PIERS MORGAN: Hapless hypocrite Hancock’s dreadful handling of this crisis has made Britain a global laughing stock but I don’t find the Health Secretary’s shambolic leadership funny – it’s making me sick with rage
There aren’t many things that make me spontaneously shriek a profanity at the top of my voice when I’m sitting at home watching TV.
Contrary to my volatile on-screen Good Morning Britain persona, I’m normally an oasis of calm in my own private quarters.
But yesterday, there were two things that sent me completely off the dial the moment I saw them.
One was Arsenal defender David Luiz getting sent off after conceding a reckless penalty (and goal), the second of two catastrophic errors he made in our first, disastrous Premier League game back from lockdown against Manchester City last night.
He’d only come on as a sub in the 23rd minute, thus rendering his 30-minute cameo as one of the worst in the history of British football.
My mouth turned so furiously blue as hapless Luiz trudged off the pitch that my wife feared I’d developed sudden, extreme Tourette’s syndrome.
Yet that wasn’t even the angriest I felt watching TV yesterday.
No, the real spleen-splitter came a few hours earlier when I watched Matt Hancock enter the House of Commons for the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions.
No, the real spleen-splitter came a few hours earlier when I watched Matt Hancock enter the House of Commons for the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions, writes Piers Morgan
Hancock has been the nation’s bossy school prefect for the past few months.
Not a day has passed when he hasn’t felt the need to lecture us sternly from his pious pulpit about the urgent need to obey his rules and save lives.
‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives,’ he barked, staring down the camera at the daily coronavirus briefing with all the self-righteous fervour of a conservative US religious preacher ordering us not to sin or face eternal damnation.
He kept this up right to the point where Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings did the complete opposite, brazenly broke multiple lockdown rules, and Hancock said he was ‘entirely right’ to do so – displaying the same glorious hypocrisy of the US preachers who invariably get caught with their trousers down.
Undeterred, Hancock moved swiftly to robotically braying the Government’s new incomprehensible mantra: ‘Stay alert, control the virus, save lives.’
Key to this, he has repeatedly insisted, is ‘maintaining social distancing.’
We MUST stay 2 metres apart, he demanded, or the virus will spread - and people will die.
Hancock’s said this so often that I’m only surprised he hasn’t tattooed it on his forehead to save time.
And like millions of other people in this country, I’ve tried very, very hard to follow the rules.
So much so that I haven’t seen my parents since lockdown began or hugged or even shaken hands with my sons.
I’ve obeyed Hancock’s commands because I believe they matter, and that social distancing does indeed save lives.
So, imagine my surprise when I saw Matt Hancock enter the Commons yesterday, walk up to a colleague in the middle of the main chamber, stand inches away from him, and then put his arm around him? writes Piers Morgan
Other people I know, including good friends and family members, have stayed away from dying loved ones as they’ve succumbed to COVID-19 in hospitals or care homes.
They had to say a final goodbye to their parents on FaceTime and restrict attendance at subsequent funerals to just a handful of people.
It’s been a desperately hard, sad period for so many as we’ve battled this dreadfully cruel virus.
So, imagine my surprise when I saw Matt Hancock enter the Commons yesterday, walk up to a colleague in the middle of the main chamber, stand inches away from him, and then put his arm around him?
Even when a third MP arrived, and the first one stepped back to observe social distancing, Hancock simply moved over to where the new arrival was standing, again inches apart, and chatted away to him too.
It was an astounding moment: the UK’s Health Secretary totally ignoring the very rules he has been ordering us to follow for months.
The same Health Secretary who when Government scientific adviser Neil Ferguson was caught breaking lockdown rules said he was ‘speechless’, added that Ferguson was right to resign and demanded the police investigate the breach.
‘Are you ****ing kidding me?’ I bellowed to myself as I saw Hancock’s arm slithering around his mate.
And I’m sure that was the same reaction of everyone who watched it.
As acts of selfish hypocritical impunity go, this was right up there with Dominic ‘I was testing my eyesight’ Cummings taking his wife to a castle on her birthday as the rest of us were barely allowed to walk to a supermarket.
When he was told he’d been caught on camera, Hancock spluttered:
‘I’m so sorry for a human mistake on my part. Like all of us, I instinctively wanted to reach out to a friend I’d just seen - in this case, for the first time in many weeks. I realised my mistake and corrected myself. It shows how hard social distancing can be - but it is so important that we all keep trying to do our bit.’
What pathetic, hollow words from a man who if he’s doing that on camera at a televised Parliamentary debate is almost certainly refusing to abide by any of his own social distancing rules off camera too.
Yet how typical of Matt Hancock that he should be exposed as such a shameless charlatan once again during this crisis.
There have been many woeful David Luiz-style performances by Government ministers during this pandemic.
There have been many woeful David Luiz-style performances by Government ministers during this pandemic, writes Piers Morgan. Yesterday the Arsenal player (pictured) was sent off during a game with Man City at the Etihad, and gave away a penalty
Indeed, so many happened during interviews on Good Morning Britain that No10 has blanket-boycotted our show for the past 50 days to spare any more humiliations which is not entirely surprising given Boris Johnson ran and hid in a fridge live on air to avoid us before the election.
But none match the consistently appalling conduct of the Health Secretary.
On January 24, Hancock made his first, very reassuring statement to the House about coronavirus.
The risk to the UK was ‘low’, he said, and even if did come, the UK ‘is one of the first countries in the world to have developed an accurate test for this coronavirus and Public Health England has confirmed to me that it can scale up this test so we are in a position to deal with cases in this country if necessary.’
Hancock ended his speech by declaring confidently: ‘The public can be assured that the whole of the UK is always well-prepared for these types of outbreaks.’
But it soon turned out we weren’t ‘well-prepared’ at all.
In fact, the UK’s handling of the coronavirus has been so bad we currently have the worst death rate in the entire world, with 65,000 excess deaths recorded since the crisis began.
Hancock failed to protect our health and care workers with anywhere near adequate PPE, so scandalously, over 300 have now died from the virus.
Hancock failed to protect our care homes, sending 25,000 elderly people back from hospitals into homes without testing them to ensure they were Covid-negative – sparking a second epidemic that’s cost over 20,000 lives.
Hancock failed on testing, actually stopping all non-hospital community testing in mid-March despite the World Health Organisation telling us to ‘Test Test Test.’ By the time he restarted it, it was too late and the virus was out of control. He then artificially hit his own 100k-a-day testing target by mailing out 40k tests without even checking they got done, counting tests twice, and now refusing to tell us how many actual people are being tested.
Even the ‘world-class’ mobile phone test-and-trace app he boasted would be up-and-running in May, and which is crucial to how we beat this virus, is turning into another fiasco and may not work until the winter.
Hancock’s propensity for U-turns in this crisis is staggering.
He said we didn’t need to wear face masks, now he says we should.
He said we didn’t need to test or quarantine people flying into the UK, even from corona-ravaged countries. Now we’re finally doing it after 20 million have already flown in.
On March 3, as countries like Iran and Italy were being run over by coronavirus, Hancock appeared on GMB and said it was fine for people to still shake hands despite the WHO saying the opposite - and despite, we’ve now learned, the SAGE advisory group stating that very day ministers should not say that. Six days later, Hancock said we shouldn’t shake hands.
He also said there was no problem with mass gatherings like the Cheltenham Festival and football matches going ahead, schools staying open, or people flying abroad. Yet within three weeks, we had banned mass gatherings, shut down schools and stopped people flying abroad.
When Hancock appeared on GMB again on March 23, the day we finally locked down so late experts now believe it cost at least 25,000 lives, he expressed dismay at those ignoring the rules: ‘The number of people not following the advice is incredibly damaging to the effort to stop the spread of the virus.’
Yet there he was yesterday, not following his own advice to stop the spread of the virus.
Hancock had another toe-curling moment before his Commons appearance when he congratulated England footballer Marcus Rashford on forcing the Government to extend free school meals for 1.3 million children over the summer, by calling him ‘Daniel Rashford.’
It may have been an innocent mistake, but it particularly grated coming from a man who had demanded footballers take a pay cut and ‘do their bit’ early in this crisis, whilst refusing to take any pay cut himself.
When one of the footballers he berated did more to help this country than anything he’s done in the past five months, Hancock couldn’t even remember his name.
The job of a Health Secretary in a public health crisis is to be firm, decisive, consistent, reassuring, and save lives.
Matt Hancock has been a dithering, blundering, inconsistent, disingenuous, lying bullsh*tter whose abject failures have made us the laughing stock of the world - only the families grieving all those who’ve unnecessarily died as a result of his terrible mistakes aren’t laughing.
Now we can add ‘horrendous hypocrite’ to the charge sheet.
To be blunt Health Secretary, as I screamed at my TV yesterday: you make me literally sick.
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