Jacob Rees-Mogg has leapt to the defence of Matt Hancock, telling MPs the health secretary is a “successful genius”. Hancock came under a fresh onslaught from Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings on Wednesday. In a rambling blogpost, Cummings published private messages, in which the prime minister called the health secretary’s performance “totally fucking hopeless”. During Rees-Mogg’s weekly appearance at the dispatch box in the House of Commons on Thursday, he was asked about Cummings’ claims by his Labour shadow, Thangam Debbonaire. “Why did the prime minister keep on as health secretary someone he thought was hopeless in a global health crisis?” she said.
“The British people recognise incompetence and waste when they see it. They know what’s right and what’s not and they know when a minister is hopeless.” Rees-Mogg replied by suggesting messages of the kind published by Cummings are “essentially the trivia, the flotsam and jetsam, the ephemera of life, and they’re fundamentally unimportant”. And he went on to call Hancock, “the brilliant, the one and only successful genius who has been running health over the last 15 months”, adding that “he has done so much to make not only the country but the world safer”. Number 10 insisted Johnson had full confidence in Hancock after Cummings’ latest claims. When a journalist shouted a question at Hancock’s ministerial car about whether he was “hopeless,” the health secretary replied: “I don’t think so.” Cummings had previously claimed during a lengthy appearance before the health and science select committees that Hancock had repeatedly lied during the crisis, giving colleagues including Johnson false reassurances about issues including testing capacity and care homes.
Cummings subsequently failed to provide documentary evidence to the committees to back up his claims. But he published a string of private messages and government briefing documents on Wednesday, as he continues to accuse Downing Street of trying to rewrite the history of the crisis. The health select committee chair, Jeremy Hunt, who was Hancock’s predecessor as health secretary, said after Cummings’ latest allegations, that he had not seen anything that proved outright the claim that the health secretary had lied. The joint health and science committees are expected to publish a report on the lessons of the government’s handling of the pandemic before the summer recess. Cummings is soliciting subscriptions of £10 a month for his new newsletter on the blogging site Substack.