Steve Barclay frustrated health officials by delaying the Treasury’s signoff on the Covid vaccine programme, amid wider hold-ups by the department in approving the financing for the project, a new book about the NHS has claimed. Barclay, who is now the health secretary, has rejected the claim. But one senior figure in the vaccine programme told journalist Isabel Hardman that Barclay, who was then chief secretary to the Treasury and lead minister on the vaccine taskforce, was a block. “He was a total dick, a total control freak but also not very good at it,” they told Hardman. “He refused to sign off the vaccine programme for ages, saying ‘Is it value for money?’” Barclay has said this is incorrect, and that he took “significant risk and acted early”. An ally of Barclay said a contemporaneous timeline of his meetings and correspondence showed he had moved swiftly. Hardman’s book, Fighting for Life: The Twelve Battles That Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future, claims the wider culture in the Treasury was so slow that other officials allowed vaccinations to begin 10 days before the formal signoff for its business case.
The decision by Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary at the health department, and Simon Stevens, the then chief executive of NHS England, meant that by the time the business case was approved nearly a million people had already been vaccinated. Another unnamed insider said of the Treasury: “It took months for them to sign off anything, and so they [the health department and NHS England] had to ignore them and get on with spending the money anyway.” The book adds that Kate Bingham, who led the vaccine taskforce, was so unimpressed by the number of irrelevant forms that needed filling in that she complained to Boris Johnson. Johnson in turn questioned Rishi Sunak, Barclay’s boss at the time, who was unaware of the delay as officials had not kept him up to date. “Vaccines had clearly not been high on the list of priorities for the chancellor’s office,” Bingham wrote in her own book about the project. Hardman’s book goes on to say that Johnson was so enthused about the idea of rapid vaccination – in part for the potential political dividends – that he was keen for vaccine centres to be open 24 hours a day, even though officials warned it would be hard to fill slots in the middle of the night, especially with a first cohort of mainly older people. The book says Johnson was encouraged in this ambition by Tony Blair, with the former Labour PM saying he would happily queue at any time to get his vaccination. It adds: “This amused Blair’s former colleagues, who pointed out that the former prime minister had probably last queued for anything in the mid-1990s.” In the end, Stevens and others persuaded Johnson that all-night appointments were not the best way forward, although a handful of centres did offer a few 24-hour slots, “which seemed to satisfy the prime minister”. • This article was amended on 26 June 2023. An earlier version said that Chris Wormald was the permanent secretary at the health department “at the time”; in fact he is still in that position.