Reckless in private but cautious in policy, we may miss Hancock now he’s been replaced by a lockdown sceptic

No 10 was aware of Sajid Javid’s instincts, and this was confirmed in his first remarks in the job: he wants to end the lockdown as soon as possible – not as safely as possible

A ‘safe pair of hands’? Sajid Javid could prove quite the opposite (PA)

Yes, Matt Hancock has left a shameful legacy and he had to go. But although he was reckless in his private life, he was cautious about public policy.

Of course he was a silly, massive hypocrite who put the public support for the struggle against Covid at risk for lust; yet when he’d finished his smooching and let Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance back in the room, he was commendably open-minded to the data and the science. I do worry now about the “lockdown sceptic” they’ve drafted in to replace him.

A “safe pair of hands”? Quite the opposite. You might wonder, for example, if they sounded Jeremy Hunt out; or otherwise guessed that he was just too nervous about relaxing the current restrictions, just as Hancock was. In any case, No 10 was aware of Sajid Javid’s instincts, and this was confirmed in his first remarks in the job: he wants to end the lockdown as soon as possible – not as safely as possible.

It is the emphasis and language that is so telling. He’s not going to cry freedom and left rip. However, we know where he is coming from, and we ought to fear where he is going to take us. The pandemic is still an emergency, and on a global scale; the Delta variant may be edging ahead in the race with the vaccines, and abolishing the remaining guidelines on 19 July in some sort of celebratory bonfire of controls is as politically attractive as it is dangerous to public health.

Covid is still spreading, cases are rising, quite rapidly, and there are still deaths. This is partly down to the new variant, but also because we have been more free and easy in the past few weeks of relaxing restrictions – there is a lag between changes in rules and an increase in circulation of the virus, so it takes some weeks for the most deadly effects to come through.

The low death rate at the moment will rise in the coming weeks, though not by as much as in the past peaks. Thanks to the public’s caution (masks, hygiene and distancing), the vaccination programme, more testing and new treatments, the link with hospitalisation and mortality has been weakened – but not ended.

So-called mild Covid is still a distressing illness, and many will be left with the life-changing effects of long Covid for years to come, if not forever. There are a couple of odd ideas still circulating – ideas which Hancock, for all his faults, did challenge. One is that there is a trade-off between public health and the economy, deaths vs jobs, if you like. But allowing Covid to get out of control (again) would simply lead in due course to a longer, more severe lockdown.

It is a gamble that the NHS can cope against an epidemiological certainty of a rising tide of illness. This time round, it might take longer to peak; but there will be more hospitalisations and there will be more deaths – because that is what a potentially deadly virus tends to do.

Each of those cases has a human but also an economic cost, and they could eventually overwhelm the NHS as the winter approaches – even Johnson has admitted as much. Far better to keep it under as much control as we can now.

Besides, there is (in fact) no general lockdown in place today, but some deeply damaging restrictions in certain sectors such as travel, hospitality and entertainment, and they need to be protected. We’re also told we need to “learn to live with Covid”. What does that mean?

It should mean a willingness to accept continuing testing, restrictions, social distancing and generalised caution; and indeed to accept that future lockdowns, local or national, and travel controls will probably be needed as new variants evolve. Some of those may be more more benign, but with some the disease may grow more virulent.

We have to think hard about what might happen if a variant emerges that is a greater threat to children, and how we prevent schools from becoming hubs for transmission – with better filtering and ventilation, testing and asking and encouraging parents to consider vaccination. Education and the mental health of children will also be badly affected by frequent lockdowns as a result of Covid outbreaks.

Instead, the idea that the pandemic may be over seems to be gaining ground, and we can’t eliminate the virus, and that we’ll just have to accept more and more people being ill and dying, just as we accept all manner of other illnesses and their consequences. Maybe, but we must still strive to minimise sickness and death.

That is all the more reason to take this golden opportunity provided by vaccination to suppress the Delta variant, put testing and tracing protocols in place, and to maximise herd immunity among adults and children (with safety first).

If we do not do that now – and on a global scale – we will have many more waves of possibly much more deadly variants of the virus overcoming our defences and medical services in future. Living with Covid should not mean living with death.

These are things Hancock seemed more sensitive to than Javid now appears to be. Javid does seem to think that the economy should trump public health in the false choice so often presented to us – in many cases, both the economy and public health will suffer.

You get the impression that Johnson wants to take another gamble, and in “the Saj” he has found a useful ally in place of the reluctant Hancock.

For what it’s worth, it looks as though he may have actually wanted to quit, if only in preference to being fired in a few weeks, never to rebuild his political career. In quitting, he can lay claim – if spuriously – to having acted with some honour and dignity. It puts him in a better position to make his comeback one day, as tends to happen after a suitable period of penance on the backbenches.

Boris Johnson tried to keep him in place for his own convenience and not to let Labour get a scalp in a by-election week, putting his own position first, even ahead of the fight against Covid. Hancock, though, eventually decided to put his career first – and took the least worst option to secure a return to office one day (maybe).

Yet none of that matters very much if Johnson and Javid are going to sleepwalk us into another wave of Covid, with all that will eventually entail for families, businesses and the NHS – and, indeed, their political fortunes. The pandemic is not over and, contrary to what Javid implies, it will not end on 19 July either.