By Tony O’Reilly-
Matt Hancock’s friend previously linked to the Government’s Covid “VIP lane” has offered to appear at the Covid inquiry – and share his private WhatsApps from the former health secretary – announcing that he has nothing to hide.
It follows recent news that Matt Hancock is among those whose Whassap Messages are to be examined as part of the covid inquiry into how the British government prepared for the pandemic.
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Hancock’s Whassap messages were not long ago under public scrutiny after Telegraph journalist Isabelle Oakshoot put them on public display to discredit lockdown measures imposed during the pandemic.
They provide mixed messages, revealing both the government’s indecisiveness over whether care home patients should all be tested before or after attending hospital. Hancock eventually said they should be tested after leaving hospital, but was later revealed to have had an agenda to scare the public over the Kent strain.
The messages also show him personally request for a testing kit to be couriered to Jacob Rees-Mogg for one of his children, then sent straight to the lab for processing.
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Hancock would later have to step down from government after being found breaching social distancing himself, when he was photographed snogging Gina Coladangelo, whom he had in a strong passionate clinch.
Hancock had appointed Collandangelo to be a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). In the end , the y both dumped their married partners for each other, with Hancock later being booted out as Mp after breaching the ministerial code by participating in televlsion show ”I am a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, where he eventually came third.
Now, his friend, Alex Bourne, a former army officer who also once ran the Cock Inn near Mr Hancock’s then constituency home in Suffolk, is volunteering to support the former Health Secretary, to show what he did to help the Uk during the pandemic.
The offer is a stunt which could work, depending on how far it addresses primary concerns of
The director of Hinpack, which moved from producing plastic cups and takeaway boxes for the catering industry to supplying medical-grade vials to the Government told journalists from i that had show how much preparation he put into the government’s preparation for the pandemic through his friend, Hancock.
“When you go from good to bad, your requirement for supplies doesn’t become a fact of what you’ve already had…It becomes logarithmic: you need 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 times what you had, and as a result, you need systems in place to respond to that.
“I think in this case they weren’t there.
“My thing is repatriating manufacturing to the UK […] If I wanted to just make money I would be a trader.”
He said that switching production from plastic cups and takeaway boxes to medical grade vials “was not easy” and that “financially it was very difficult for me to do it”.
“We weren’t paid upfront for loads of stuff that we never delivered; I paid for it and then delivered it.
“It also has the positive effect of providing jobs when they are being taken away and includes giving business to third party suppliers and sub contractors (ours numbering over 100) in the local economy. These things may seem mundane to many but to me they are essential.
“As this pans out we’ll see more and more what I did for the country.
“I have nothing to hide in this and I don’t think Matt Hancock does, either. But I do think there were significant problems with the procurement system […] my thing is: if there’s another pandemic tomorrow what’s the plan?
Former prime minister Boris Johnson, at the heart of the whassap inquiry, appears to have several messages missing.
Labour called for the evidence from Boris Johnson that has seemingly “gone missing” must be found and presented to the Covid-19 inquiry to avoid the “whiff of a cover-up”.
The deputy leader, Angela Rayner, said:
”The fact the Covid inquiry has invoked legal powers to compel the handover of crucial documents in the face of legal battles and delaying tactics shows this is a government with much to hide. It now appears that vital evidence has gone missing. It must be found and handed over as requested if the whiff of a cover-up is to be avoided and bereaved families are to get the answers they deserve.
She added:
”It is for the Covid inquiry itself rather than Conservative ministers to decide what is and is not relevant material for its investigation, and this interference only serves to undermine the inquiry’s crucial job of getting to the truth.
The pandemic featured one of the worst times in modern Britain, with continuous reports of multiple deaths caused by the virus, frightening millions of people having to also deal with competing information, including conspiracy theories as to what was going on.
As wells as being a killer, statistical exaggerations relating to hospitalisation figures which failed to separate those testing positive for the virus but had attended hospital for a different reason , went a long way to contaminating perceptions about what was really going on.
Partygate was no helper either, but furthered the belief that the populace were being fed propagandist news which the ruling elite fully understood, and would not be be constrained to rigid rules in the form of social distancing. Necessary and imperative as experts said it was, politicians made the British public feel differently.
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