Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic
Guests: Matt Hancock
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One of the reasons I wanted to come in and talk to you was because I want to just talk freely.
How does that all feel for you personally? That thought that one week earlier, we could have saved 21,000 lives.
There were some mistakes that we made in terms of the measures, how they were brought in.
Well, now you see, Stephen, you're getting into "gotcha" questions.
No, genuinely.
It’s just all total rubbish. I'm not going to—
No, no. I've not even asked the question yet.
There needs to be boundaries. You warned against—
No, no, no. Those rules were not in place.
Can I ask the question?
You can ask a question.
I'm going to ask the question. Just, this bit is really hard for me. People say you were a contradiction. What's your response to that?
Matt, I was really, really keen to have you come and join me in my kitchen here in London to talk in a long-form way about a ton of different things that are front of mind for you that have gone on over the last couple of years. I think, you know, usually—and you've listened to this podcast before, so you know I typically start with childhood and all those things, which I will get onto. But the question that was really front of mind for me, and I think will be for a lot of people, is why did you want to have this conversation here?
Well, I love your podcast. One of the reasons I love it is because I think what you manage to do is you manage to get people to be really, really honest about themselves. One of the things I admire about the podcast is that it's important that we have a space where people can talk about where things go well and where people have failed and what they've learned from that.
You're so sort of brutally honest with yourself about it and you really put that on the line, and that in turn gets it out of other people. And, I've been through this extraordinary experience of being the Health Secretary in the pandemic. There's a lot of things that I've learned through that and learned about myself. I want to be able to articulate how I saw it, if you like. I just think that your podcast is just one of the most self-aware podcasts that I've listened to, and now I'm completely hooked.
So let's start then. I was brought up in a happy, loving, complicated modern family. Explain. And why complicated?
Well, complicated because my parents separated when I was two, and I effectively grew up with four parents. Both of them happily remarried before I can really remember. So it was complicated in the way that lots of modern families are complicated. I have a half-brother, I have step-brothers and sisters. But it was also very loving, and I got that love and support from four parents rather than the normal two.
What were you like in school?
Well, one of the biggest things that happened to me was that after primary school—primary school was in this lovely, very rural Cheshire primary school, very straightforward, small, warm—and then at the age of ten, they put me in for the, or I was asked if I wanted to go in for the exam for the local independent school a year early.
This was probably one of the biggest things that happened in my childhood, because I went and did the exam and I got through and I went to school. So I went to secondary school a year early. Suddenly, I went from finding it all pretty straightforward to really having to struggle to keep up, really having to work hard.
Both socially and academically, suddenly I was in with a group of people who were all a year ahead of me. Combine that with my mother's work ethic—she started her own business and worked incredibly hard—and that had a big impact on me.
In what way? Specifically on the social side, you said you were socially struggling to keep up. Were you bullied?
A bit. I wouldn't say that was the main thing, but yeah, people were tough on me. I'm also quite self-confident and exuberant, and that sometimes has rubbed people up the wrong way, especially when you're the little guy at school. So I'm sure that part of the drive that I have comes from the fact that I found myself age ten suddenly in a very tough environment.
And you ultimately must have done pretty well in that secondary school where you were trying to fit in because you went to Oxford, which is—
Yeah, so I went to Oxford a year early. I studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE), which a lot of people that go on to become politicians study. That seems to be almost a bit of a rite of passage to politics in a way, because you’ve got people like Ed Miliband, David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Ed Davey, Ed Balls.
Why did you choose politics?
I thought it was just the most interesting thing to do. I actually got into it through the economics. I studied economics A-level because I was really interested in business. What happened was this: when I was a teenager in the early '90s, my mom's business nearly went bust. We had a moment when our major client was struggling in the recession in the early '90s and couldn't pay their bills.
It was a classic late payment cash crunch for a small business. We knew that if we didn't get this check by the end of the week, then the company was going under. Eventually, on the Wednesday or the Thursday, the check arrived and the business was saved and it went on to prosper. But that made me ask this question: how come a perfectly good business, employing a load of people who are working incredibly hard, can be at risk of going bust for something completely outside of their control?
The sort of sense of injustice in that made me then ask, how does the economy work? And that's what led me to take an interest in economics, which I had a real affinity with. I loved it as an A-level subject. That's what led me to PPE.
At that age, say like 18, 19, 20, were you aspiring to become a politician?
No, I was aspiring to become an entrepreneur. I actually almost did Economics and Management at Oxford, and then somebody told me it was easier to get into PPE than Economics and Management. That sounded close enough to what I wanted to do, so that's why I ended up doing it.
People have said to me, "Oh, maybe you should go into politics, Steve." The thing that scares the life out of me is it's like a lose-lose game. People are going to hate you regardless of what you do. So I sometimes wonder, who are these people that want to be politicians?
Well, thanks. But it's true, right? My experience as the Health Secretary is you get some people who love you and some people who hate you. I never know how it's going to be when they come up and see me. I was on the tube last night and some enormous guy in a heavy metal t-shirt and long hair comes up to me and I'm like, "Oh boy, how is this going to go?" And he said, "I just want to say thanks, I got my vaccine because of you and I'll never forget it." I was like, "Oh, well, that could have gone worse."
Obviously, not every interaction is as cheerful, to put it diplomatically. And so in a way, you know, that is part of it. You know that if you're going to make a big decision that affects lots of people's lives, some people are going to like it and some people aren't. That isn't what got me into politics. What got me into politics was the observation that that's where the big decisions are made. Quite rightly in a democracy, the big calls in economics to stop other people going through the same experience that I did as an early teenager with my parents' business—that's what drove me.
One of the things that is also always leveled at the political system in our country is that a lot of the people that do go on to make those big decisions come from privilege. Even living in Cheshire—I'd rather live there than in Moss Side, right? It's a privileged place to grow up. Going to an independent school like King’s School in Chester is a privileged background. It puts me off politics, this prospect that it's this elitist club where they all come from Oxford. The decisions then that are made for all of us are made by people that have walked a different path.
Let's park the Oxford point, because actually, if Oxford and Cambridge and the other top universities get it right, then actually they are great meritocratic levelers. The thing that Oxford really did for me was it took a provincial boy from Cheshire and put him into exactly the group that you describe. I was from a very much a middle-class background, but if those top universities get their selection right and get the support right so that people from your sort of background feel encouraged and drawn towards them, then they can be great levelers.
The most important thing in politics is where you're going and what you're trying to achieve. One of the most important skills that I think is incredibly hard to communicate in politics, but is vital to doing the job well, is empathy. You can't walk other people's shoes except through empathy. The lived experience of a particular background is incredibly important, and I'm a big fan of welcoming people into politics from more sorts of backgrounds.
Each and every one of us has our own background. The way that you can try to get over the problem that you describe is through empathy. That is incredibly important.
I can't have empathy for what it's like to be a woman, for example, because I've never been one. I believe true empathy comes from understanding the pain or struggle or situation they're going through. I can never truly understand the pain or struggle that a woman facing discrimination when she's trying to raise money is going through because I have never experienced that. I can guess what it might feel like.
It's like the topic of racism. I don't know how a white male politician that's gone to Oxford will know what it's like to be called the N-word on the playground when I was 11 and how that made me feel—the feelings of shame and being different. I tend to believe that the way we create a truly empathetic political system is by finding a way to get people in that have come from low economic housing and different backgrounds.
That is why you should go into politics. Of course you can get in. I'll sign you up now. It depends on which party you want to join; I can only speak for one of them, but go for it. It is wrong to say that you cannot empathize with others' situations. You can't have lived somebody else's life, but you can seek to try to understand where they're coming from. And I certainly do that, and that's part of representing a constituency.
I think it's actually really hard to communicate the empathy point because it's really easy to generalize. It comes down to the fact that if you poll people, most people think that politicians are useless, but when you name a politician, they tend to think their local MP is great. There's a gap between what people think of politicians as a whole and think of individuals who they've interacted with.
I think in order to create a truly representative political system, it needs to be full of people who have actually gone through those things. I worry that the system is promoting friends and bringing them up from Oxbridge. It feels very difficult for someone like me.
I really think you're wrong because actually the system in a way tries to draw people through faster. Give him his credit, look at who Boris Johnson has put in his cabinet. I know that you're immediately thinking of people he was at the same school and university as, but there are an awful lot of people who weren't. Sajid Javid grew up in one of the poorest streets in Bristol and made it from there. Rishi Sunak grew up in a pharmacy. There are loads of people who have made it from difficult backgrounds.
You become eventually George Osborne's chief of staff in 2005-ish, then in 2010, you became the MP for West Suffolk. Moving forward, you get promoted a few times, and then Theresa May comes in and demotes you to Minister of State for Digital and Culture. Why did she demote you?
She demoted me because they decided they wanted a clean break from the Cameron-Osborne years. She fired George Osborne pretty brutally. I was attending cabinet at the time. I remember the meeting. They had told the press that they were going to fire people until 11:00 AM and then start hiring people. I was asked to go and see her at 10:50. I walked in and she said, "Well, there isn't a space for you in my cabinet, but I know you're really interested in digital, and that's one of the big things that's going on in the world. So would you like to be the number two in DCMS and be responsible for digital policy?" I leapt at it. It was absolutely wonderful.
This is maybe a bit of my political naivety, but how can one person know anything about all that stuff? You've been the minister for digital, business, enterprise, energy, and health. How can anyone be a master of five or six different things?
It's not the job to be the master. In a way, it's the job to be the people's representative amongst the experts. Your job is to listen to the experts and then decide democratically what direction we want to go. Take an area that I did have a background in, take on the future of the internet. I can code and I understand a bit about technology. But the big question was, how do you keep children safe online?
For that, yes, you need experts, but you also need a view of where you want to get to. It's about setting the mission and the direction. It’s leadership that’s needed.
Whenever I see the social media policies being set, the debate we have is: who is it that's making these decisions? We know that they don't know it like us. You're telling me there's this group of experts behind the scenes feeding information, and then your role to play is in deciding on the tradeoffs. Understanding the tradeoffs needs expertise.
Sometimes experts can get so close to their subject matter that you've got to be like, "Yeah, but there are 60 million people over there who aren't experts and they need a voice in the room as well."
The harm that can be done if someone doesn't understand that area of expertise is huge. You can destroy an industry or cripple an economy. I've always thought the person making the call should be really experienced in that subject matter.
Because of democracy, Stephen. It's democracy and that's good and right. Because when you have technocratic government, you just get people—experts are so focused on their area that sometimes they just don't see the big picture. That's what I tried to be as a minister. It's about lifting people's eyes to the big social tradeoffs. How free to be versus how safe to be. People have been worrying about that question in the offline world for 300 years, and we were bringing that sort of approach into the online world.
The job is to synthesize the expert view but not just follow it. The experts can become so focused, but also they can't sometimes provide the leadership to say, "We are going over there." Like, yes, of course, we're going to take on Facebook over some of the harmful content. We're not just going to lie down and say that they can make the rules up.
When I see the political debates with things like Facebook, a lot of the government officials both here and in the US haven't got a clue what Facebook is. You can see them asking Mark Zuckerberg the most dumb, naive questions. As an outsider watching these people who don't understand what they're talking about writing the legislation, I worry.
Getting a rational solution out of that bundle of problems is not easy. But it is democratic to ensure that somebody who represents the people is ultimately making the decision. If they're any good, they'll listen to the advice that you get.
You became in charge of health as well. The health minister, which is obviously something not in your wheelhouse.
No. Doctors ask me, "Why should a non-doctor be responsible for the health service?" Two answers to that. First is, it's pretty arrogant of doctors to say it should be a doctor—what about a nurse? The reason is because I am there as the representative not just of those who work in the health service, but of the people who use the health service, which is to say all of us.
I think actually it's better for the Health Secretary to essentially be somebody who is there on the side of the patients. You of course listen to the clinical advice. Ultimately, it's right that the person taking the decisions is representing the people through the democratic process we have and not representing the producers.
Different countries deal with it in different ways. Some countries, the entire cabinet is made up of people who aren't in parliament. Like the US cabinet is made up of people who by law must not be in the Senate or the House of Representatives. But then you get even more of a divide between the political and the democratic over here and the essentially technocratic over there. I actually think our system is better than the US system because these two things are merged together.
The civil service will never put forward a proposal that they don't think is workable. That's the deal. So you do have these long-term experts who have been in the field. I saw my job as saying, "This is the mission," and then communicating how we get there and being advised on the way from A to B. The thing you lose if you go for your model is you lose the democratic input.
In 2019, when Theresa May stepped down, you ran to be the next Prime Minister or at least to lead the party. Why?
Because I thought that there was a need for a complete fresh start.
Did you think you'd win?
No. But I had fun trying. I wanted to get some arguments made. I worried that the party was talking not enough about how it's enterprise that leads to prosperity.
I pulled out, came seventh out of ten. I got behind Boris because it was obvious that he was going to win. Also, I came to the view that he could sort the problem that we were stuck with of Brexit better than any of the other candidates.
We move forward to COVID. You get appointed as the Health Minister when a pandemic rolls in.
I remember seeing the Chinese publication on the 1st of January. New Year's Day. I saw this thing on the inside pages of one of the newspapers to say the Chinese have just announced that there's a new disease. Nobody knew it was a coronavirus; it might have been a flu. Nobody knew whether it was serious or not, but I remember thinking, "Well, maybe this is it." But I didn't really think it was until a couple of weeks later.
When was that? I was reading through all the minutes from your SAGE meetings to try and understand the phases. When in your view did you start to realize that this wasn't just a cold or a flu?
End of January. The Chinese published the sequence of the genome of the virus. We then knew it was a coronavirus. That was bad news because we had a stockpile of flu vaccine for this sort of emergency if it had been a flu. The fact that it was a coronavirus and spreading this rapidly in China was bad news.
At that point, I remember Chris Whitty saying to me, "It's 50/50." Something this contagious, either they can hold it in China or if it gets out of China, it's going to go global. So we were, by the end of January, we were onto developing the vaccine, for instance, and trying to get the testing system up and running. Then we had this surreal month during February where nobody else was thinking that this was a big thing.
I remember standing next to the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons for a PMQs, watching every single question was about something else. Nobody asked a question about what became known as COVID. I remember thinking at the end of the session, "Every single question that has been asked is totally irrelevant because it’s all about other things and we've got this one fact in China and it is totally dominant."
Why weren't you raising the bell?
Oh, I was. I was giving statements to Parliament. We were preparing inside government for what needed to happen. At the end of January, JVT (Jonathan Van-Tam) came and I said, "How long will it take to get a vaccine?" He said, "Well, normally it would take five years, but we think we can do it in a year to 18 months." I said, "Your mission is to have a vaccine by Christmas."
Then it was when we saw the pictures from Italy. That was the moment that I knew it was global. That was the end of February.
But still in March, there was a lot of confusion in those SAGE minutes about what to do. Could we stop it?
Complete lack of data. That was the problem. Total paucity of data. We didn't have a testing regime; we had to build that from scratch. We didn't know how many people had it. We didn't know the characteristics of the disease. We didn't know what the symptoms were because the symptoms of COVID are so varied.
One of the things that we didn't know for ages, which we now take for granted knowing, is how many people have had it and have got the antibodies. There was a big debate after the first peak. Some people were saying—they're optimists like me, but it turns out far, far too optimistic—saying, "Oh, three-quarters of the people must have had it by now, so basically we're fine and we're through it."
So I got a survey done taking people's blood, and we eventually got the data through that said that something like in London 15% of people had had it and outside London it was under 5%. Christ, that means almost nobody's had it and still we've had all these deaths. That was the moment we knew we had a major problem because there was no way through this other than the vaccine.
And SAGE at this point, the meetings that you're having there, there's kind of this resignation that it is going to just wipe through the population. The objective is now just to try and stop it smashing the NHS basically.
We saw those predictions of the reasonable worst-case scenario. But the big problem was we were going up the reasonable worst-case scenario quickly. I remember the day that the first person in the UK died of COVID, but I remember the day that oddly something like the 32nd person died. I was sitting on the side of my bath at home and I got the news that we'd had 32 deaths. Suddenly, this isn't one person for whom we've got a protocol of how you manage that. This is like big numbers and it was a big jump in the number, and I knew that that number was going to get bigger.
The most frightening period of the whole thing was after we'd done the lockdown. We'd pulled every lever we could. I remember sitting in the Cabinet Room and saying, "We're going to have to tell people to stop all unavoidable social contact." If this disease had carried on going up, there was absolutely nothing more we could have done. We'd shut the schools, we'd shut hospitality. We'd set out at the start of March a set of options of levers that we could pull to try to stop this thing, and by the middle of March we'd pulled every lever. The next two weeks as the numbers carried on going up—they carried on going up for about ten days because of the incubation period—that was really, really scary.
The criticism leveled at the UK is that we were the last major Western country to pull those levers you've described in mid-March. When you look through the minutes, there is just several weeks of confusion and indecision. What you didn't know was the speed of transmission that was going on and obviously because of that 14-day death delay.
The truth is we didn't have the data. These were difficult calls. Actually, in terms of where we were on the curve, we pulled the levers ahead of other countries because we were a bit behind Italy and Spain.
Spain, France, and Italy went into lockdown on the 9th of March and we didn't. We reckoned that we were several weeks behind them in terms of the progress of the virus.
And that was wrong. The big picture was we were much closer to them than the best estimate by these scientists in SAGE. What it felt like was: this is an enormous call. So the costs of action are huge, the costs of inaction are also huge. We knew when we were sitting around the cabinet table making these decisions that the balance between these two was an enormous, enormous unknown.
I came into politics partly because I had this searing formative experience of something completely outside of our control nearly knocking out the livelihood of my family. And here I am participating in decisions that were going to have a more devastating impact on businesses and people who rely on social contact in order to survive and thrive. We were hugely aware of the pain that would come from the decisions as well as the pain that would come from delay.
The other thing that we didn't know was how the public would react. Right, and there there's an optimistic story, which is the public were amazing. The advice that we were getting was, "We're not sure whether the public will put up with lockdown for very long." And so you've got to time the period of the lockdown. Actually, the public were amazing once you explained that there's a serious problem and we're all going to have to do something.
With Italy, Spain, and France locking down first, there was also a bit of a case study as to how publics will react if presented in a certain way to the lockdowns. Because we were later in locking down people, if you look at the numbers, they say that if we'd locked down a week earlier, 21,000 people would still be alive from that first wave. When you hear that, how does that sound and feel? In hindsight, how does that all feel for you personally?
If I search for what I really believe about that, the honest truth is that we didn't know. And of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing. It was about judgments based on the balance of these two scales. I think that whenever you go through a period of history, ultimately it's about learning from it. You've got to make sure that if a pandemic happens again, we'll be far better prepared. I really wish we'd known then what we know now.
When you look back honestly at the decisions that were made and how you got the data and the way that the meetings were handled with SAGE, what in hindsight do you think were the mistakes or the areas where we could have done better in the decision-making?
You know, there were some mistakes that we made in terms of the measures, how they were brought in. Just details about the things that really, really matter to people. I'll give you one example: funerals. We brought in rules saying that six people could go to a funeral, I think it was. It was very, very restrictive. But for some people, especially people who were shielding, the rules were interpreted as, in some cases, even the spouse shouldn't go to the funeral if they were shielding. Now that was terrible.
I remember watching that film of a young boy who died who was buried by people in hazmat suits without his parents there. And that was just awful. You listen to that, and we changed the rules and made it clear. All the time, we were on the lookout for what do we need to be doing differently because it was unprecedented. In hindsight, some of it looks like these were sort of hard and fast and obvious decisions. They weren't obvious decisions at all, and we were constantly questioning ourselves.
What was your life like in that time?
My alarm went off at 6:00 every morning. I'd basically had about half an hour with the kids in the morning, and then I'd get picked up at 7:30, maybe 7:00, and then work until about midnight. My permanent secretary Chris Wormald at the start said, "This is not going to be over in a couple of weeks. You've got to get—we've all got to get ourselves into a position where we can just keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint." Weekends basically meant that we didn't start work till about 9:00. That was the time off, so to speak. And that went on like that for three or four months.
What about your mental health? Going home every day with that feeling that my decisions could sway, as we saw negatively in this case, 21,000 lives. Ultimately, 160,000 people died. You're going home with that every day, with that thought that the decisions you're making now as Health Secretary are life and death. How do you relax?
Relaxation I got through exercise. But in the Health Department, the sense was a total sense of mission. Some people say this is what it's like when you're on a military operation as well. There was a focus over how to optimize how we could make decisions. Of course, there were sleepless nights. Chris Whitty himself is a brilliant advisor on how to keep yourself in the zone. So the sense of mission was very, very strong.
Did you have anxiety?
Depends what you mean by anxiety. Of course, I was anxious about all these big decisions. That awful sense of nervousness that can be crippling at times. I didn't find it crippling; I found it motivating. I didn't feel that in a medical sense. I basically felt like I got up in the morning and I did my level best, and then I went to sleep and then I woke up and repeated the exercise. And that for me was the only way to get through it without collapsing in a heap.
If you had known that a pandemic would roll in, would you have avoided that Health Secretary job?
I don't know. That's a great question. Someone's got to do it.
Would you have put yourself in that role if I said now there's a pandemic coming next week?
The honest answer is yes. Because someone's going to make the decisions. What I'm trying to articulate, not particularly well, is a sense of duty. When the really bad stuff happens and you're in the job, you've got to stand up and be counted.
One of the decisions that was made and ultimately criticized is this whole care home stuff. What's your view on that?
This is a really good example of learning from what you're seeing on the ground. So the criticism runs that the NHS made a decision to get people out of hospitals because we needed hospital space and send them into care homes and that took COVID with them and a lot of people died. That criticism is wrong. There's been a piece of analysis that's done that shown that approximately 2% of the infections that got into care homes were from that route.
The reason for that is that when those people went into the care homes, they were then isolated in the care homes because they weren't tested, because the tests didn't exist. Now I wish to God that the tests had existed and we’d built this testing system. But they didn't exist, and most of those people who left hospital actually went home, not into care homes.
The truth is that the peak in the care homes came about a month later. The truth is, and we couldn't say it at the time because we didn't want to demotivate people, but the truth is that the main route of the virus getting into care homes sadly was from staff because staff live in the community and this disease was rife in the community. But I didn't want to stand at that podium and give the impression I was blaming the staff.
The thing that we then did was we changed the rules so you could not work in more than one care home. In the second wave, the number of deaths in care homes was far, far lower and we had the testing. So actually, what we needed to have done was do the staff movement policy much earlier. We hadn't spotted that that was the route.
There's an inquiry that will come and go through all these things. And I'm actually looking forward to it because there's a whole series of points where we've got to make sure we learn the right lesson. We talked about criticism as a politician. One of the things I've been criticized for is for giving a contract to the local pub landlord. It's just not true.
SAGE did say on roughly the 10th of March that there should be special policy consideration given to care homes and various types of retirement communities. Presumably you had the data at that point that said elderly people were being disproportionately affected. But in the SAGE minutes, you don't really see care homes mentioned again until a month later when there's been serious death in care homes.
First, it is the most vulnerable people who live in care homes. Second, the nature of care homes is obviously that the disease can spread more easily and every European country had this problem. Action was taken, but we didn't get to the policy that I think had the best impact, which was the stopping people from working in more than one care home for several months afterwards. If we'd known that that would be the thing that would stop it as much as it did, obviously we would have done that earlier. But again, it comes down to not knowing.
We were worried about a different problem that didn't happen. In Spain, a whole care home full of elderly people had died because the staff had all gone home. So we were also worried about making sure that the care homes remained staffed, because people in care homes die if the staff aren't there. So thankfully that never happened, but we were worried about the opposite problem at the same time and thankfully we avoided one, but the other one came to pass.
I know for sure and I know that the team around me worked with the right motives to get through as best as we could. It's important to have this sort of discussion about the care homes in particular to make sure that just because something is in the narrative doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Without doubt, if I'd known then what I know now, we would have brought in the staff movement rule much earlier.
When people mark the success of our handling of the pandemic, one of the ways they choose to do it is to compare it to other countries. In that first wave in particular, our deaths were just so much higher than the comparable countries. Does that not indicate that we messed up?
A combination of things. A combination of things like the timing of the decisions to lockdown, the obesity of our nation compared to others is one another factor. One of the factors that the experts think is a cause is that lots of people travel from all over the UK to Spain and Italy during that half term, and so it was brought back and seeded across the whole country, whereas some other countries like France had it very badly in a couple of cities but didn't have the spread in the way we did.
Is the large number of deaths that we had versus other countries an indicator that we made poor decisions in that first wave?
Well, now you see, Stephen, you're getting into "gotcha" questions. It is self-evident and obvious that you've got to improve decisions and learn from them. The best proof point of this is that in the second and subsequent waves, we have done relatively better internationally. How I feel about all that is I feel sad that the performance in the first half was not as good as it could have been. And then I feel pleased that we learned quite a few things and in a way we did better second time round.
The thing I felt at the time, and this is true in any organization I've been in, is that if you want people to perform at their best, they have to know that if they screw up, they're not going to get shouted at. The question is not who did that, it's how do we fix it. And that attitude was a big part of how we managed to get better. Testing is another example. Testing at first was far too—we didn't have any, we built it as fast as we could. That needed to go much faster. By this Christmas, the Americans were saying, "Why can't we have a testing system like the UK?" Every time we had a screwup, the question that we asked was how do we fix it, not whose fault is it.
Did you actually think that was a gotcha question?
I don't think you are, which is why I called you out on it. What I meant by gotcha is that the question of "will you get the guy to say that there was x screwup" is a classic of the *Today* program. And that actually frankly makes some of the decision-making harder.
The World Health Organization at the time said that we couldn't wait for a vaccine. They said they sometimes take five or ten years. You thought there was always going to be a vaccine?
I had faith. At first it was faith and it gradually became more and more real. I knew that we'd got a vaccine for Ebola. And the Oxford vaccine actually comes from the work several years before to get an Ebola vaccine. And I had just this belief. Once the data came out in about May that showed that only a small proportion of the population had had antibodies and had had exposure, the people who'd been promoting herd immunity were now evidently and scientifically wrong.
Once we got to that point, there was only one way out, and that was a vaccine. I believe in the power of human ingenuity, and I believed in the team in Oxford. I also thought that when the whole world is searching for something, then somebody was going to get it right. And so we brought in people to go and buy from around the world like Kate Bingham, and we took this attitude which was, "Sure we back the British one, but we absolutely—we're going shopping as well." And money is no object. And that's what we did, and thank God we did it.
Was there a tipping point where, because in the SAGE minutes there's this understanding that this is going to go through the population and that really the central objective has to be to protect the NHS, was there a tipping point where you realized the vaccine was going to come and it was going to come quickly, so the strategy then has to go to like "the vaccine's on its way, so now it's about actually limiting death as well"?
Once we found out that only a small proportion of the population had had it, it was obvious from then on that the only way out was through a vaccine. And therefore the policy became to suppress the virus until a vaccine makes us safe. And I then repeated that all the way through the summer and the autumn. In the autumn, I was arguing for keeping this thing under control because the vaccine's around the corner. People were briefing against me that no, Hancock's the only one who believes in the vaccine and it's a running joke that there's only one person who thinks the vaccine's going to happen. And I just spoke directly to the Prime Minister on this one and didn't go through his then-advisors in Number 10. And it came good.
You talked about some of the procurement rumors, one of them in particular that you mentioned about a pub landlord.
This is an example of how you need to go through these things properly and how narratives can spin out of control. This is true on social media, but it's also true in the mainstream media. For some reason that is lost in the mists of time, some of the papers got the idea that the landlord in the village that I had previously lived in in Suffolk, who had then gone on to run this factory, had got a contract that I had given him.
And it was on the front page of *The Guardian* for several days. And it's just all not true. He didn't have a contract with the department, he didn't have a contract with the NHS. Yes, he flipped his factory to making those little plastic tubes—you know, the ones that you stick your test thing in—but we needed millions of these things and somebody had to. I didn't have anything to do with the contracting arrangements because he was a subcontractor to another business. It's a total nonsense. And so in a stressed period like a pandemic, a lot of conspiracy theories got going. This was one of them.
The rumor around that time was that he had sent you a WhatsApp message and you'd forwarded him on to someone and that had led to him getting a deal.
These WhatsApps have been published under FOI. The WhatsApp was about something incredibly banal. It was about standardizing the size of these tubes across different suppliers so that they could be made more efficiently. Like a really in-the-weeds bit of policy that I just pinged this onto the people. It was at a level of detail about eight below where I was operating.
There was in May 2021 some minor inadvertent breach because you held shares in a firm that had got a contract?
No, that's not true either. I was given some shares in my sister's company. They had a contract, an existing contract, with the Welsh NHS. And I wasn't responsible for the Welsh NHS. So it's another example. Sometimes people stand up in Parliament and say it, and you just have to hit it on the head every time it comes up. It's just not true. But there's an underlying problem, which is that the people working to save lives in this period were working incredibly hard to just deliver that as best as they could. And all the people who now try to say, "Oh no, you were trying to contracts for this," it's just all total rubbish.
On the 8th of December, that first vaccine was administered and you went on TV and got very—you cried.
I did, yeah. That was incredibly emotional. Because we'd put everything into this and the very first vaccine down the track, so to speak, had worked. We bought six vaccines, including the Oxford one. Actually, one of them only got approved about two weeks ago. Imagine if that had been the case for all six. So the fact that the very first one sailed through and has worked brilliantly, and then the Oxford one—that also has gone brilliantly. So on the 8th of December, the first person receives it and this is the way out of this terrible situation that we're all in and all these people had died and I knew that science was going to save us.
But that wasn't the worst—the problem was at the same time, we were having the second wave getting really big. So it was a really mixed period because we had the joy that the vaccine was working but at the same time cases growing. I was on *Good Morning Britain* and I hadn't seen the video of Margaret Keenan getting—I'm sure you're thinking of it now, we can all remember it—but I hadn't seen that image and they showed the image. And I completely lost it and I was in floods of tears and totally lost control of my body and my voice.
Then I tried to pull it together and they said in my ear, "We're coming back to you in five." And I just about got it together and then started talking to, I think it was Piers Morgan again. On Twitter they were like, "This guy's making it up, he's not authentic, he was just trying to cry." The honest truth was, if they'd come back to me five seconds earlier, I would have been in a complete mess and I was trying to hold myself together. Maybe as politicians we do that too often; maybe I should have just been more relaxed about it because I got a load of abuse for looking inauthentic because I was trying to sort of be professional and not cry.
Well, for me, that was actually the first time that I thought you did have empathy. I've said on this podcast that I thought you were an emotionless robot.
That's outrageous!
Just being honest. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand has felt much more human and emotional, and I think that gives me as a normal person a sense that they understand me. When I see politicians being a bit straight-faced and tough—Barack Obama, he would cry. After Sandy Hook and these kids' shootings, he would stand there in front of the nation and he would cry and it made me realize that he felt the same way that I did. The reason I said you were an emotionless robot was because I'd never seen that. Part of the reason is because you're put in situations where they are trying to always just get you, like five or ten minutes. So you're defensive.
That's part of the reason. So one of the things that I've learned without a shadow of a doubt is that you've just got to let that show. And I find that hard. You've just got to let that emotion show more and just try to say it as you feel it. The podium doesn't help; the very formal communication method, two Union Jacks, oak background. The podium doesn't always help because it puts that barrier in place.
I find it hard because the natural instinct when you're under especially when you're under pressure in questioning is to go alpha male. It isn't always the best answer. I think that is a problem with politics. Because I'm relaxed now and the way that we're talking, there'll probably be something on *Mail Online* tomorrow, "Hancock is in such and such a screwup." Because that is how the media reacts. Once you're experienced in seeing that reaction, it also then tempers how you talk. Actually, coming in—one of the reasons I wanted to come in and talk to you—was because I want to just talk freely and I don't care if that is on item ten of the *Mail Online* tomorrow. I'm just trying to answer the questions as best as I can. I genuinely think that that is a better way of communicating in politics and it's definitely something that I've learned.
There ends up being a language of politics. Some people think that they don't understand the code. It’s as if it’s a code. And it’s just not helpful because it puts a barrier up. That's why I was so upset when I heard you say it, somebody I really respect, saying that I'm an emotionless robot.
It's important to say because A) it's what I said and what I felt, and B) it's actually not just you, it's generally like the politics as a whole. What I see in normal people is real empathy. The language in those interviews is very political and very controlled. I think PR training is honestly a curse in politics. I work so hard not to do that. It is in particular in response to the aggressive questions. When you get the *da-da-da-da* type question, you give the *da-da-da-da* type answer.
How do we get to a state where politicians go, "You know what, that was a bit of a mistake and hindsight's a wonderful thing"?
The first time I did Any Questions, when I was new in Parliament, you go for a meal before you do Any Questions. Nigel Farage was on as well, and he had two pints. I said to him, "You have two pints before going on Any Questions?" He said, "Yeah, because otherwise I can't talk freely." He managed to get every single question to an answer about why Europe was awful, but he just absolutely—he'd had a couple of pints and he sounded like he'd had a couple of pints. Now, whatever you think of his politics, his ability to communicate in a relaxed way—I remember thinking every time I then saw him—that was years before the referendum—every time they saw him, "Like, you've obviously been drinking!"
The people that are really going to resonate with the public are going to be the normal people that break through without political PR training. Obama felt like one of them to me. I felt the sincere emotion. I don't really get that from Boris.
I disagree with that. I think that one of the reasons that Boris relates to people and people relate to him is because he doesn't speak in political speak. One of the reasons he is such an effective communicator, whether you agree with him or not, is that he doesn't play by those rules. Boris has a background as different from the voters of Hartlepool as it's possible to get, but he can reach people. I think he's in the Barack Obama category for people of a different politics. He's one of the few people who will withstand the sort of criticism of the next day's press in order to try to actually say how he feels. He's a very, very emotionally engaged person.
Let's talk about some of the stuff that you haven't really been able to speak about at length. In September 2020, there were laws established—well, not laws, but guidance given to stop us having casual sex with people outside of our household. You said established couples shouldn't be having sex, there should be boundaries, you warned against casual sex, advising the public to stick to well-established relationships. Then this CCTV stuff comes out with *The Sun* and everything in between.
I don't mind it all except the opening bit about casual sex. I haven't had casual sex with anybody. I fell in love with somebody. Let me ask the question and you can correct the question.
Those rules were not in place when all this happened. Let's ask the question in a reasonable way.
I actually haven't asked the question yet. The point that's been leveled at you is very simple: it's that there's a contradiction in what you said and how you behaved.
I totally get that bit.
Hugging was advised against, distance, there was this whole hands-face-space thing which we were all told to obey. Couples were said to stick within well-established relationships, and you jokingly said, "I know I'm in an established relationship." Then this CCTV stuff comes out. People say you were a contradiction. What's your response to that? This is ultimately why you resigned.
That is my absolute—that is my response. So I resigned because I broke the social distancing guidelines. By then they weren't actually rules, they weren't the law, but that's not the point. The point is they were the guidelines that I'd been proposing. And that happened because I fell in love with somebody. I've known Gina for more than half of my life, and we first actually worked together on student radio back in the Oxford days.
I brought her into the department to help with public communications, in the same way we brought loads of brilliant people in who were experts in their field. So we spent a lot of time together, ironically trying to get me to be able to communicate in a more emotionally intelligent way. And we fell in love. That was something that was completely outside of my control. Of course, I regret the pain that that's caused and the very, very, very public nature. You know, anybody who's been through this knows how difficult it is, how painful it is. Doing that in public is incredibly painful. But I fell in love with someone.
Did you fall in love while working together?
Yeah. So it all happened quite quickly. It actually happened after the rules stopped being—after the rules were lifted, but the guidance was still in place. So I'm not trying to claim that—I hold no bitterness about this because I broke the guidelines. I face up, I broke the guidance. And there were only two people responsible for this, and ultimately that's why I resigned. I took responsibility for having done that.
When that CCTV stuff happens—and I'm not going to go into the details because I don't want to drag people into this—but I want to understand how that feels. I can only imagine having dealt with a pandemic and then getting this call from *The Sun* that they're about to leak something. Tell me, when you get that call.
It was awful. We obviously knew what was going on. But we wanted to do this as unpainfully as possible, and by the release of those images, obviously that caused a huge amount of pain. It's been—anybody knows how difficult it is ending a relationship, and we have six children. It's tough. But Gina and I love each other very deeply. Seven, eight months later, it gets a bit easier with time. But I have no sort of—I don't hold it against anybody because I took responsibility.
Have they figured out where that footage came from?
So many people ask me this question. My honest feeling in response to that question is I just don't care. The best I know is that it was one of the security guards in the department. There's a current ICO investigation; I don't know any of the details of that investigation. However, the investigation is based on a law, data protection law, that I took through Parliament, into which I personally put a journalistic exemption. So I don't hold it against the journalists for publishing it. But obviously, it was a very serious data protection breach. The thing that we've learned immediately is why did you have a CCTV in the Secretary of State's office? Obviously, I didn't know about it. Because even who's in the office is an important fact and a sensitive piece of information.
But all of that is by the by, because it is not the responsibility of others that those social distancing guidelines were broken. That is my responsibility and I took responsibility for having done that.
You took responsibility, you went to Boris, you said you'd apologize to him, and he considered the matter closed. Then the media noise and the pressure built and eventually you then resigned after 24-48 hours. It wasn't really the press; it was that some people I really respect got in contact and told me about things that they had been not able to do.
Like what?
Like seeing dying relatives. And I realized that it was unsustainable.
Would you class that as the worst time of your life?
Being Health Secretary is not nearly as difficult as worrying about your children in a very public divorce. Undoubtedly, going through that is undoubtedly the hardest thing I've ever done by a long, long way.
What's your strategy going forward now to try to mend, to try to be kind, to try to make things better?
On the professional side, I've got other things I'm interested in. I actually don't miss the job as much as I expected. I actually really enjoy the freedom of being on the backbenches. And I'm absolutely in love with Gina and that helps a bit.
Since you departed the front bench, there's a lot of Partygate stuff going on. It’s almost reminiscent of your situation because the claim leveled at the government is that there was a contradiction; there were all these parties going on in 10 Downing Street while the rest of the nation was locked down and obeying the rules.
I wasn't invited.
That's obviously very difficult. But I do think you've got to look at the big picture of we're coming out of the pandemic now and that's in large part because of the big calls.
But you resigned when you had the decency to say, "Right, I have been a contradiction here and I have let people down."
Yeah, but the Prime Minister has so many other things on his plate as well. He's got Russia, Crimea, and he's got getting out of the pandemic—that was a big call, especially the response to Omicron. So he's got all these other big things on his plate.
What do you make of all this Dominic Cummings stuff? He's become a very interesting character, a bit of a whistleblower/exposer type. You've been supportive of Boris Johnson pretty much the whole way. But he released some text messages where Boris said that you fucked up ventilators and that you're totally fucking hopeless.
Remember at that time, it subsequently transpired that Dominic Cummings was trying to get me fired. If you look at those text exchanges, they're a diatribe against what I was up to that didn't actually reflect what was going on. Boris has apologized for the way that came over and for sending those messages, but actually if you look at it in context, the context is this guy was trying to get me fired. He sent a load of aggressive messages to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister responded as he did in a private setting never expecting that to become public. There are people who really want to fix things and improve things in life, and I'd rather be that type of person.
Speaking of fixing things, one of the things you're really focused on fixing at the moment—and I've seen you talk about this in Parliament and in several other places—is this issue of dyslexia in our country. Why is this personal to you?
So I was only identified as dyslexic at university. And I know, despite really good teachers, it would have been so much easier for me because before I was identified, I just thought I was stupid and bad at English. Some people say you shouldn't identify, you shouldn't tell dyslexic kids they're dyslexic because then they'll be labeled. But I labeled myself as useless with words, and kids do that.
Still today only one in five children are identified at school. I think this is ridiculous, especially in a world where you can have online assessments that can give you the data that says this child is highly likely to be dyslexic. I'm campaigning for that. Now that I've got—I can choose how I spend my time as a backbencher—this is something I really care about. I never got round to doing it in government; I actually had assembled a little team to push on this in the Department for Health after the election before those people got moved on to have to deal with the pandemic. So for me this is unfinished business. And for the hundreds of thousands of dyslexic kids out there, if I can show just one of them that you can succeed as a dyslexic person and you can make it so long as you get the support you need, then it will have been worth it.
When we talked about you doing—having this conversation with me here, I remember you saying there was things that had been said that you wanted to kind of have a chance to address and rebut. Do you feel like you've had a chance to address and rebut those things?
Yeah, I have. I feel like because we've been able to have a long conversation, there's a few of those things I've been able to explain—explain the thinking behind. But I also hope that we can have a proper debate about how the pandemic side is dealt with properly in the future and we can learn the lessons as best as we can. I think that's important.
Every guest in this podcast—you might be aware of this tradition—leaves a question in the Diary of a CEO. Forgive me if it takes me some time to read the handwriting. Here we go. So the last guest on the Diary of a CEO podcast left this question for you: If you were lying on your deathbed, what three things would you want to have achieved in life?
Oh, that's a great—three things! Pretty ambitious. Number one is I want my children to be happy and have fulfilling lives. That is undoubtedly number one. The second is that I want to have a happy and loving and fulfilling life and relationship for the rest of my days.
Just because of what's happened with Gina—Gina's actually here today, it's worth me saying that—the scrutiny around that must make it—it can't make it easier.
We've been through a lot together. That's the joyous bit, that's the easy bit. There's a lot of very difficult things that I have to deal with, you know, and having fallen in love with Gina is the easy bit. And the third one? I hope to have improved the country that I love. If, for instance, that is making sure that every single dyslexic child gets both the capability to read and write and be effective and the self-esteem that comes with that, then that would be wonderful. I'm lucky to have a platform in Parliament and through the fact that I'm fairly well-known to be able to try to affect change. And that's what I want to do.
Thank you. Thank you for both your time, because I know it's in tremendous demand, but also thank you for choosing to have this conversation here. These conversations aren't easy, so it's often easier to avoid them. We talked about the importance of emotion and relatability in politics, so I want to thank you for taking the time to have a conversation where you didn't set any restrictions on me, my line of questioning at all, and you let me ask the questions which as a quite naive person who isn't really political would have. I think that's a credit to you and I thank you for that.
Well, thanks for giving me the chance. I don't think you're naive at all; you're self-knowing, and that's the most important thing to know.
Well, thank you, Matt.
When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. *Hello, Ted.* Your cat seems thirstier. *Whoa, slow down buddy.* Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. VEG ER for Pets. This is Kate. VEG: the better, kinder ER for pets. When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. *Hello, Ted.* Your cat seems thirstier. *Whoa, slow down buddy.* Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. VEG ER for Pets. This is Kate. VEG: the better, kinder ER for pets.