Matt Hancock’s casual dismissal of the climate emergency and A&E targets isn’t leadership – it’s complacency

If the health secretary’s interview on Radio 5 Live was supposed to be part of the government’s tactic of avoiding the ‘Today’ programme and getting an easier ride, it failed

Matt Hancock is a remarkable politician. There are few on the current front bench who can rival his ability to not only mess up their own policy brief, but to range so destructively across so many other departments’ responsibilities. Mr Hancock’s capacity to drop a pitch-perfect gaffe recognises no boundaries.

Yesterday, it was the turn of the transport and the business departments to feel the chill of the Hancock effect. Grant Shapps and Andrea Leadsom, hardly superstars themselves, had managed to get through the embarrassing spectacle of bunging a huge, environmentally damaging subsidy to a private business, Flybe, without too much political fallout. The green backlash had been muted. Enter Mr Hancock, who took to the airwaves to reassure people that flying less was not, as common-sense might suggest, an answer to the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gasses – air travel (and short-haul flights being worst of all). Rather, according to the health secretary, the answer lies in technology and, specifically, the electric passenger aircraft. “I’m told that electric planes are on the horizon if that’s not pushing the metaphor too far,” he said, speaking to Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5 Live.

Mr Hancock certainly pushed the credulity of his audience too far. He revealed, all too carelessly, that he and his government are not taking their pledges on the climate crisis seriously. He did not have to declare that he had “flown from London to Aberdeen” and “would again if it was necessary”. Not for the first time, Mr Hancock will have left his colleagues wondering what he is doing sitting at their top table, just as a radical cabinet reshuffle approaches...