Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: a ‘fundamentally dishonest’ write-up?

“Standing in my kitchen in Suffolk after a quiet New Year’s Eve, I scanned my copy of The Times for clues as to what might be lurking around the corner. The only thing in my patch was a news-in-brief item about a mystery pneumonia outbreak in China.” So reads the opening entry of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, which were published this week and serialised in the Daily Mail.

This is, no doubt, an “unvarnished and searingly honest account of what really went on behind the scenes”, said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. “Voters will at last be able to see which key government figures were to blame for any failings in the UK’s response – and which noble, unfairly maligned heroes were ahead of curve right from start.”

In that opening entry, for instance, the then health secretary makes a mental note to focus on this emerging virus, and raises it soon after with the prime minister. “You keep an eye on it,” Boris Johnson says breezily. “It will probably go away like all the others.”

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Everyone else to blame

This is Hancock’s attempt to get his defence in first, said Ben Spencer in The Sunday Times. Everyone else, he says, was to blame for what went wrong: GPs, Public Health England, Dominic Cummings. Crucially, he claims that Simon Stevens, then head of NHS England, was responsible for the decision to move patients from hospital wards into care homes without testing; 20,000 deaths had been recorded in care by the end of May 2020.

This is, at best, highly questionable. Hancock also says that care-home owners unscrupulously allowed Covid-infected staff to work. This claim has also been furiously denied: “the sector is up in arms”, according to one care-home owner.

Hard to judge the truth

It’s hard to judge the truth of Hancock’s claims, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Those will be evaluated by the Covid inquiry, and by historians. What’s clear, though, is that the book is written in a “fundamentally dishonest” way. It’s an example of “a particularly shabby new non-fictional form: the ‘diary’ written in retrospect”.

By the admission of the publisher, it isn’t a diary at all; it has been cooked up by Hancock with the political journalist Isabel Oakeshott. We should recognise this for what it is: “a hazy and self-serving after-the-event write-up”.

It’s also vomit-inducing, said Kevin Maher in The Times. “What price love?” begins the section which ends in his resignation, as Hancock attempts to turn his “infamous breaching” of social distancing guidelines with his adviser Gina Coladangelo into one of the great love stories of our time. Will the public buy his defence? We shall see.