After care home crisis and ‘chumocracy’ claims, Matt Hancock’s affair with aide could be final straw
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The pictures appearing to show Matt Hancock in an amorous embrace with aide Gina Coladangelo in his ministerial office have inevitably led to speculation as to whether he can hold on to his job.
Only time will tell. But perhaps the more interesting question is: How has the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care managed to cling on this long in the first place?
As far as Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former aide, is concerned, Mr Hancock deserved to have been fired “15 or 20 times”, even before the current scandal.
As the man in charge of England’s health system when the pandemic struck, he is accused of overseeing the disastrous discharge of Covid-positive hospital patients into care homes, mismanaging the supply of personal protective equipment, and the multi-billion pound failure that is NHS Test and Trace.
According to Mr Cummings, Mr Hancock “lied” to Mr Johnson and the public about much of this.
If a text allegedly sent by Mr Johnson in March last year is to be believed, the Prime Minister thought his Health Secretary “totally f------ hopeless”.
Mr Hancock strenuously denies much of this.
Nevertheless, it comes on top of allegations that he awarded a lucrative contract to supply the Government with tens of millions of Covid test vials to a former neighbour, who lacked experience producing medical supplies, after he received a WhatsApp message from him.
He also committed a “technical” breach of the ministerial code by failing to declare that a firm run by his sister, in which he has a 20 per cent state, had been awarded an NHS contract.
That’s a tough rap sheet for any minister, let alone one with such a shaky standing as a member of Mr Johnson’s Cabinet.
For a start, he supported Remain in 2016.
As an acolyte of George Osborne, Mr Hancock rose through the ministerial ranks of David Cameron and Theresa May’s governments, breaking into the Cabinet as Culture Secretary in 2018.
Almost his first act in office was to launch a personal app, the first MP to do so, sparking hilarity and some derision in Westminster. Mr Hancock was characteristically undeterred.
Indeed, it set the template for a series of brazen publicity-seeking stunts, such as releasing a video of himself playing cricket with staff in his office after England won the World Cup, or crying on live television at the start of the vaccine rollout.
Many assumed that his elevation in July 2019 to the job of Health Secretary would be short-lived once Mr Johnson entered Downing Street.
Mr Hancock had stood against Mr Johnson in the leadership race of 2019, opposing the prorogation of Parliament to deliver Brexit.
However, he subsequently endorsed Mr Johnson’s candidacy, after winning just 20 votes in the first ballot, and clung on to his job.
Still believed by many to be living on borrowed time, Mr Hancock campaigned relentlessly during the general election of that winter, taking it upon himself to visit more constituencies than almost any other minister and duly saturating Twitter with videos of him doing so.
He has brought the same relentless, energetic visibility to the pandemic, seemingly never turning down an opportunity to go on television, however grim the situation.
This sheer durability, and eagerness to act as a punchbag for the media, goes some way to explaining why his stock in government had risen since the grim days of last autumn, when the failures of Test and Trace were brutally exposed by the gathering second wave.
That and the success of the vaccine rollout, with which he has naturally been keen to associate himself.
Mr Cummings’s vendetta against Mr Hancock has generated some terrible headlines, but none that seriously threaten the Health Secretary’s position because Mr Johnson will not want to be seen to hand his former chief advisor a scalp.
Mr Hancock is also very unlikely to be fired simply over an extra-marital affair – not by this Prime Minister.
The danger lies in the familiar territories of hypocrisy and the alleged “chumocracy” of the Johnson administration.
If Mr Hancock’s embrace of Ms Coladangelo contravened government guidelines, as he has now admitted it did, many will remember his reaction to last year’s Neil Ferguson scandal, where he suggested it could be a matter for the police, not to mention countless hugs with loved-ones missed over recent months.
Meanwhile, if evidence emerges suggesting that Ms Coladangelo was brought into the Government because of her personal relationship with Mr Hancock, rather than her expertise, the rap sheet all too quickly becomes too heavy to survive.
