Normally Matt Hancock is relentlessly upbeat. The very model of middle-management enthusiasm. The Tigger who gives good meeting and likes to say yes. But over the past week or so, a few cracks have begun to appear in his natural charm and the health secretary has been decidedly tetchy. It’s as if he feels under-appreciated. Not just by a country that he feels he has been working round the clock – no one has done more media appearances than him – to single-handedly save from the coronavirus pandemic, and which only wants to know why the UK now has the highest number of deaths in Europe, but by his cabinet colleagues who are, at best, doing nothing and frequently making things actively worse. If he never saw Priti Patel or Michael Gove again it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. Here he actually has the nation’s sympathy. If that wasn’t bad enough, on the very morning before he was due to face both departmental questions and an urgent question in the Commons, he’d rather been landed in the shit by both the chief and deputy scientific advisers giving evidence at the select committee. Patrick Vallance had said that if it was down to him then all the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’ evidence would have been published – something the government needed like a hole in the head – while Jenny Harries had all but admitted that the reason the UK had not made testing a priority early on was because we did not have the capacity to do so. So Matt was already on a decidedly short fuse as he took his place on the government front bench. He made it through questions from the shadow health secretary, John Ashworth, by interpreting them as unequivocal support for his new “test, track and trace” app that was being piloted on the Isle of Wight, but lost it when challenged by Labour’s junior health minister, Rosena Allin-Khan, who in her spare time as an MP doubles up as an A&E doctor in a south London hospital and has far more experience of how the NHS works in practice than Hancock. Not that Allin-Khan’s questions were particularly aggressive or demanding. Rather, they were completely to the point. The testing strategy had been non-existent early on and the figures had been manipulated to allow the health secretary to claim that his arbitrary target of 100,000 daily tests had been reached by the end of April. All of which had contributed to an unnecessarily high mortality rate and had meant that doctors like her had been left to break the bad news that people had died to relatives. This was too much for Tigger. Almost as if a nerve had been touched. “Methought I heard a voice cry. Sleep no more! Mattbeth doth murder sleep.” For deep down Hancock does care: he knows that the government’s response to the pandemic in the early days was hopelessly inadequate and that many lives could have possibly been saved. Yet he dare not say so for fear of implicating both himself and colleagues. In the battle between his career and his conscience, the career is still winning. But the gap is closing. Part of him longs to tell the truth. About the uselessness of his predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, who ran down the capacity of the NHS to unsafe levels. About the self-indulgence of a prime minister who prioritised celebrating Brexit and sorting out his private life over trying to make sure the country was prepared for the pandemic. Yet he can’t quite go there yet. So instead he attacked Allin-Khan for adopting the wrong tone. In time, he will see that it was he who got the tone wrong. During a brief interlude while Hancock left the chamber, his junior minister, the nice-but-dim Edward Argar, claimed the reason the UK had failed to join the EU procurement scheme four times was because the email had gone to the wrong address four times, but that if an invitation went to the right address next time he would be all ears. He then compounded the embarrassment by insisting Exercise Cygnus had been a total success in preparing the country for the pandemic, because it had turned out we had enough ventilators all along despite his department having tried to panic-buy 30,000 in March. It’s come to something when a minister can’t come up with any better excuses than this. Even when he returned for the UQ, Hancock didn’t seem entirely himself. He just couldn’t understand why everyone was so focused on what was going wrong. The lack of personal protective equipment, the high mortality rate, the reluctance of the government to announce any relaxation of lockdown to parliament rather than at a bank holiday press conference. Why couldn’t people congratulate him on reaching his 100k testing target? One day he will realise he’d have got more applause for narrowly failing to meet an ambitious target, than fiddling the figures? There again, Matt isn’t the fastest of learners. So maybe not. There were times when you could sense Hancock was itching to dob his colleagues in. Jeremy Hunt for ignoring Exercise Cygnus. Priti Vacant for failing to test and isolate passengers at airports. But he held it together. Just. Though for how much longer is anyone’s guess. Right now he’s propping up the entire government and taking the flak for everyone else’s failures. Sooner or later, something will have to give. And when Matt does erupt, it could be a thing of beauty. It could also be the making of him. The Little Man’s revenge.