Saturday, June 26, 2021
One rule for them, another for us continued
It is the hypocrisy that rankles the most, that and the sight of Matt Hancock tongue-wrestling with one of his publicly paid advisors, a sight I still have not been able to expunge from my mind. Unsurprisingly, Boris Johnson has stood by his health secretary, after all the Prime Minister is hardly in a position to assume the moral high-ground in sacking a minister over inappropriate behaviour with a member of the opposite sex. But there is more to this than an elicit tryst.
For a start it is the breaking of social distancing rules, a regime that Hancock was instrumental in putting in place in the first instance. The episode on film took place two weeks before the ban on hugging was lifted. And as Marina Hyde relates in the Guardian, 'a full 10 days after The Clinch occurred, Hancock went on telly specifically to warn people thinking of hugging a loved one that they “should do it carefully”.'
Nor should we forget Hancock’s harsh criticism of Professor Neil Ferguson after the government adviser was found to have broken lockdown rules by arranging visits from his lover last year. As the Independent reports, in May 2020, the health secretary claimed to have been left “speechless” by Prof Ferguson’s “extraordinary” behaviour, and said it had been right for him to resign as a government Sage adviser. Although Scotland Yard decided not to prosecute Prof Ferguson, Mr Hancock had said he would back the police if they wanted to take action over the matter.
And let us not forget the Welsh Tories who went ballistic when, as ITV Wales reports, Welsh Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething was photographed eating food with his family on a park bench. Why have they suddenly gone quiet over this blatant rule breach by one of their colleagues?
It is of course against the ministerial code to have a relationship with an employee, not that this code has much traction in Johnson's government. In this case Gina Coladangelo, is a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care, while her husband runs a firm that has contracts with the NHS. She is meant to be holding the minister to account, but not quite in that way. Hancock is now facing fresh questions about how Coladangelo – a friend from his days at Oxford University – came to be hired, and whether they were already in an intimate relationship at that point.
But Ed Davey is right too, Matt Hancock is a terrible Health Secretary and should have been sacked a long time ago. Whether it is the PPE scandal, the crisis in our care service, the unbelievably poor test and trace system, or questions over the awarding of health service contracts during the pandemic, he has failed miserably.
The consequences of this latest episode and the Prime Minister's refusal to act on it could be dire, especially with the third Covid wave establishing itself around the UK. As the Guardian reports, behavioural scientists advising the government have warned that the health secretary’s public disregard for the social distancing rules could undermine public compliance:
“‘Do what I do’ can have a bigger impact than ‘Do what I say’, particularly when combined with public anger,” said John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex and a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science, Spi-B. “We know from research on the Cummings incident that rule-breaking at the top undermines social cohesion and adherence.”
And who is investigating the leaking of internal security camera footage? That it is possible for such video records to be smuggled out of a government building and passed to a national newspaper must surely give rise to concern about national security and the possibility it can happen elsewhere, in more sensitive environments.
The whole UK government is an omnishambles, hamstrung by a lack of moral fibre, indifference to public standards, an inability to empathise, hypocrisy and incompetence. It is not just Matt Hancock who should resign but the whole lot of them.
For a start it is the breaking of social distancing rules, a regime that Hancock was instrumental in putting in place in the first instance. The episode on film took place two weeks before the ban on hugging was lifted. And as Marina Hyde relates in the Guardian, 'a full 10 days after The Clinch occurred, Hancock went on telly specifically to warn people thinking of hugging a loved one that they “should do it carefully”.'
Nor should we forget Hancock’s harsh criticism of Professor Neil Ferguson after the government adviser was found to have broken lockdown rules by arranging visits from his lover last year. As the Independent reports, in May 2020, the health secretary claimed to have been left “speechless” by Prof Ferguson’s “extraordinary” behaviour, and said it had been right for him to resign as a government Sage adviser. Although Scotland Yard decided not to prosecute Prof Ferguson, Mr Hancock had said he would back the police if they wanted to take action over the matter.
And let us not forget the Welsh Tories who went ballistic when, as ITV Wales reports, Welsh Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething was photographed eating food with his family on a park bench. Why have they suddenly gone quiet over this blatant rule breach by one of their colleagues?
It is of course against the ministerial code to have a relationship with an employee, not that this code has much traction in Johnson's government. In this case Gina Coladangelo, is a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care, while her husband runs a firm that has contracts with the NHS. She is meant to be holding the minister to account, but not quite in that way. Hancock is now facing fresh questions about how Coladangelo – a friend from his days at Oxford University – came to be hired, and whether they were already in an intimate relationship at that point.
But Ed Davey is right too, Matt Hancock is a terrible Health Secretary and should have been sacked a long time ago. Whether it is the PPE scandal, the crisis in our care service, the unbelievably poor test and trace system, or questions over the awarding of health service contracts during the pandemic, he has failed miserably.
The consequences of this latest episode and the Prime Minister's refusal to act on it could be dire, especially with the third Covid wave establishing itself around the UK. As the Guardian reports, behavioural scientists advising the government have warned that the health secretary’s public disregard for the social distancing rules could undermine public compliance:
“‘Do what I do’ can have a bigger impact than ‘Do what I say’, particularly when combined with public anger,” said John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex and a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science, Spi-B. “We know from research on the Cummings incident that rule-breaking at the top undermines social cohesion and adherence.”
And who is investigating the leaking of internal security camera footage? That it is possible for such video records to be smuggled out of a government building and passed to a national newspaper must surely give rise to concern about national security and the possibility it can happen elsewhere, in more sensitive environments.
The whole UK government is an omnishambles, hamstrung by a lack of moral fibre, indifference to public standards, an inability to empathise, hypocrisy and incompetence. It is not just Matt Hancock who should resign but the whole lot of them.
