Matt Hancock's broken half-formed brain

The man is a dimwit. But the truth about covid is much more disturbing than that.

Matt Hancock has a variety of problems. They are, in order of importance: his brain, his face, his manner and his record. Over the course of this week, they've put him in an extraordinary level of jeopardy.

It felt like you could almost see the steel jaws of the trap close around him as he gave evidence to the covid inquiry yesterday. And once they clamped down, nothing would prise them apart again. He knew it. Inquiry Chair Baroness Hallett knew it. Counsel Hugo Keith KC knew it. He's a useful fall guy. 

Several witnesses have marked him as a particularly egregious example of failure. Dominic Cummings said he was a "proven liar". Helen MacNamara said he made confident assertions without any evidence to back them up. Patrick Vallance said he said things which "were not true". Most of them attack each other too - Cummings hates MacNamara and MacNamara hates Cummings. But everyone hates Hancock.

There's good reason for that. He is plainly inept and ill-suited for the role of health secretary. Indeed, he's ill-suited for any role above that of a regional manager for a third-tier domestic company.

You could see this in the various attempts he made to save himself. At one point he tried to dismiss Vallance's testimony, which was critical of him, by pointing out that it had been written later and was therefore unreliable. "I don't know whether these parts of Sir Patrick's diaries were contemporaneous," Hancock insisted, "because I know that some was written after the fact."

The only trouble with that argument was that his own diaries were written months after the event they described. He had admitted to this only moments before, but was seemingly oblivious to the fact that it would undermine his own defence. "These were evening notes," Hugo Keith KC said of Vallance's account, "made certainly more contemporaneously than your book."

Hancock tried to present himself as a brave warrior for tough covid action, pushing for lockdowns weeks before they took place. He insisted that he had demanded Boris Johnson lockdown on March 13th 2020, ten days before the decision was eventually made. 

The trouble was there was no evidence of this. His diaries had noted all sorts of events that day - flights, meetings with first ministers of devolved nations - but no mention at all of the pivotal moment the secretary of state for health had marched into the prime minister's office and told him in no uncertain terms to instigate a lockdown. "To tell the prime minister of this country for the first time that he had to call an immediate lockdown is surely worthy of some recollection is it not?" Keith asked, civil but deadly. 

It's quite rewarding watching KCs, rather than journalists, go after politicians. They're much better at it. No need to cultivate contacts, no requirement to ensure balance, no pressure to let them talk so they'll come on the show again - just cutting right through the bullshit.

Shortly afterwards, there was a quick coffee break. When Hancock returned he looked full of confidence and vigour, as if he was about to be vindicated. He had found an email from March 13th. It argued for a suppression strategy. That was it, he suggested. That was the hard evidence. Keith sighed. "Mr Hancock, the inquiry is well aware of that email," he said. The trouble was it did not constitute the proof Hancock said it did. "Do you use the word 'immediate' or 'lockdown'?" he asked. Hancock staggered, then replied: "I don't have it in front of me." Keith asked again. Hancock gave the same answer.

The witness testimony was otherwise full of moments of supreme cerebral failure, a straight-up infantilism suggestive of a half-developed mind. Here is a typical excerpt: "I phoned up the prime minister and I remember it very well because he didn't take the call and then he called me back and I was in a classroom in a primary school in Suffolk and I had to say to the kids 'I'm really sorry the prime minister's calling I have to go' and it was quite a moment." Hours and hours of this stuff, like finding something thin and glutinous leaking out of your brain.

It played out like farce, but at its core was tragedy. The decisions Hancock made were not of the normal magnitude. They were judgements about life or death and typically weighed on the latter end of the ledger. On May 15th 2020, Hancock said: "Right from the start, it's been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most. So right from the start, we've tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes." In reality, the government discharged covid patients into care homes. There were 28,000 excess deaths in care homes between April and May 2020.

But there is a deeper, more disturbing truth to Hancock. If only we could pin all the blame on him, we would sleep easier in our beds at night. But we cannot. In reality, he is not actually particularly stupid compared to the others in his ministerial cohort. He is a completely average example of the ministerial class during the post-Brexit period. 

Certainly he's no worse than figures like Dominic Raab, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Robert Jenrick, Steve Barclay, Gavin Williamson or the others. They are all utterly redundant examples of humanity, the political equivalent of the slop left over on the floor of a pub when the lights go up. You only have to watch Esther McVey, the "minister for common sense", on Question Time last night. She is a mouth attached to a face without a brain to coordinate it. On and on it goes, a perpetual stream of vacuity and non-sequiturs, leading nowhere. A wall of meaningless sound, with all the logical relevance of a TV tuned to a dead channel.

Hancock is singled out not because he is stupid, but because he is oafish. That's the reality of it. You can see it in the cringe-worthy kiss with Gina Coladangelo that led to his resignation. Or the video of him standing freakishly close to Conservative candidate Wendy Maisey during a TV interview, or his mock crying during the vaccine rollout, or his preposterous black turtleneck interview, or his attempt attempt to use I'm a Celebrity as a form of reputational resuscitation, or when he's called a "weasel-faced cunt" on reality television.

The barrier between his internal self and his social self is perilously thin. You need a big thick wall between your private thoughts and your public presentation in politics. You need to hide your weakness, your hesitancy, your desires and your prevarication. You are always on display, always on show, and you must therefore project strength and certainty no matter the situation you are presented with.

Look at McVey on Question Time last night. Perilous halfwit that she is, she still remains utterly unaffected by her surroundings. The audience looks at her as if she were a stain on the floor. The presenter is openly mocking her. The other guests are sniping away from the sidelines. None of it affects her. None of it causes her to blink. There is no access to her private thoughts or character. 

Hancock does not have that quality. He looks vulnerable and half-formed, not quite able to summon up the solidity of his colleagues. There is a gaping chasm between how he thinks he looks and how he actually looks. And that is his great weakness. That's what makes him an easy target. The trap door closes. The army of people pinpointing him for blame grows. He becomes the fall guy.

That would be a betrayal of the people that died in those years. The situation is much worse than any one figure, particularly one who is singled out because of his presentational failure. It's about a ministerial class that cannot operate with anything even approaching basic competence. Whoever was in the health secretary post - whether it was Raab, or McVey, or Gavin Williamson, or any of the others - would have been just as bad. In many cases they would probably have been considerably worse. For all his inadequacy, Hancock did at least eventually grasp the basics of the virus and distanced himself from the nihilistic scientific illiteracy of the herd immunity crowd.

Yesterday was a strange day. Reading about Alistar Darling while hearing Hancock's testimony was a visceral and profound demonstration of how far we have fallen, of how starkly political standards in this country have declined. 

There were plenty of structural flaws in British government when Darling's moment of crisis came. At the moment the financial crash hit, there were just three people in the Treasury civil service team dealing with financial stability issues. But the difference was that Darling had the basic intellectual competence to grapple with the issues that arose. He was motivated by a sense of public service and defined by a modesty about his own prominence and accomplishments. In short, he was a serious person, who was capable of approximating the seriousness of the time he lived in.

When covid hit, those conditions were reversed. The structural flaws remained, but the quality of ministers had plummeted. They did not have the intellectual competence to grapple with the issues. They were not motivated by public service, but by social division and personal prominence. They were not serious people. And they could not approximate the seriousness of the time they lived in.

That did not happen because Hancock is clodding and ungainly. It happened because of the priorities and incentives at the top of government. And it'll happen again, unless we take a structural view of what took place. 

Hancock is a clown. He giggles and dances and makes farting noises and it's all very distracting. But we need to focus our attention on the circus.