Matt Hancock denies Dominic Cummings allegations that he is a serial liar
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Matt Hancock has outright denied a series of damaging allegations from Dominic Cummings that painted the health secretary as incompetent and a serial liar.
Hancock told MPs today that these “unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true”.
Cummings claimed in an explosive seven-hour committee meeting yesterday that the health secretary should have been fired “15 or 20 times” and that he repeatedly lied about the UK’s supplies of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), about testing in care homes and on NHS treatment of non-Covid patients.
Speaking to the House of Commons today, Hancock said: “I’ve been straight with people in public and in private throughout.
“Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic since last January I’ve got up each morning and asked what must I do to protect life?
“That is the job of a health secretary in a pandemic.
“We’ve taken an approach of openness transparency and explanation of what we know and of what we don’t know.”
The health secretary also hit back at Boris Johnson’s former powerful aide, saying that “governing has become a little easier and we’re being able to deliver” since Cummings left Number 10.
Cummings’ extraordinary hearing at a combined session of parliament’s health and science committees yesterday saw Hancock and Johnson get blamed for the allegation that “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”.
The UK’s Covid death toll of almost 130,000. is among the highest death rates in the world.
He said the Prime Minister’s initial strategy was for the country to get herd immunity through mass infection and that he resisted imposing new Covid restrictions for weeks in September when cases were rising.
The former Vote Leave mastermind said Hancock lied when he told the country he had put a “protective ring” around care homes and about testing hospital patients going into care homes.
He also said Hancock diverted resources away from setting up an effective test and trace system to hit his own public target in April last year to hit 100,000 tests a day.
“That meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundmetally trying to operate in different ways,” Cummings said.
“Completely because Matt Hancock wanted to go on TV and say look at my 100k target. It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”
Labour shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth told MPs: “These allegations from Cummings are either true and if so the secretary of state stands in breach of the ministerial code and Nolan principles. Or they are false and the Prime Minister brought a fantasist and a liar to he heart of Downing Street.”
Hancock said that “so many of those points [made by Cummings] were unsubstantiated”.
“We’ve had to level with people when it’s been tough, when things have ben going in the wrong direction,” he said.
“We have learned throughout, we’ve applied that learning to tackling this pandemic and making sure we are well prepared in the future as possible.”