Did Matt Hancock ‘bounce’ Boris Johnson into extending Covid restrictions?

John Rentoul assesses the significance of a report that the health secretary withheld information from ministerial colleagues

Matt Hancock, once described as ‘totally hopeless’ by the prime minister (Getty)

Today was going to be “freedom day”, marking the fourth and final stage of the easing of coronavirus restrictions, as set out by the prime minister in February. Instead, we have to wait another month before social distancing, the rule of six and compulsory table service are abolished.

Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph front-page lead story claimed that this delay was engineered by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, who had “bounced” Boris Johnson into the decision by withholding important information about how effective the vaccines are against the Delta variant of the virus.

The Department of Health has responded with an emphatic denial, saying the story is “incorrect”. So what is going on?

The Sunday Telegraph article claimed that Hancock was briefed on 10 June about new findings by Public Health England that the vaccines were more effective against the Delta variant than previously thought. It says that he did not pass on this information to No 10 until just before a meeting of the Covid quad of ministers on Sunday 13 June. That was the meeting at which it was decided to extend the restrictions for another month, with a further review after two weeks.

So the Department of Health is right to say: “The effectiveness of the vaccines against the Delta variant was discussed in the meeting that agreed the delay.” But this does not quite rebut the implication of the Sunday Telegraph report: that the information was held back, giving the other quad ministers – Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove – less time to consider it.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that they would have reached a different conclusion if they had had more time. And the meeting was attended by the scientific advisers, who would have been familiar with the evidence as it emerged.

The significance of the story may be more that a minister or official is so opposed to the restrictions that they are prepared to leak information from the heart of government. It could be that this is part of an attempt to influence the review on 5 July, promoted by an anti-lockdown newspaper and urged on by Steve Baker, the anti-lockdown Conservative MP, who was quoted in the report.

Or it may be someone in government carrying on Dominic Cummings’s feud with Hancock. You can see how, if Cummings had still been in No 10, he might have given a story to the media in order to stoke Johnson’s suspicion of Hancock, knowing that the prime minister was temperamentally reluctant to extend the restrictions.

Although Hancock said, when he gave evidence to the joint select committee about Cummings’s allegations against him, that the government had worked much better since the departure of someone he could not bring himself to name, it may be that the ghost of Cummings is still stalking the corridors of power, ensuring that the government remains at least slightly dysfunctional.