Matt Hancock affair highlights the real sleaze at the heart of Whitehall

This ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ culture has run rampant. The level of corruption surrounding the Tory Party is immeasurable. For every big scandal like this that reaches the tabloids, there are another 10 NEDS quietly working away influencing our politics while we’re none the wiser.

High Court finds Matt Hancock acted unlawfully over COVID contracts

A High Court judge has ruled this week (19 February 2021) that Matt Hancock’s failure to publish details of contracts related to the COVID-19 pandemic response within 30 days was unlawful, breaching the “vital function” of transparency over how billions of taxpayers’ money was spent. The case was brought forward by the Good Law Project, an organisation that is in the process of many legal challenges against the government’s procurement of services during the pandemic, including PPE contracts.

Slow vaccine roll out intensifies Tory COVID-19 incompetence

The UK has now administered the first COVID-19 vaccinations to over 5.4 million members of the population according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s latest update on Friday 22 January. The rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and, more recently, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been lauded by Conservative MPs as large success of an otherwise shambolic and devastating response to the coronavirus crisis.

UK Statistics Authority calls out Tories for misleading COVID-19 testing figures

Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock received scathing of criticism of official government figures in a letter published today (2 June 2020) from Mr David Norgrove chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA).

The watchdog’s response to government publication of official data on COVID-19 tests in England described the figures as of “limited value” and called out that the “aim seems to be to show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding”.

Hancock tells Doctor MP to watch her ‘tone’

Health Secretary Matt Hancock instructed Labour MP and A&E doctor Rosena Allin-Khan to watch her “tone” in during an exchange in Parliament today (5 May 2020).

During the Health and Social Care Questions session Dr Allin-Khan alleged that the government’s testing strategy was “non-existent” and that “testing figures are now being manipulated” after it emerged uncompleted tests were being counted towards the government’s 100,000 tests a day figure.