Matt Hancock
© Getty ImagesMatt Hancock
For those of us who were cynical about the government's pandemic response as it was unfolding in real time - as I was - the Daily Telegraph's 'lockdown files' confirm our worst suspicions. Judging from the revelations in the 100,000+ WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock's phone that Isabel Oakeshott has handed to the newspaper, the then-Health Secretary's decisions were driven as much by a desire to shore up his own political reputation as they were by medical considerations.

To be fair to Hancock, the medical advice often changed from one moment to the next and wasn't always consistent, as these messages reveal. The overall impression left by the 'lockdown files' is that the government wasn't 'following the science', as Hancock and others claimed - not because the scientific advice was clear and they were ignoring it, but because there was no such thing as 'the science'. We were in uncharted waters and no one really had a clue what to do, including the government's scientific advisors.

What's unforgivable is that the government imposed policies it knew would cause widespread suffering, such as banning people from visiting their dying relatives in hospitals and care homes, without really knowing whether they would save lives. As Hancock's WhatsApp messages make clear, such measures were often imposed because the government wanted to be seen to be doing something - anything - rather than admit the truth, which is that it was completely out of its depth.

So far, the Daily Telegraph's revelations, based on its filleting of the 2.3 million words in the WhatsApp messages, don't look good for Hancock. They include:
  • He rejected Chris Whitty's advice on 14 April 2020 to test all people going into English care homes, introducing guidance that only made testing mandatory for those being transferred from hospitals.
  • When a civil servant passed on scientific advice on 24 April 2020 that he should 'prioritise testing of asymptomatic staff and residents' in care homes, Hancock replied 'ok so long as it does not get in the way of actually fulfilling the capacity in testing', i.e., provided it didn't jeopardise his 'audacious' target of carrying out 100,000 tests by 30 April.
  • To achieve that target, Hancock decided to expand the definition of 'test' to include testing kits dispatched before the deadline, enabling him to include an Amazon truck loaded with 26,000 kits that left the depot late on the evening of 30 April, even though he knew 80 per cent of them might never be returned.
  • Hancock was advised by Helen Whately, a health minister, in October 2020 that 'preventing husbands from seeing wives because they happen to live in care homes for months and months is inhumane', but he decided to keep the rule anyway.
  • He was told by his former colleague George Osborne, then the editor of the Evening Standard, that 'no one thinks testing is going well' after he claimed in November 2020 that 'mass testing it going v well'.
  • At a time of massive shortages in testing kits, one of Hancock's advisors arranged a test for Jacob Rees-Mogg's child.
And there's more to come, including supposedly embarrassing revelations about mask mandates and school closures.

Not surprisingly, Hancock has been fighting back today, claiming the Daily Telegraph has 'doctored' the messages to fit an 'anti-lockdown agenda'. On the critical point of whether he ignored the Chief Medical Officer's advice to test all residents being admitted to care homes on 14 April 2020, he says the Daily Telegraph has omitted WhatsApp messages that reveal there was a meeting later that day with the 'testing team' where he was told Whitty's advice 'wasn't deliverable' due to lack of capacity, so he took the decision to prioritise testing of those being transferred to care homes from hospitals.

That may be true, but it still leaves Hancock open to the charge that he wasn't being completely forthright when he said he had 'thrown a protective ring' round care homes from the start of the pandemic. The reason this matters is that the ONS revealed in January 2021 that deaths in care homes between 7 March and 18 September in 2020 accounted for roughly half of all excess deaths in the period. Hancock maintains the proper place to adjudicate these matters - and eventually apportion blame - is the ongoing public inquiry, which he's given the WhatsApp messages to.

A source close to Hancock has also claimed Isabel Oakeshott is in breach of an NDA she signed when Hancock shared the WhatsApp messages with her, which was to help her co-author his diaries, published last year. I'm not sure that will help his cause since it suggests he wanted to keep some of the information in the messages confidential, presumably to protect his reputation.

I'm grateful to Oakeshott and the Daily Telegraph for making the messages public. Not only are they clearly in the public interest, but the people who lost loved ones during the pandemic - particularly in care homes - should not be forced to wait until the official inquiry concludes before discovering what went on behind the scenes when the pandemic struck and, more importantly, whether mistakes were made. In addition, the revelations may help us prepare better for the next pandemic, which could strike before the inquiry makes its recommendations.

I'm also thankful for another reason, namely the ongoing debate I've been having with James Delingpole and others about whether the pandemic and the response to it, including the development and roll out of the mRNA vaccines, were all part of a sinister plot to enrich a cabal of billionaires and enable them and their political allies, such as Klaus Schwab, to railroad through their globalist agenda. I've always maintained that it wasn't; that it was cock-up not conspiracy and these WhatsApp messages confirm that analysis. There was no 'plandemic'. It was just the usual political clown show.