The government needs to “clash hard on the police” to ensure they crack down on lockdown violators, Matt Hancock said during the pandemic.
Private WhatsApp messages, revealed yesterday, also reveal how the then health secretary gave officers ‘their marching orders’ to impose restrictions to stop the spread of Covid-19.
Mr Hancock made the second comment days before No 10 staff held an unauthorized party in Downing Street. The leaked texts to The Daily Telegraph also reveal that senior officers were dragged to No 10 to be told to be more stern with the public.
This was despite ministers at the time claiming that the police were operationally independent from the government.
On August 28, 2020, Simon Case, then Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office, asked Mr Hancock, ‘Who actually looks after enforcement?’
Government must ‘clash hard on police’ to ensure they crack down on lockdown violators, Matt Hancock said during the pandemic
Derbyshire Police raised eyebrows over their diligent enforcement of lockdown rules, including sharing drone footage of people walking their dogs in the Peak District
Mr. Hancock replied, “I think we’re going to have to crack down hard on the police.”
Following a meeting on January 10, 2021, a week after England entered its third national lockdown, Mr Hancock texted about how ‘the plodders got their marching orders’.
The meeting was attended by Boris Johnson, then Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Mr Case, who is now Cabinet Secretary.
On January 14, a meeting was held in No. 10 to mark the departure of two Heads of Cabinet. The Metropolitan Police later said that this event was against the rules in force at the time.
It also emerged that Johnson feared he had ‘blinked too soon’ by plunging Britain into a second lockdown during the pandemic.
The then prime minister made the comment in private messages after being told that the modeling work he had been shown to predict deaths was “completely wrong”.
The reports, leaked by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who ghost-wrote Mr Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, show that he expressed his fears on 1 November 2020, a day after announcing that a national lockdown would take effect a few days later.
Despite his fears, the lockdown continued and lasted for a month.
The messages raise new questions about whether ministers made decisions about restricting people’s freedoms based on science, as they have always maintained. It also raises the prospect that people have been forced to adhere to draconian restrictions for longer than necessary.
In a message dated November 1 of that year, Mr. Johnson said he held an online conference call with scientists Dr. Raghib Ali and Dr. Carl Heneghan.
He told people in the message group that Dr Heneghan had said that “the death modeling you’ve been shown is already very wrong” because it was out of date because it was drafted three weeks earlier.
The previous day, Mr Johnson had announced an impending national lockdown, justifying the decision by citing public modeling that 4,000 people could die daily without action. But this data projected what could happen if restrictions are not imposed.
.Jessica Allen and her friend Eliza Moore were fined £200 by police after walking with coffee at Foremark Reservoir in Derbyshire. The fines were later withdrawn
The then Prime Minister shared a link in the exchanges suggesting modeling was behind by a factor of four, with a newer Cambridge study suggesting 1,000 deaths per day.
Referring to the idea that ministers could be criticized for announcing a lockdown too early, Mr Johnson wrote: ‘The attack will be that we blinked too soon.’ Earlier reports show how Mr Johnson was told that lifting curbs ahead of schedule was not in line with what the public wanted.
A message Mr Johnson sent to Mr Hancock on June 6, 2020, said he was ‘thinking hard about June 15’. On June 15, ministers planned to open non-essential retail premises. But Mr Johnson’s message suggested he wanted to go further and lift more restrictions.
However, he was warned not to do so by his senior media advisers Lee Cain and James Slack. Johnson said they “still think the whole package will get ahead of public opinion.”
