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Tag: Matt Hancock

  • Theresa May’s ‘Abuse of Power’: An Insightful Memoir – A Review by Christopher Jackson

    Theresa May’s ‘Abuse of Power’: An Insightful Memoir, by Christopher Jackson

     

    The memoir by the departed leader has evolved a little since Winston Churchill’s confident predictions regarding his own six volume account of his own premiership, “History shall be kind to me, as I intend to write it.” No PM today would expect to have the field to themselves quite as Churchill did.

    Nevertheless, we expect to hear from our prime ministers once they leave office – nowadays, this usually occurs just after Sir Anthony Seldon has told us, with his usual authority, what really happened – warts and all. In terms of UK Prime Ministers, the worst for my money is Tony Blair’s A Journey which could certainly have done with a proper edit, and the best is arguably by the man whom he defeated in 1997, Sir John Major.

    The biggest difficulty with the genre is that what one has to say will usually in some way impact the current incumbent, and most people who have been PM have such a vivid memory of the difficulty of the job that they have no wish to make daily life any harder on their successor than it is already likely to be.

    But there are other problems: one is practical, and the other moral. Practically, the writer needs to be discreet about many decisions, often leading to a banal narrative as happened in the case of Bill Clinton who may well be accused of having written the most boring book of all time in the shape of My Life.

    Morally speaking, one must justify one’s tenure while also avoid looking too self-serving. Typically the man – or woman – of action won’t have the literary experience to walk such a tightrope.

    Theresa May has bypassed all this and written one of the best of prime ministerial memoirs. She has done so largely by taking herself out of the equation. The quality and originality of this book is somewhat unexpected: May was never known when prime minister for her fluency as a speaker.

    In fact, the office seems often to have constricted her powers of expression, and the reader will sometimes wish that if she could think and write like this, that she should have done so more freely when she was the nation’s leader. At a recent Finito event she gave a brilliant exposition of her social care policy – the very same policy which she had once struggled to elucidate on the campaign trail in 2017.

    The point about Theresa May is that she was the most moral prime minister since Gladstone. Had things gone a little differently – especially had she not called that disastrous Snap General Election in 2017 – I think she had the work ethic, the quiet vision, and the character to be a great prime minister. Her grasp of detail was second to none. Brexit wouldn’t have been done without her hard work, and I don’t know of anybody on any side of the political divide who doesn’t admire her stance on modern slavery. Which politician since Wilberforce has found an issue of such importance and done so much to raise it in the public awareness?

    This memoir then, which is both brilliantly written and full of a central truth which we need to heed, is partly a reminder of what might have been. But it’s more than that – because it tells us what we have become. The book begins with May leaving office and adjusting to life outside Number 10:

    Having more time to think about my experience enabled me to consider the themes that underpinned the issues I encountered. Because, although in some sense every problem or opportunity I dealt with was different, over time I started to understand the similarities between them and to recognise more clearly what had driven behaviours and hence outcomes.

     

    And what was this? It was, writes May, a fundamental misunderstanding about the very nature of power and politics. She argues powerfully throughout this book that we have lost our sense of service in relation to others; further, she states that this is especially the case when it comes to decision-makers. This insight becomes a sort of skeleton key which unlocks a huge amount of what we have seen over the past 14 years, and it is certainly not confined to the Conservatives, though I note in passing that I think Sir Keir Starmer would surely agree with its central thesis.

    What Theresa May is describing is exactly the sort of immorality pandemic which Starmer made the centre of his first speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5th June. May explains the problem in its entirety in her excellent introduction:

    By personal interest, I don’t mean personal financial interest. This is much wider than that. It is about seeking to further your own interests, protecting your position, ensuring you can’t be blamed, making yourself look good, protecting your power and in so doing keeping yourself in power.

     

    Theresa May has placed her finger on the problem, and she is also the right person to be sending out this message. Whatever was said about her when Prime Minister, I don’t recall anyone saying that she was out for herself.

    This is partly due to her upbringing. I have always felt a sense of sympathy towards Theresa May because of what happened to her parents, and also often wondered at her quiet strength regarding it. Her father’s death in a car accident and her mother’s death from Multiple Sclerosis at a time when there were far fewer treatments than there are today cannot help but be central biographical facts. Not only has she navigated them, but she has done so without trying to gain popularity by her having done so. This dignity is extremely rare – and was mistaken for froideur when she held the highest office in the land.

    But in Abuse of Power she writes elegantly about what growing up as the daughter of a vicar means to her:

     

    Perhaps the background of growing up as a vicar’s daughter is not so far removed from the requirements of being a senior politician as it might at first seem. As a child of the vicarage, you are not just yourself, and you are not just seen as representing your parents (although when your father is the local vicar, that is more significant than it is for most children). Like it or not, you are also a representative of a wider body – the Church.

    This observation enables May to make an admission that wouldn’t be so powerful had it not just been shored up with her understanding of how the world works: “There were times [when a senior politician] when I stopped myself from making a funny aside or what I thought was a humorous quip because it could have been taken out of context,” she writes.

    She did play it safe this respect – and she did so too much. I’m sure she sometimes reflects that she might have been braver in showing the electorate who she really was.

    But though it is too late for that, it’s not too late for this book. If we accept that this form of naked individualism has become a problem, then by applying that insight to the problems of the day, we can begin to see that problem’s scale. Whether she is looking at Hillsborough or Primodos, at Putin and Ukraine or at Grenfell, the idea that power has been abused is an effective microscope by which to see what has really been going on. The effect is of a light shone on public life – and therefore on us for allowing the perpetrators to be there.

    Nor is this book without answers. Towards the end of it Theresa May writes:

     

    I referred earlier to there being too many careerist politicians in Parliament today. I was reminded of this in a conversation I had recently with a young woman who showed an interest in politics. I said we needed more good women in Parliament, and asked if she was interested in becoming an MP. She had indeed given it some thought and was not dismissing the possibility, but she wanted to know how to become a Cabinet minister. This misses the point. The core of an MP’s job is providing service for their constituents. Anyone who doesn’t see that as good enough in itself is failing to understand the essence of our democracy.

    ‘Dismissing the possibility’ is very good – it amounts to a very telling character sketch in three words. It’s one of many insights in an important book which I hope the huge number of new MPs will read. Theresa May’s premiership has some of the hallmarks of a missed opportunity, but this book doesn’t repeat that error. It’s both a powerful indictment of our core motives as a society and, in its implications, a call to arms for us to do better. And when it comes to that, as I’m sure Sir Keir Starmer would agree, there’s no time like the present.

     

    For more book reviews see these links:

     

    Review: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries

    Book Review: Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die

     

  • Review: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries

    Christopher Jackson

     

    This is a strange book to review since it has been almost entirely superseded by the actions of its ghostwriter. It is axiomatic among book reviewers that you must review the book and nothing external to the book, but that turns out to be impossible here.

    For anybody living without Internet access these past months, here is the sequence of events.

    Matt Hancock was a busy Health Secretary, and former prime ministerial candidate with ambitions to digitise the health service. In late 2019, he began getting reports from Wuhan about a virus which would upend his and all our lives. He was a cheerleader for lockdown, and also – as he goes to considerable lengths to point out throughout this book – a driver of the vaccination programme. In May 2021, he began a marital affair with his aide Gina Coldangelo, and when an embrace between them was somehow – we still don’t know how, or by whom – photographed, Hancock was forced to resign.

    Post-government he famously appeared on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, where he made more friends than some had expected. Pandemic Diaries was intended to continue his rehabilitation. However, it was written in a spirit of what now seems gullible collaboration with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. In the writing of the book, Oakeshott was given access to all of Hancock’s What’s Apps. After the book was released, Oakeshott, pleading the importance of journalism, handed all the messages over to The Telegraph, who proceeded to publish a series of immensely unflattering stories about Hancock which undid much of the painstaking work of rehabilitation.

    As a result, the book has acquired a sort of unexpected intertextuality, whereby we can now see that what is said in the book is a pared-down and smoothed-over version of what was said in real time, now there for all to see in the pages of the Telegraph.

    The juxtaposition between the two can often be comic. For instance, on the unhappy day to which we all know this book is building – the disastrous day when Hancock’s affair is broken by The Sun – Hancock begins his entry with a knowing dissertation about love.

     

    What price love? I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything. They are ready to blow up their past, their present and their future. They will jeopardise everything they have worked for and everything that is solid and certain.

     

    The tone is of an earned, rueful wisdom, and we are invited to consider Hancock as a sort of modern Antony or Othello, undone by human failings, one who ‘loved not wisely, but too well’. Perhaps he is but he comes across differently to readers of The Telegraph in the following What’s App exchange on what was presumably the same day:

     

    Hancock: How bad are the pics?”

    Special adviser Damon Poole: It’s a snog and heavy petting.

    Hancock: “How the f— did anyone photograph that?”

    Gina Coladangelo: OMFG

    Hancock: “Crikey. Not sure there’s much news value in that and I can’t say it’s very enjoyable viewing.”

     

    It is The Telegraph version, sadly, which in all its awkwardness has the real flavour of lived experience. Incidentally, I find huge sadness and a sort painful dignity in Coladangelo’s acronym, and I suspect many readers will feel especially sorry for her.

    Perhaps in a ghoulish way it is good to have both versions, but there is an overriding sense that we know more than we’d like or ought to about the whole thing. Anyone who enjoys reading about the destruction of other people’s lives and imagines themselves immune from similar treatment has ceased to think themselves fallible on another day.

    Of course, the question of government by What’s App has now been taken up as a live issue in direct response to the Oakeshott leaks. It seems unlikely that it’s any worse as a form of government, to paraphrase Churchill, than all the others which have been tried. In fact, the real thing at issue has always been between responsible and irresponsible government.

    How does Hancock, and how does the political class, come off in Pandemic Diaries? It’s a mix. The book conveys Hancock’s Tiggerishness very well in the clip of its prose. Developments are often greeted with a one word exclamation. “Stark,” he writes on hearing news that the NHS could have a deficit of 150,000 beds and 9,000 ICU spaces. “Fuck,” he says, on hearing that Nadine Dorries has tested positive early on in the pandemic. “Amazing,” he exclaims when he hears that 4,000 nurses and 500 doctors have rejoined the NHS in 24 hours on 21st March. This turns out to be his favourite word and is levelled at good news on the vaccination programme and at the exploits of Captain Sir Tom Moore. Its obverse: “Very sobering” is deployed when the Covid deaths spike, as they do saddeningly throughout the book.

    The style conveys someone in a hurry, and one is left in no doubt that Hancock had the energy and ability for the job. In fact, he probably had every right to imagine he had a good chance of being prime minister one day. Although his official mentor is George Osborne, who crops up occasionally in the book, Hancock feels more reminiscent of Blair; in fact, he sometimes seems to have self-consciously modelled himself on him. Blair’s astonishing electoral success marked the younger Conservative generation who began to imagine that power would never come their way if they didn’t somehow emulate him.

    It was Clive James who said of Richard Nixon that he could handle the work; Hancock was the same. You can feel that the Health Department, unwieldy and daunting a brief as it is, was in some way too small for his ambition, and that he role wasn’t too much for him. He was equal to the task, and throughout you have a sense of him moving his agenda forward: he comes across as a skilled and astonishingly hard-working minister.

    Even so, I don’t think the book is likely to make people especially eager to enter politics. This might be because we all know that whatever is going on in the book, our hero is hurtling with alarming pace towards downfall and public humiliation.

    But this isn’t the only reason. In the first place, large sections of the book seem to detail something like a toxic work environment which few would wish to join. The undoubted villain of the book is a certain Dominic Cummings, which are the passages I most enjoyed reading, since he seems to get under Hancock’s skin very easily, leading to some entertaining and quite astute rants: perhaps we are never more insightful than when we hate. On March 31st 2020 we get the beginnings of a theme which will recur:

     

    Amid all this, Cummings’s morning meetings have turned into a shambles. I can’t say I’m shocked. The feedback is that no one really knows who’s meant to be talking about what, to whom, or indeed whether they’re supposed to be at that meeting or the one an hour later….Managing No. 10 is a massive and extremely frustrating part of my job.

     

    As much as one can sometimes feel a bit frustrated with Hancock himself, this rings true, and there is real relief in the book which you suspect must have been felt by all the characters in the book, including Boris Johnson, when Cummings leaves.

    Government itself seems ad hoc, and Boris himself very often reactive. Of course, this might be an effect of the genre: we only see Boris when Hancock goes to see him, and then as it’s all being told through Hancock’s eyes. But there seems to be a sort of fatal passivity about Boris, the ramifications of which played out in March 2023 before the Privileges Committee.

    Above all, we’re beginning to realise that these were just very unusual times. That is perhaps the biggest hindrance towards enjoying this book: the events it describes were both appalling and recent. What a terrible thing the virus was and is; how terrible lockdown was. There is no doubt for this reader that Hancock found a single-minded groove over lockdown which to some extent kept him sane and able to function under pressure. It was this coping mechanism which led to some of the worst What’s Apps in the Oakeshott leaks, including the infamous one where he considers threatening to block a local MP’s disability centre. By a certain point, he had come to believe in lockdown as, to use another infamous phrase, a ‘Hancock triumph.’

    The reader is left with the sense that perhaps Hancock went a little bit mad. But one feels that somewhere in his make-up is a man of admirable energy and commitment. He’s not quite in the Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and Ken Clarke category of almost Prime Ministers, but a couple of rungs down, with Nick Clegg for company.

  • Exclusive: Matt Hancock on what he learned as Health Secretary

    As Matt Hancock emerges from the jungle, he recalls his time as Health Secretary and offers lessons to the next generation 

    In the global fight against Covid-19, there has been one group of people who have sacrificed so much and yet received such little praise – young people. I understand how difficult it has been for young people during the pandemic. From not being able to study, to not being able to see friends in person and missing out on so many exciting opportunities, Covid-19 has been extremely difficult.

    As Health Secretary, I was so grateful to young people for playing their part in the wider national effort. Because the virus is so much more deadly with age, the sacrifice made was all the more generous the younger you are. Without that sacrifice though, we simply wouldn’t have been able to suppress the virus and save lives. So from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everyone who played their part.

    As I look back over the pandemic, some of the greatest highs I felt were when I saw young people queueing in their swathes to get vaccinated. At sports stadia, at local pharmacies, or in places of worship, we saw individuals making the conscious decision to come forward to protect others. While some said it wasn’t worth the risk for them, the vast majority of young people have been vaccinated. Speaking to some University students who got their jabs, I was struck by the sheer selflessness of this generation. I was told that while they felt it was important to protect themselves from issues that come from long Covid, the main reason why they were getting vaccinated was to protect their friends, loved ones and the wider community. The generosity and open-mindedness of these students gave me huge confidence for the future of our country.

    So, young people have sacrificed formative parts of their childhood and got vaccinated to protect others. I will not accept the failed argument that young people are lazy and selfish. In fact I think it’s quite the opposite. For me, young people have been the quiet heroes of the Covid war.

    Now it’s fantastic to see 12 to 15 year-olds coming forward to get their jab in such large numbers. Recently, we reached the impressive milestone of over one million 12 to 15 year-olds having had their jab. I urge all children who are offered to come forward and get theirs, to protect themselves, their educations, and people that they love

    Continuing in the spirit of selflessness, it shows the spirit of this generation that last year, there were record levels of applicants to medical schools, and nursing qualifications, in the UK. This is so promising for the future of our NHS, but also for the possibilities that this brings for future scientific discoveries.

    We’ve seen as a country just how valued our scientists and healthcare workers are.  For instance, a YouGov poll this year showed that scientists and doctors were the most respected professions in the UK. I was also very emotional when I saw the video of Professor Sarah Gilbert from the Oxford vaccine group receiving a standing ovation at Wimbledon. From seeing closely how hard Sarah and her team worked to create their vaccine, I couldn’t imagine someone who deserves the whole world’s gratitude more than her.

    Think about this team of scientists at Oxford University who dedicated their lives to creating the global cure for the pandemic. I gave them the ambitious mission of creating a vaccine in ten months that we were told would usually take up to 10 years. Their hard work, creativity and perseverance working alongside the great team at AstraZenea, has given the whole world the security it needs against this deadly virus – at cost price. With further improvements in technology and more funding going into scientific research, British science has fast become a cornerstone of our economy and society.

    It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in the field of medical research. Everyone knows about vaccine development, of course. But in the UK we’ve also seen incredible scientific discoveries of drugs and antivirals for Covid-19. British scientists in the Oxford-led DISCOVERY trial found that Dexamethasone was clinically proven to save lives against Covid-19. Dexamethasone has now been estimated to save well over a million lives across the world. We’ve also seen more recently how the Antivirals taskforce, set up just in April this year, is making great progress in securing antivirals to protect people after they catch Covid. 

    As we grapple with this pandemic, with new variants as they emerge, it is the medical science that will help us through – as it has done so often in the past. 

    This is the main reason why I’m writing this piece. I hope that the brilliance of British scientists throughout the pandemic will encourage the next generation to enter into medicine. Working in medicine brings such benefits to society, but also to yourself. In very few jobs can one say that they experience both the best times and worst times in peoples’ lives. From births to deaths, those in the NHS are there for us when we need them most. Speaking to NHS workers, the principle they all have in common is the sense of reward for helping others.

    When the public were told to stay at home to save lives, they did so because they wanted to protect our precious NHS. At the same time, NHS workers and at one stage, over 35,000 medical students stepped up in the face of adversity to help look after others in their time of need. I was delighted when Her Majesty The Queen awarded the NHS the George Cross to reflect just how important their contribution was to the UK’s collective fight against Covid-19. The George Cross is awarded for “for acts of the greatest heroism or for most conspicuous courage in circumstance of extreme danger”. I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this award in peacetime.

    But working in medicine is not only about public service. Our caring professions have never been more highly thought of. While the rest of the public sector saw a pay freeze in the face of the pandemic, that was not extended to the NHS. More excitingly, medicine is at the cusp of groundbreaking changes unlocked by the insights of modern data. From genomics to the use of wearables, data is transforming how we care for people as much as it has transformed so many other areas of our lives in the past decade or more.

    So, if you are debating your career progression and want a rewarding opportunity that will give your life variety and fulfilment, I couldn’t recommend a job in science or healthcare more. You’ve got to be up for the challenges – because they are significant and tough. But the rewards are also huge: they are those of a mission-driven fulfilling life.

    One of the many lessons of the successful vaccine roll-out is that when people with passion, precision and purpose come together, we can achieve great things. That’s what happened so conspicuously in the pandemic – but it’s what happens every day and every night in medicine. With British medicine and life sciences so demonstrably a global superpower, there has never been a more exciting time to go into the world of medicine.