unlimitedhangout.com/2019/07/investigative-reports/the-epstein-associate-nobodys-talking-about-the-idf-linked-bond-girl-infiltrating-the-uk-nhs/.
While you do it is worth remembering that NHS CEO Stevens has been influencing the NHS ministers since 1997, even while with UnitedHealth 2004-2014.
Maybe there is also another angle to this whole affair that is currently lurking in the shadows.
The intimation in the articles I have seen is that Hancock wasn’t aware of the presence of any CCTV.
If that is the case was Hancock under investigation (by who and for what?) and if not how many other MP’s are being covertly monitored and by whom and to what purpose?
The idea that there may be covert monitoring of MP’s offices is profoundly disturbing.
I hope I’m wrong.
This idea occurred to me early on…..
This happened not in a building with MP’s offices but in the DHSS building I think.
Eric – Apparently not
An official probe is under way into how CCTV footage from inside Matt Hancock’s private office came to be made public.…………
……..It follows claims that a whistleblower from inside Mr Hancock’s department was the source of the images, after secretly recording them from the building’s security cameras.
According to the Mail on Sunday, the whistleblower approached media outlets using a now-deleted Instagram account, offering “damning” footage of the “totally f*****g hopeless” Health Secretary in a “very compromising position.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/matt-hancock-cctv-leak-under-24407174
Many CCTV systems are connected to an organisation’s computer network and via that to the internet. This is often sold as increasing security because a manager can log in to the system at any time from anywhere and see what is going on in the buildings. However it should be obvious that it does the exact opposite of increasing security.
Once you get remote access to the network, the rest is comparatively easy. To get some idea of how easy it is here is Jim Browning’s YouTube series “Spying on the Scammers”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk&list=PLBNmQJqxpaMaxqghShRiOnHUjO00ZCsor
In Browning’s case he allows scammers to connect to his computer and reverses the connection but someone who worked in an organisation with a little bit of technical knowledge may not even have to do that. From what I have heard, the government is incredibly lax when it comes to electronic security. For instance it is rumoured that Zoom has been used for remote cabinet meetings. If so that would be absolutely astounding.
Such covert cameras are features of a police state. Are we surprised?
On the ‘bright side’, the evidence of such extreme dirty tricks and in-fighting does not bode well for the Conservatives.
Now if we had an opposition with an ounce of energy and aggression… they’ve got the people – Lammy, Phillips, Cooper, Milliband. Whatever your preferred flavour of Labour politics, all of them (and perhaps a few others) are capable of controlled, articulate, passionate attack.
It’s well past gloves-off time