Best tweets as Matt Hancock was ‘busy saving lives’ during Cummings’ evidence

Health Secretary Matt Hancock will face MPs and the media to respond to claims from Dominic Cummings that he lied to colleagues and should have been fired for his disastrous performance in the coronavirus pandemic. Turns out he didn’t watch it as he was out ‘saving lives.’

Yesterday he ran off from reporters who asked him about what Cummings might say. In the end Cummings stabbed Hancock in the back, the front, and probably any reincarnation of the Health Secretary in the future.

Dominic said Hancock should have been sacked 15-20 times for gross mistakes and seemed to blame him for pretty much everything that went wrong during the pandemic.

Today Mr Hancock did not comment on former No 10 aide Mr Cummings’ explosive claims ahead of his Commons appearance and Downing Street press conference, saying he was “just off to drive forward the vaccine programme” as he left his north-west London home.

Cabinet colleague Robert Jenrick said he was sorry for the Government’s “errors and mistakes” during the pandemic but insisted Mr Hancock and his department had worked “incredibly hard” during the crisis.

Deaths

The fallout continued from Mr Cummings’ seven-hour evidence session to MPs, during which he claimed his former boss Boris Johnson was “unfit” to lead and his Government’s failures had led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Apart from his damning assessment of the Prime Minister, Mr Cummings saved his fiercest criticism for Mr Hancock over failings around care homes policy, personal protective equipment (PPE) procurement and his public pledge on a testing target which caused disruption in Whitehall.

Mr Cummings blamed Mr Hancock, telling MPs on Wednesday that the Prime Minister had been told “categorically in March that people will be tested before they went back to care homes” from hospital.

It was “complete nonsense” to claim the Government had put a shield around care homes, Mr Cummings claimed, but Mr Jenrick insisted “it’s not correct to say that we didn’t do everything we possibly could to protect both the residents and the people who work in care homes, with the imperfect information we had available to us at the time”.

Responding to Mr Cummings’ assessment that the pandemic demonstrated a country of “lions led by donkeys”, Mr Jenrick told BBC Breakfast: “Well I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of what happened.”