09.03.2023

Stupidity and score-settling

What was Matt Hancock thinking about when he handed a vast trove of WhatsApp messages over to a notoriously mercenary journalist? Paul Demarty looks over the ‘lockdown files’

Spare a thought for poor Matt Hancock, who is in yet another fine mess - yet again of his own making.

The accident-prone former health secretary - now, of course, outside the parliamentary Conservative Party, thanks to his decision to appear on I’m a celebrity, get me out of here - already had an eye on his legacy earlier that year, when he announced the publication of a book called Pandemic diaries - an inside story of the period when his cabinet post suddenly became the most important job in the country. It was misleadingly named, and would consist not of contemporaneous journals, but rather a memoir, ghost-written by Isabel Oakeshott.

Oakeshott is not to be confused with a principled journalist. Her best known work is perhaps Call me Dave - a spectacularly mean-spirited revenge biography of David Cameron, ghosted for his aggrieved former Svengali, Lord Ashcroft, and above all for that book’s unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable allegation that Cameron had engaged in intimate relations with a dead pig. Indeed, she seems to have ended up as the ‘house band’ for Ashcroft’s vanity press, Biteback, which also published Hancock’s book. The latter was also full of score-settling, especially with the notorious Dominic Cummings - formerly special advisor to Boris Johnson and before that Michael Gove.

Pandemic diaries was slated for release in December of last year. In November, however, Hancock made his fateful decision to go into reality TV, and wrap his giant teeth around some of I’m a celebrity’s famous ‘bushtucker trials’. This was the worst possible bit of advance publicity for the book, and seems to have exhausted Oakeshott’s patience at last. She has now leaked large tranches of Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to The Daily Telegraph (much to her colleagues’ disgruntlement at The Times), and the press at large have been gleefully picking them over for morsels.

Fear and guilt

What is revealed is nothing terribly surprising. The Telegraph recoiled in mock horror, as it found Hancock, other ministers and officials discussing using “fear and guilt” to ensure compliance with lockdown rules, but what else was there? Lockdowns were only ever considered - never mind imposed - because these officials were afraid: guilt is an appropriate response to wilful and irresponsible disregard of the public good. Even if, as many lockdown-sceptics now do, you take the whole thing to have been a total mistake and contemporary opponents to be wholly vindicated, that does not vindicate the actions of people who broke lockdown rules, since no public health policy can succeed on the basis that people only comply when they feel like it. Once again, the patrician conservatism of the Telegraph dissolves into infantile libertarianism.

That cognitive dissonance is also on full display in the departmental warfare between Hancock’s health department and then-chancellor Rishi Sunak’s treasury. Sunak was plainly keen to get back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible - a course of action regarded with some exasperation by Hancock, who was by mid-2020 quite convinced of the warnings from government advisors that the national health service was on the brink of collapse. Of the treasury’s infamous ‘eat out to help out’ scheme, Hancock quipped privately that it should be called ‘eat out to help the virus get about’. He later warned Sunak to stop briefing against him - a demand we can assume Sunak ignored.

Less flatteringly, we find Hancock conspiring with Dominic Cummings to offload the then NHS chief executive Simon Stevens, thanks to his persistent criticisms of the government over many years, before Covid made him essentially unsackable (he resigned in 2021 of his own accord). Hancock also pursued a vendetta against Jeremy Farrar, attempting to get him booted off the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies after sharp criticisms of the government response. In this respect, Hancock merely followed his boss: the Boris Johnson government never once saw a messenger it didn’t want to shoot. But - given his feuds with Sunak, his willingness to consider blackmailing rebellious MPs to ensure their support for government Covid policy, and all the other evidence of a squabbling political class - can he really deny the picture painted by Farrar at the time?

Then, of course, there was his downfall. We get a few extra details about his fateful snog on the balcony with underling Gina Coladangelo. “How the fuck did anyone photograph that?”, Hancock wondered (I don’t know, mate: maybe with a camera?). Hancock became the first cabinet casualty of the lockdown rules, although he certainly was not the last, nor were his breaches (so far as we know) the most serious.

In his own way, however, Hancock is the minister most characteristic of the Johnson era. In a cabinet stuffed with yes-men, here was the brownest nose of them all; in a sea of oafishness, Hancock raised stupidity almost to an art form. He made Johnny Mercer look like Bismarck. Nobody has been so blatantly over-promoted since Charles II became the king of Spain. The ‘lockdown files’ are Hancock’s coup de grâce - who else would have thought it wise to hand over such vast troves of material to a notoriously mercenary journalist, someone known to sympathise with Hancock’s lockdown-sceptic enemies? What previous politician has ever made a success of a visit to some reality TV set? How can he have thought it was a good idea? We know how: merely by being Matt Hancock.

We do not expect him to trouble the front benches any time soon then (though perhaps his cronyism has been sufficient for an appointment to the Lords in due course). His most recent misfortune offers us, as most liberal journalists suggest, a picture of Tory decadence slamming hard into reality. As a way out of the parliamentary guerrilla warfare over Brexit, Boris offered a simulacrum of intransigence. He expelled ‘remainer’ rebels, went to the polls and got his thumping majority. He then ‘got Brexit done’ on more or less the same terms he described as treacherous when proposed by Theresa May.

Yet the substantive differences were never the point. With Boris, the style was the substance. From Donald Trump, he learned that a large constituency exists that prefers an obvious lie - a lie that nobody could ever really believe - to all the opaque, tangled untruths of routine bourgeois politics. An obvious lie has a kind of honesty about it.

We would no doubt have been in for a delightful tour of the promised ‘sunlit uplands’, had not Wuhan been overrun by a mysterious new coronavirus at the end of 2019. The Johnsonian clown show is perfectly compatible with ‘serious’ diplomacy with European Union officials over disputed questions. Back channels exist precisely because all bourgeois governments know that the masses are there to be lied to, however much the Agincourt bloviations might annoy one’s continental partners. No such back channels exist with infectious diseases. A response could not be indefinitely delayed; amateur dramatics could not substitute for determined state action. A government assembled essentially to be a Greek chorus for whatever swerves were necessary in a given week was suddenly on the front line of a global emergency.

‘Barrack socialism’

Such public health emergencies drive governments in the direction of a kind of ‘barrack socialism’, whatever their ideological priors. The unreconstructed Thatcherism of much of the government, however, made it a very sticky wicket. Horrendous errors of judgement led to a dismal death rate in the early days of the pandemic. The subsequent two years were not wholly characterised by disasters, with the government successfully rolling out vaccines incredibly quickly, with the help of an army of volunteers. Yet the early death toll, combined with egregious corruption and the wanton idiocy of ‘Partygate’, testify to the inadequacy of bourgeois governments (and Bonapartist clown-shows like Johnson’s administration in particular), when it comes to bringing state capacity to bear in emergencies like this.

It is not clear whether a fresh relitigation of the pandemic will decide anything in the brewing struggle over the future of the Tory leadership. Nobody comes out of it smelling of roses - and, with the polls as they are at the moment, no candidate is necessarily guaranteed to keep their seat (with Labour on course to steal back its old northern heartlands and the Lib Dems nibbling away at Tory ‘remainer’ constituencies in the south-east). The pandemic showed us many things in a poor light: a health service worn down to the bone; a system of international supply chains equally fragile; the beggar-thy-neighbour rubrics of international politics when limited resources like vaccines were to be fought over; the unlimited credulousness of libertarians and conspiracy theorists.

Compared to that, the fundamentally unserious character of the Tory government after 10 years in power and several decades since the last major challenge to bourgeois normality by the labour movement was a minor thing. For now, we can perhaps get some small pleasure from watching them squabble.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk