The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Matthew Hancock is the MP for West Suffolk, the former Secretary of State for Health, and was responsible for leading the country through the COVID-19 pandemic until his time as Health Secretary was brought controversially to an end in summer 2021. For the first time, Matt speaks candidly on what it was like to lead a country through a once-in-a-century pandemic, and the circumstances surrounding his resignation. When I started this podcast, I wanted to bring you conversations that allow us to see behind the scenes, to give the context and this conversation is no different. You do not have to agree with Matt but I think after this episode today we will have the answers we’ve all been waiting for. This is not your typical political interview. This is a conversation that definitely needed to happen. Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. One of the reasons I wanted to come in and talk to you was because I want to just talk freely. How does that all feel for you personally? That thought that one week earlier we could have saved 21,000 lives. There were some mistakes that we made in terms of the measures. Yeah. How they were brought in. Well, now you see, Stephen, you're getting into gotcha questions.

No, I genuinely... It's just all total rubbish. No, no, no. I've not even asked the question yet. There needs to be boundaries. No, no, no. Those rules were even asked the question yet. There needs to be boundaries. No, no, no. Those rules were not in place. Can I ask the question?

You can ask a question. I'm going to ask the question. This bit is really hard for me. People say you were a contradiction. Yeah. What's your response to that? When I started The Diary of a CEO, I wanted to create a platform where we get to see behind the scenes, where we get the truth, where we get the context. That is at least my attempt. The rest of it is up to the viewer to decide what they make of the conversation

and what they take from the conversation. And the same applies to this episode. So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Matt, I was really, really keen to have you come and join me in my, in my kitchen here in London to talk in a long form way about a ton of different things that are front of mind for you that have gone on over the last couple of years. I think, you know, usually, and you've listened to this podcast before, so you know, I typically start about with childhood and all those things, which I will get onto. But the question that was really front of mind for me yeah and I think will be for a lot of people is why did you want to have this conversation here well I love your podcast one of the reasons I love it is because I think what you manage to do is you manage to get people to be really um

really honest about themselves right one of the things I admire about the podcast is that um it's important that we have a space where people can talk about where things go well and where people have failed and what they've learned from that. And you're so sort of brutally honest with yourself about it and you really put that on the line. And that in turn gets it out of other people. And, you know, I've been through this extraordinary experience of being the health secretary in the pandemic. There's a lot of, you know, things that I've learnt through that and learnt about myself. And I want to be able to articulate how I saw it, if you like. I just think that you're, it's just one of the most self-aware podcasts that I've listened to. And now I'm

completely hooked. So let's start then. I was brought up in a happy, loving, complicated, modern family. Yeah. Explain. And why complicated? Well, complicated because my parents separated when I was two and I effectively grew up with four parents. So the both of them happily remarried before I can really remember. So it was complicated in the way that lots of modern families are complicated. And I have, I have a half brother, I have stepbrothers and sisters. But it was also, it was also very, it was very loving. And ever, you. And I got that love and support from four parents rather than the normal two. What were you like in school?

Well, one of the biggest things that happened to me was that after primary school, primary school was in this lovely, very rural Cheshire primary school. Very, very straightforward straightforward small uh warm and then at the age of 10 they put me in for the or i was asked if i wanted to go in for the exam for the local independent school a year early this was a probably one of the biggest things that happened in my childhood because you know I went and did the exam and I got through and I went to school so I went to secondary school a year early

suddenly I went from being finding it all pretty straightforward to really having to struggle to keep up really having to work hard and both socially and academically suddenly I was in this you know I was in with a group of big group of people who were all a year ahead of me and combine that with my sort of my mother's worth work ethic you know she started her own business and worked incredibly hard and um you know that had a it had a it had a big impact on me in what way specifically on the social side you said yeah socially struggling to keep up were you bullied um a bit i wouldn't say that was the matter that was the main thing but i was but yeah people it was tough people were tough on me um and um and i'm also quite sort of you know self-confident and exuberant and that sometimes has rubbed people up the wrong way

especially when you're the little guy at school so I think you know that so that I'm I'm sure that part of the sort of the drive that I have comes from the fact that I found myself age 10 suddenly in a very you know a tough environment and you you ultimately must have done pretty well in that secondary school where you were trying to fit in because you went to Oxford, which is just... Yeah, so I went to Oxford a year early, you know, so I was... You went to... Yeah, because you got into secondary school a year early.

Exactly. And you studied politics, philosophy and economics, right? Which is a lot of people that go on to become politicians study that course. That seems to be almost like a bit of a rite of passage to politics in a way, because you've got, you like is ed milliband david cameron jeremy hunt that have all yeah study the list goes on michael go ahead davy right um yeah so one of the things that as being a bit of a pot like a i guess there's two questions here

the first is why did you choose politics i thought it was just i thought it was the most interesting thing to do i actually got into it through the economics so i did i studied economics a level because i was really interested in business right and what what happened was this that um when i was a teenager in the early 90s my mum's business nearly went bust and we had a moment when we had this uh our major client themselves was struggling in the recession in the early 90s and couldn't pay their bills so it was a classic late payment cash crunch for a small business we knew that if we didn't get this check by the end of the week then the company was was going under eventually on the wednesday or the thursday

the check arrived and the business was saved and it went on to to prosper but that made me ask this question you know how come a perfectly good business employing a load of people who are working incredibly hard how can that go bust or be at risk of going bust for something completely outside of their control? And the sort of sense of injustice in that made me then ask, how does the economy work? And that's what led me to take an interest in economics, which I had a real affinity with. I loved it as an A-level subject. And so that's what led me to to um to PPE at that age say like 18 19 20 yeah were you were you aspiring to become a politician no I was inspiring aspiring to become an entrepreneur

so I actually I almost did economics and management at Oxford and then somebody told me it was easier to get into PPE than economics and management so and that sounded close enough to what I wanted to do right so that's why I ended up doing it is there not because because when I because people have said to me you know I've had business success and all these things about platform people say have suggested oh maybe you should go into politics Steve and the thing that scares the life out of me yeah it's like a lose-lose game people are gonna fucking hate you regardless of what you do so I sometimes wonder like who are these people that like yeah want to be politicians so well thanks um the um but it's true right and my experience as

health secretary is i as you get you know some people uh are some people love you and some people hate you right i was i was on the tube and i never know what that what how it's going to be when they come up and see me so i was on on the tube last night and some enormous guy in a heavy metal t-shirt, long hair comes up to me and I'm like, how's this going to go? And he said, I just want to say thanks. I got my vaccines because of you and I'll never forget it. I was like, oh, well, that could have all gone worse. And so, you know, and obviously not every interaction is um

is as cheerful to put it diplomatically and so in a way you know that is part of it you know that if you're going to make a big decision that affects lots of people's lives some people are going to like it and some people aren't and that isn't what got me into politics what got me into politics was the observation that that's where the big decisions are made and quite rightly in a democracy you know the big calls in economics to stop other people going through the same experience that i did as an early teenager with my parents business where it almost went bust for something completely outside their control and that and that and that's what drove me and the combination of the interest and you know because it's very interesting politics and the mission uh got me there um so one of the things that has also always leveled the like political system in

our country is that and you kind of see this from you know you studied politics philosophy and economics at oxford yeah is that a lot of the people that do go on to make those big decisions yeah as you've described yeah they come from like privilege right right and even you know you you know your parents went through a tough time but living in Cheshire is yeah I'd rather live there than Moss side right yeah it's an it's a it's a privileged place to to grow up and to live and going into an independent school you went to King's King's School in Chester as well which is a privileged place to come from yeah so one of the things that I've always contended with and is you know and honestly one of the things that actually quite quite honestly

put me off ever going into politics was this prospect that it's kind of this elitist club where they all come from oxford and and then the problem you have with that if that is true right is that the decisions then that are made for all of us yeah are made from people that have walked a different set of yeah pathways right okay so i think there's a few bits let's park the oxford point because actually if we get if oxford and cambridge and the other top universities get it right then actually they are great um meritocratic levelers because the thing that Oxford really did for me not only taught me how to read and write but it also it took a provincial boy from Cheshire and put him into exactly the group that you describe right so I was from a very much a middle class background but if those

the the top universities get their their selection right who they choose and if they get the the support right so that people from your sort of background feel encouraged and drawn towards them and then supporting once you get there then they can be great levelers okay so so but let's park the sort of oxbridge debate because that's the sort of uh you know that debate will go on for as long as those universities are preeminent i imagine I think the most important thing in politics is where you're going and what you're trying to achieve. And one of the most important skills that I think is incredibly hard to communicate in politics,

but is vital to doing the job well, is empathy. And you can't walk other people's shoes except through empathy. And the lived experience of a particular background is incredibly important. And I'm a big fan of welcoming people, trying to get people into politics from all sorts of backgrounds. So I'm not disagreeing with your critique the point is each and every one of us has our own background the way that you can try to get over the problem that you describe is through empathy and that's and that's incredibly important i can't have empathy for what it's like to be a woman for example because i've never been one no that's not true not true. You can have empathy for it. But so yeah, I can have empathy, but I believe that empathy comes, real true empathy

for someone else comes from understanding the pain or struggle or situation they're going through. Yeah. And I can never truly understand the pain or struggle that, say for example, a woman facing discrimination when she's trying to raise money is going through, because I have never experienced that so i can guess what it might feel like it's like almost like the topic of racism i think like yeah no one can know i don't know how a white male politician that's gone to oxford will know what it's like to be called the n-word on the playground when i was 11 and how that made me feel like the feelings of shame and being different that I then went on to feel. So I tend to believe that the way we create a truly empathetic political system is by finding a way to get people in that have come from like low economic housing and different backgrounds and minorities. So when I look at the political landscape and I see that a lot of,

you know, a lot of people have come through a very, like too of people have come through a very like too many people have come through a very privileged background it makes me think that the decisions that are going to go on to be made will lack that true understanding of what it's like to grow up in a house that is like damp and moldy and there's rats and stuff so there's this i'm grinning because there's two ways to answer this right but the thing that's absolutely screaming at me to say to you is that is why you should go into politics but i feel like i can't get in because because of course you can get in you'd be uh you'd be i'll sign you up now it depends which party you want to join that's uh i can only speak for one of them but but go for it so firstly that's my actual response but the other thing is it's it is wrong to say that you cannot um uh that you can't empathize with with others and others situations you can't have lived somebody else's life but you can seek to try to um

to understand where they're coming from and and i certainly do that and you know that's part of representing a constituency i I think it's actually really hard to communicate in politics, the empathy point, because it's really easy to generalise. And it comes down to the fact that if you poll people, right, most people think that politicians are useless. But when you name a politician, they tend to think that they're their local person, their local MP, they tend to think that they're great, right? So there's a gap between what people think of politicians as a whole and think of individuals who they've interacted with.

Yeah, I think I can definitely empathise with pain and suffering and all of those things. I just think in order to create a truly representative political system, it needs to be full of people who have actually gone through those things go for it join get involved i think the thing that's always put the office because when i heard about this like you know everyone's come you know a lot of politicians have come from a certain background and then you see how promotions and stuff are done it makes me think that it's a bit of a like uh you know a system where we're promoting our friends and bringing

them up and if they've gone to oxbridge and I went, you know, I studied with them, I'll promote them when I get there. So it's always felt to me like running would be very, very, very difficult because I didn't go, I don't come from that sort of privileged Oxbridge, like typically quite boys club place. That's how it feels, right, for me. So I might be wrong. I think I really think you're wrong because I think actually the system in a way, quite boys club place yeah that's how it feels right for me so i might be wrong i think i i

really think you're wrong because i think actually the system in a way um because of this problem um the system is actually tries to draw people through faster um is it doing a good enough job uh i mean look at actually um give him his credit you you know, look at who Boris Johnson has put in his cabinet, right? And I know that you're immediately thinking of people he was at the same school and university as, right? But there are an awful lot of people who weren't, right? And I don't want to go through the individual backstory of, you know, the guy who arrived aged nine from Kurd kurdistan with only a pound his dad with only a pound in his pocket yeah right um sajid javid who grew up in one of the poorest streets in bristol and made it uh from there and by the way who's from a family of amazing amazing men um his i

think he's got four brothers there's five of of them. Rishi Sunak, right? He grew up in a, his mum's a pharmacist, he grew up in a pharmacy, right? There are loads of people who have made it from difficult backgrounds. And actually, I'm sad that you have the impression that you do, because it's not really my experience of being there.

So you make the decision then to move towards politics you become eventually george osborne's chief of staff in 2000 and in 2005 ish yeah and in 2010 you became the mp for mid suffolk west suffolk west suffolk yeah yeah and that that was your i guess your your entry into politics yeah moving. Moving forward then, you know, you get promoted a few times and then Theresa May comes in and demotes you. Yeah. So she demoted you to Minister of State of Digital Culture. Digital and Culture.

And God, that was a brilliant job. I mean, so... Why did she demote you? She demoted me because they decided they wanted a clean break from the Cameron Osborne years. She didn't like George Osborne? Well, she fired him pretty brutally. And I was just, you know, head below the parapet enough to get through.

And she demoted me. I was attending the cabinet at the time. And I remember the meeting. They had told the press that they were going to fire people until 11am and then start hiring people. And I was asked to go and see her at 10.50. So I thought, oh, this isn't going to go very well. I walked in and she'd been running about 15 minutes late.

So I walk in and there's a clock on the wall in her House Commons office and it says 11.05. And I said, oh'd been running about 15 minutes late. So I walk in and there's a clock on the wall in her house commons office and it says 11.05. And I said, oh, it's gone 11. So I guess this is going to be okay. And because I thought, well, you know, at least make her laugh if she's going to be firing me, you know, why make it unpleasant? And she said, well, that depends how you react.

Because there isn't a space for you in my cabinet but i know you're really interested in digital and that's one of the big things that's going on in the world uh so would you like to be the uh the number two uh in dcms and uh and and be responsible for digital policy and just keep your head down and sort that out. And I leapt at it. It was absolutely wonderful. This is maybe a bit of my political naivety, but when I was reading through that you'd been the minister for like digital, business, enterprise, energy, and ultimately health. How can one person know anything about any of that stuff? How can anyone be a master of like five, six different things?

Yeah, because that's not the job. So it's not the job to be the master. In a way, it's the job to be the people's representative amongst the experts. So your job as the minister is to be able to be the representative of the people who is responsible for the direction of that policy area and you have endless experts your job is not to be an expert it's to listen to the experts and then decide democratically what direction do we want to go so take i mean an area that i do know you know i did have a background in take on um the future of the internet and um what was a background in take on the future of the internet.

What was your background in that? Well, only that I can code and I understand a bit about technology. But the big question was, how do you keep children safe online? And how you take the internet from a sort of a wild west in social media to a place where people have more protection you know is it that was the the the you know most important question in that area at the time and for that yes you need experts but you also need a you basically need a view of where you want to get to it's a it's a it's you want to you you need to set the mission and the direction it's let's talk about that leadership that's needed my background social media and i actually whenever i see like the social media

policies being set i always the debate we have in social media and digital is like who is it that's making these decisions because the people we see yeah when we obviously the spokespeople as you've described yeah we know that they don't know it like us yeah so we think that we we we pray that the decisions aren't made poorly so let's take because that can be the subject we use to describe all of these industries that you've you've led as minister so as it relates to say social media when you're trying to understand what policies to set for children to keep them safe yeah you're telling me there's this like group of experts behind the scenes yeah who are discussing and feeding information yeah and then your role to play is in deciding yeah on the trade-offs the trade-offs right which would which needs expertise to know what the trade-offs are yeah yeah um and

then also and communicating them communicating it to the public understanding what the public is expecting okay sometimes experts can get so close to their subject matter that you've got to be like yeah but there's you know there's 60 million people over there who aren't experts and they need the voice in the room as well yeah you're ultimately the person when you're in charge of digital that is making these calls so you speak to the experts then make the calls my my thing is on a topic like digital the harm that can be done if someone doesn't understand that area of expertise because ultimately the minister makes the call yeah you can like destroy an industry cripple and like cripple an economy so i've always thought that the person making the call yeah should be should be really experienced

in that subject matter and that doesn't seem to be the case because of the design of the political system because of democracy steven it's democracy and that's good and right right because when you have technocratic government you can you just get you know experts are so focused on their area that sometimes they just don't see the big picture so you're saying you need that impartial kind of outsider to yeah that's what that's what i tried to be as a as a minister um and also so it's about lifting people's eyes to the to the the you know the big social trade-offs and i mean that in the best sense that you know the trade-offs within society um how free to be versus uh how safe to be in the in the internet it's an absolute classic of

political philosophy right and people have been worrying about that question in the offline world for 300 years and we were bringing that sort of approach um into the online world as opposed to just leaving it as a completely libertarian space um but the the job is to is to synthesize the expert view but not just not just follow it because the experts can become so focused, but also they can't sometimes provide the leadership, right? To say, we're going over there. And, you know, like, yes, of course, we're going to take on Facebook over some of the harmful content. Yeah, of course we are. We're not just going to lie down and say that they can make the rules up.

It's interesting because when I see the political debates with things like Facebook, a lot of the government officials, both here and in the US, haven't got a fucking clue what Facebook is. And you can see them asking Mark Zuckerberg the most dumb, naive questions about the platform. And then as an outsider watching

that these people that don't understand what they're talking about are ultimately going to be writing the legislation as someone that works in the industry and could actually tell you what in my view having worked in the industry for 10 years deep in it yeah fully understands things like the cambridge analytical scandal and data data privacy and really also understands the context of the media pressure, which is sometimes, is it agenda-based? And I worry that we don't have experts. Right, so getting a rational solution out of that bundle of problems is not easy.

Yeah, so what would you, can it, is there an improvement? But it is democratic to ensure that somebody who represents people is ultimately making the decision. But if they're any good, they'll listen to the advice that you get. I think my view is that they should represent the people for sure.

And I think that spokesman role in leadership is incredibly important. But I also feel like they should have deep understanding of the nuance and complexity and have experience in the thing, which kind of brings me on to, you became in charge of health as well yeah the health minister which is obviously something not in your wheelhouse no so i'm i'm a um doctors ask me you know why should a non-doctor

yeah be responsible for the health service now two answers to that first is well it's pretty arrogant of doctors to say it should be a doctor what about a nurse right because there's more nurses in the nhs than doctors park that minor local issue right the reason is because I am there as the representative not just of those who work in the health service but of the people who use the health service which is to say all of us and so I think actually it's better for the health secretary to essentially be somebody who is a who is there on the side of the patients, of course you listen to the clinical advice, you know, and some of the most amazing

brains in the world, right? Like Chris Whitty, Jonathan Van Tam. These people are amazing, wonderful communicators, very shrewd advisors. Ultimately ultimately it's right that the person taking the decisions is representing the people through the democratic process we have um and not representing the uh the producers if you like that is a that is a better way of structuring it you think you believe that because i really do i mean i look i don't know these issues deeply enough to to know the full complexities and this is maybe even proving my point that i don't understand the nuance of politics so i can't actually say if that's a better or worse system one would assert though that the best solution might be to have someone who understands the side of the patients

because they are one we're all humans we all live in this society so we use the nhs that gives me a little bit of empathy as to the the you know the the the system from a patient's perspective yeah but also someone that understands health and and the nuances of that maybe that's spent the last 10 or 20 years uh you know working within the industry and can understand those layers you know more than someone who was working in digital five minutes ago can it's just an observation as like a naive outsider. Like why do these people that don't have experience in a subject matter become the minister for it? Yeah, it's quite a common critique of politics. And different countries deal with it different ways, right?

So some countries, the entire cabinet is made up of people who aren't in parliament. Like, you know, the US cabinet is made up of people who have to by law not be in the senate or the house of representatives but then you get even more of a divide between the sort of political and and the democratic over here yeah and the essentially technocratic over there actually i think that our system is better than the u.s system because it's because these two things are emerged together um because you do you Because in taking these decisions, you get incredible advice.

You get access to all the industry experts that you want to talk to. And ultimately, you're making balanced judgments. The way the UK does it as well is the civil service will never put forward a proposal that they don't think is workable. That's the deal, right? So you do have these long-term uh experts who have been in in the field um and they will uh they'll say okay this is where the way i i tried to do it i'd say this is where i think we need to get to how should we best get there and then the experts will come up with a plan of how to get there okay And you might have a view on some of the details of that, but essentially I saw my job as saying,

this is the mission and then communicating how we get there and then being advised on the way from A to B. Because the thing you lose if you go for your model is you lose the democratic input and that can lead to things going wrong. In 2019, when Theresa May stepped down, you ran to be the next prime minister, or at least to lead the party, right?

And that would lead you to being the prime minister. Why did you want to be the prime minister? Because I thought that there was a need for a complete fresh start. Did you think you'd win? No. At least you're honest. Yeah.

No, but I had fun trying no i didn't i didn't think i'd win um but i wanted to get some i wanted to get some arguments made right i worried that my i worried that we were the party was talking not enough about how it's enterprise that leads to prosperity. Is it a publicity thing running? Because I watch the US elections every year. I'm obsessed with it. And the same people run every year. They know they're not going to win.

But I think the exposure and publicity you get is incredible. Yeah, of course, that's one of the consequences. I basically had an argument I wanted to make, which was, okay, Brexit, decision's been taken. Let's get that done and get on to building a stronger economy in the future and basically get it done as quickly as we can and move forward.

That was the argument I wanted to make. I managed to make the argument quite sort of loudly because I was running. And then i pulled out pulled out came seventh got behind boris i was it did you come seventh out of ten was it six or seven oh yeah and then you got behind boris and then i got behind boris um because you knew he would win yeah it was obvious that he was going to win also i came to the view that um he he could sort the problem that we were stuck with a brexit better than any of the other candidates um and also i thought you know

this guy has great capabilities and he needs people around him. We move forward to COVID, which was, you know, you get appointed as being the health minister when a pandemic rolls in. I know. I remember seeing the Chinese publication on the 1st of January. So it was New Year's Day.

And I saw this thing on the inside pages of one of the newspapers to say the Chinese have just announced that there's a new disease. And nobody knew. We didn't know it was a coronavirus. It might have been a flu. And nobody knew whether it was serious or not. But I remember thinking, well, maybe this is it.

But I didn't really think it was until um until a couple of weeks later when was that that because I you know I was reading through all of the minutes from your sage meetings to try and understand the kind of phases of yeah because I listen I run business right and we have crises and chaos all those things yeah there's various stages you go through of trying to understand exactly what this is and then how you know how impactful it's going to be yeah and then what we should be doing yeah i kind of ran through all of that so when in your view did you start to realize that this wasn't just a cold yeah end of january so the chinese published the sequence of the genome of the

of the virus so we then knew it was a coronavirus. That was bad news, right? Because we had a stockpile of flu vaccine for this sort of emergency, if it had been a flu. And the fact that it was a coronavirus and spreading this rapidly in China was bad news. And then at that point, I remember Chris Whitty saying to me it's 50-50 something this contagious either they can hold it in China or if it gets out of China it's going to go global

so we were by the end of January we were on to developing the vaccine, for instance, and trying to get the testing system up and running. And then we had this surreal month during February when nobody else was sort of thinking that this was a big thing. And we still thought it was 50-50, but 50% chance of a global pandemic is, you know, very, very bad. And we were, I remember standing next to the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons for PMQs, watching every single question was about something else. And nobody asked a question about what became known as COVID. And I remember thinking at the end of the session, the end of half hour, every single question that has been asked is totally irrelevant because it's all about other things and we've got this one fact in china and it is it's totally dominant why

weren't you raising the bell oh i was i was giving statements to parliament and what have you and we were preparing inside government for what needed to happen so at the end of january uh jvt came and said um i said how long will it take to get a vaccine he said well normally it would take five years but we think we can do it in a year to 18 months he said in january yeah if everything goes well and i said your mission is to have a vaccine by christmas and we he he and the team that we built pulled it off um so we were getting things moving and then it was when we saw the pictures from italy do you remember the you know that was the moment that i knew it was global and that was what month that was the end of february february yeah it was the end of february half term because everything was calm at this point we were

watching it happen overseas. I mean, like, I remember the China scenes. Yeah. Everyone was kind of calm about it. Oh, China are having a problem. That's kind of how it felt. And then the Italy moment was terrifying. Yeah, that was the moment when it was obvious it was coming.

Right. And I remember having a call that my German opposite number, who I became very close to, he phoned me up. He said, have you seen these pics out of Italy? I was like, yeah. He was like, this is it. And I was like, yeah, this is it. So that was the end of February.

But still in March, there was a lot of confusion in those sage minutes about what to do, about what was going to happen. Could we stop it? Complete lack of data. That was the we stop it yeah complete lack of data that's the that was the problem total paucity of data um we had a um we didn't have a testing regime we had to build that from scratch uh and so you didn't know how many people had it um we didn't know the characteristics of the disease uh we didn't know what the, we didn't know what, you know,

what the symptoms were largely because the symptoms of COVID are so varied that they didn't have a full symptom list. One of the things that we didn't know for ages, which we now take for granted knowing is how many people have had it and have got the antibodies. There was a big debate after the first peak of some people saying, they're optimists like me, but it turned out far, far too optimistic, right? Saying, oh, you know, three quarters of people must have had it by now. So basically we're fine and we're through it. And then, so I got a survey done taking people's blood and got a representative sample. it took ages to get this thing up and running and we eventually got the data through that said that something like in London 15% of people had

had it and outside London it was under five it's like Christ that means almost nobody's had it and still we've had all these deaths and that means you know that was the moment we knew we had a major problem because there was no way through this other than the vaccine and sage at this point and the meetings that you're having there there's kind of this resignation that it is going to just wipe through the population but the issue is the the objective is now just to try and stop it smashing the nhs basically yeah so the what happened was you know we saw those predictions of the and the reasonable worst case scenario but the big problem was we were going up the reasonable worst case scenario quickly you know and i remember i remember of course i remember the

the day that the first person in the uk died of covid but but i remember the day that oddly something like the 32nd person died. And it's a funny to say that number, but there's a reason for it. I was sitting on the side of my bath at home, and I got the news that we'd had 32 deaths. And suddenly there was a, this isn't, you know, one person for whom we've got a protocol of how you manage that. Terrible as that is, this is like like big numbers and it was a big jump

in the number and i knew that that that number was going to get bigger and the worst period the the most um sort of frightening period of the whole thing was after we'd done the lockdown we'd pulled every lever we could so i remember sitting in the cabinet room and saying, we're going to have to tell people to stop all unavoidable social contact. And you probably remember that being said. And the really frightening time was after we'd done all those things, brought in the lockdown,

we'd done everything, right? And if this disease had carried on going up there was there was absolutely nothing more we could do we'd shut the schools we'd shut hospitality you know we'd pulled you know we'd set out at the start of march a a set of options of levers that we could pull to try to stop this thing and by the middle of march we'd pulled every lever and it was a um and and so the next two weeks as the numbers carried on going up they carried on going up for about 10 days because of the incubation period that was that was that was really scary and then and then and then they started to turn and then we knew we

could get this thing under the criticism leveled at the uk is that we were the last like major western country to pull those levers you've described in mid-March. And when you look through the minutes, there is just several weeks of confusion and indecision. And obviously in those weeks, as you've described there, what you didn't, from what I've seen in the minutes and subsequent interviews, is what you didn't know was the speed of transmission that was going on.

And obviously because of that 14-day death delay. Delay, yeah. So it's funny that the previous conversation we had was about how you should have the experts making the decisions. The truth is, the experts didn't have the data either. So these were difficult calls. Actually, in terms of where we were on the curve, we pulled the levers ahead of other countries

because we were a bit behind italy and and um uh spain um but the um so spain and spain france and italy went into lockdown on the 9th of march yeah but we didn't we reckoned that we were several weeks behind them in terms of the progress of the virus that it as in it had come to those countries first right then from them to us but either way and that was wrong the big picture we were much closer to them than than than we were being than their best estimate right by these by the best people who were in sage there's the scientists and you know what it felt like was, this is an enormous call. So the costs of action are huge. The costs of inaction are also huge. So you, you know, we knew when we were sitting around the cabinet table making these decisions, that the balance between these two was an enormous, enormous unknown. So with an unprecedented virus with very little data, we were essentially doing these things that we knew were going to be very damaging.

If you think about the story I told earlier about coming in, I came into politics partly because I had this searing formulative experience of something completely outside of our control, nearly knocking out the livelihood of my family, right? And here I am, participating in decisions that were going to have a more devastating impact on on businesses and and and people who rely on social contact in order to to survive and thrive so we were hugely aware of the of the pain that would come from the decisions as well as the pain that would come from uh from delay and the other thing that we didn't know was how the public would react, right? And there there's an optimistic story,

which is the public were amazing, you know? And the advice that we were getting was, we're not sure whether the public will put up with lockdown for very long. And so you've got to time the period of lockdown. Actually, the public were amazing. Once you explain that, that you know there's a serious problem um we're all going to have to uh do something it's going to be uncomfortable but

we'll get through it together and the public were amazing obviously with italy spain and france locking down first there was also a bit of a case study as to how publics will react yeah if presented in a certain way yeah um to the lockdowns. Because we were later in locking down people, if you look at the numbers, they say that there's about 20, if we'd locked down a week earlier, 21,000 people would still be alive from that first wave. When you hear that, how does that sound and feel? And also around that time, Boris Johnson goes and does that interview and references one of the options being taking it on the chin and then in hindsight how does that all feel for you personally that thought that one week earlier we could have saved 21 000

lives yeah um it's obviously it's something that i'll i'll always think about. You know, if I search for what I really believe about that, and the honest truth is, the honest truth is that we didn't know. And of course, you know, hindsight is a wonderful thing. And it was about, it was judgments based on judgment based on on on these you know this the the the balance of these two scales um and um i think that whenever you go through a period of history ultimately it's about learning from it you know you've got to make sure that that if this if a pandemic you know disease happens again we'll be far better prepared and i think that the i think the far east was far better prepared because they'd been through mers and sars and and um honestly that how i feel is like i really wish we'd known then what we knew now

well what if you in hindsight then because we're playing games of hindsight now which are as as they say it's 2020 but what are when you look back honestly at the decisions that were made and how you got the data and the way that the meetings were handled with sage and all of these and ultimately what led to these decisions what in hindsight which is a wonderful thing that we can only deploy in in the past yeah in hindsight what do you think were the mistakes or the areas where we could have done better in the decision making how we got the information and all those things what were those mistakes in hindsight well um you know we made there were some mistakes that we made in terms of the measures, how they were brought in.

As in not hard enough? Just, you know, just details about the things that really, really matter to people. I'll give you one example. Funerals. We brought in rules saying that six people could go to a funeral, I think it was. Very, very restrictive. But for some people, especially people who were shielding,

the rules were interpreted as, in some cases, even the spouse shouldn't go to the funeral if they were shielding. Now, that was terrible. I remember watching the film of a young boy who died who was buried by people in hazmat suits without his parents there and you know that was just awful and you know you listen to that right and we changed the rules and made it clear. So that was all the time. I'd say all the time we were on the lookout for,

okay, what do we need to be doing differently? Because it was unprecedented. And there was a... And in hindsight, some of it looks like these were sort of hard and fast and obvious decisions. They weren't obvious decisions at all. And we were constantly sort of questioning ourselves in terms of whether we got the judgment right. What was your life like in that time? Oh, yeah.

Well, so my alarm went off at six o'clock every morning. And I basically had about half an hour with the kids in the morning. And then I'd get picked up at 7.30, maybe 7 o'clock. And then work. It was just unbelievable until about midnight. And, you know, my permanent secretary, Chris Wormwell, at the start said, this is not going to be over in a couple of weeks, right? You've got to get, we've all got to get ourselves into a position where we can just keep going.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. And there was a... A weekend basically meant that we didn't start work till about nine. And so that was the, you know, that was the time off, so to speak. And that, it was like that for three or four months during that period.

What about your mental health position? Because I... Yeah. You know, because that feeling, that going home every day without feeling that my decisions could sway as we saw negatively in this case you know 21 million 21 000 lives for better or for worse and ultimately you know 160 000 people died yeah you're going home with that every day yeah with that thought that you'll just sit this

decisions you're making now as health secretary yeah our life and death yeah how do you relax how do you yeah well i think that's real relaxation i got through exercise um but the um in the health department the sense was a total sense of mission um and i've never been in the military but some people say this is what it's like when you're on a military operation as well um as in there was a focus over how to optimize how we could make decisions you know of course there were sleepless nights but really we thought you know when we had some you know chris witty himself is a brilliant advisor on how to keep yourself you know personally in the um in the zone so the the sense of mission that we were trying to solve something that was incredibly difficult as best as we could um was very very strong in that period you have anxiety it depends what you mean by anxiety of

course i was anxious about every you know all these big decisions that awful sense of nervousness that you know can be crippling at times you know that yeah but it was yes up to the bit but not about i you know i didn't i didn't find it i didn't find it crippling i found it motivating do you know when i say anxiety do you know what i mean i mean there's the the kind of phrase of describing something as being an anxious situation but then actually suffering with anxiety yeah not not in a medical i didn't feel that in a medical sense i basically felt like i got up in the morning and i did my level best and then i went to sleep and then i woke up and repeated the exercise and that for me that was the only way to get through it without sort of collapsing in a hoop if you'd known that a pandemic would roll in,

would you have avoided that health secretary job? Be honest with me. I don't know. I don't know. That's a great question. Someone's got to do it. Would you have, if you knew that that situation was coming if I knew that situation was coming there's about a hundred

things I'd immediately have done right we would have would you have put yourself in that role if I said now there's a pandemic coming next week do you want the job of being health secretary that's such a what if question but I would answer it the honest truth is yes

you would take it because someone honest truth is yes. You would take it? Yeah. Okay. Because someone's going to make the decisions. Okay. So one of the- Do you know what the overriding sense is? I'm trying to articulate not particularly well,

is a sense of duty, right? When the really bad stuff happens and you're in in the job you've got to stand up and be counted one of the decisions that was made was and ultimately criticizes this whole care home yeah stuff what's your view on that before yeah so so okay this is a really good example of um the the the of of of learning from what you're seeing on the ground. So the criticism runs that the NHS made a decision to get people out of hospitals because we needed hospital space and send them into care homes

and that took COVID with them and a lot of people died. That criticism is wrong. But there's a different criticism which is more accurate. The reason that's wrong is twofold. There's been a piece of work, a piece of analysis that's done that showed that approximately two percent of the infections that got into care homes were from that route. And the reason for that is that when those people went into the care homes, they then isolated in the care homes. they weren't tested because the tests didn't exist now

I wish to god that the tests had existed and we you know that was a big part of my life trying to build this testing system but they they didn't exist and most of those people who left hospital actually went home not into not into care homes the truth is that the peak in the care homes came about a month later. So the facts don't even stack up this narrative. But there's a few false narratives that have got going about the pandemic, and that's one of them. The truth is, and we couldn't say it, we didn't want to say it at the time, because we didn't want to demotivate people. But the truth is that the main route of the virus getting into care homes, sadly, was from staff. Because staff live in the community and this disease was rife in the community. But I didn't want to stand at that podium and give the impression I was blaming the staff.

The thing that we then did was we changed the rules so you could not work in more than one care home. And in the second wave, the number of deaths in care homes was far, far lower, and we had the testing. So actually, what we needed to have done was do the staff movement policy much earlier, and we hadn't spotted that that was the route. And so, you know, there's an inquiry that will come and go through all these

things and i'm actually looking forward to it because there's a whole series of points where we've got to make sure we learn the right lesson uh and then there's a couple of other things that are upper there that you know just aren't true and need to be like this whole you know we talked about criticism as a politician right one of the things i've been criticized for is for giving a contract to the local pub landlord right i don't know whether you've read that story yeah i've heard all of that stuff yeah it's just not true we'll talk about that i want to just because the point on the care home yeah it's good so you've answered one of my points there which was about that whole rumor that people were being released from the nhs into care homes and that was causing issues the thing that

that i saw from the sage minutes was that on the roughly the 10th of march which was fairly early in all of this yeah sage did say that there should be special policy consideration given to care homes yes and various types of types of retirement communities presumably you had the data at that point that said elderly people were being disproportionately affected by so around the 10th of march yeah but it's there should probably should have been an action taken. Yeah. And then in the sage minutes, you don't really see care homes or retirement communities mentioned again until a month later when there's been serious death in care homes. I think people going into care homes were 10 times more likely to die than if they'd just gone home because of the, more than 10 times

more likely to die. I think at the peak of the pandemic, the first wave, there were 17 times more likely to die in a care home than had they just gone home to live with, you know, in a private home. Yeah, but that's because there's lots of reasons for that. You've got to unpack it. So firstly, it is the most vulnerable people who live in care homes. So their vulnerability to the disease is much greater. Secondly, you know, the nature of care homes is obviously that the disease can spread more easily.

And every European country had this problem. But the broader point about the SAGE minutes around that time, action was taken. But we didn't get to the policy that I think had the best impact, which was the stopping people from working in more than one care home for several months afterwards. and if we if we'd known that that was going to be the thing that would say stop it as much as it did obviously we would have done that um we would have done that earlier but but again it comes down to uh to not knowing yeah and i i guess this is a point of judgment hindsight has revealed that that was a mistake. Some countries got it right.

New York didn't get it right either. But other countries did get that. You know, and the other thing we were worried about, so we were worried about a different problem that didn't happen. And sometimes this, you know, it's important to think about at the time the things we were worrying about.

So in Spain, a whole care home full of elderly people had died because the staff had all gone home. So we were also worried about making sure that the care homes remained staffed because people in care homes die if the staff aren't there. So thankfully that never happened. But we were worried about the opposite problem at the same time. And thankfully we avoided one, but the other one came to pass.

Do you look back on that decision in particular? Because that's one of the big criticisms that a lot of people level at, the handling of the process. Do you look back at that as a another mistake in hindsight because you you as you say you were trying to make the best decision on balance yeah i i know i know for sure and what would you've done differently right yeah what so on this foresight hindsight thing i know for sure that i did my best and i know that the team around me worked with you know did work with the right motives to get through as best we could

the um the importance of learning how best to handle this situation, for God forbid if it happens again, is absolutely vital. But I worry as much about learning the wrong lessons as learning the right lessons. So that's why it's important that we have this sort of discussion about the care homes in particular, to make sure that just because something is in the narrative, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true.

Without doubt, if I'd known then what I know now, we would have brought in the staff movement rule much earlier. In fact, do you know what? You should probably have it in normal times as well, because lots of people die each year of flu in care homes. And the processes of how flu gets into a care home are probably the same as covid because it's just another communicable disease when people like mark the success of um our handling of the pandemic one of the ways that they choose to do it is to

compare it to other countries and in that first wave in particular our deaths were just so much higher than the comparable countries so does is that not an indicator that we messed up or that we got it or that our judgment calls turned out to be the wrong ones? A combination of things, right? A combination of things like the timing of the decisions to lockdown, the obesity of our nation compared to others is one other factor um one of the factors that um the experts think is a cause is that lots of people travel from all over the uk to spain and italy during that half term and so it was brought back and seeded across the whole country whereas

some other countries like france had it very badly in in a couple of cities but didn't have the spread in the way we did so there's some things that are essentially you know just just facts of life that were outside anybody's control obviously that's not you know what you're getting at and it's not the stuff that really affects how i think about it because it's the it's the active decisions that we also need to, you know, we need to go through and learn from. So would you, that's what I'm saying is, is the large number of deaths that we had versus other countries,

a indicator that we made poor decisions in that first wave? Well, now you see, Stephen, you're getting into gotcha questions. No, I genuinely, because we're going to go into the good stuff, right? We're going to come into the fact that we're out of lockdowns before everybody else.

But the reason I reacted that way is that it is self-evident and obvious that you've got to improve decisions and learn from them. And the best proof point of this, and the best sort of, it's obvious from anybody who's run any organisation, is you constantly got to be asking was that the best decision and part of leadership is to allow your team to essentially learn from and change their decisions not stay stuck with them just because that's the decision that we took and in the second and subsequent waves we have done relatively better internationally.

So how I feel about all that is I feel sad that the performance in the first half, if you like, was not as good as it could have been. Okay, that answers the question. And then I feel, but I feel pleased that we learned quite a few things. And in a way, you know, we did better second time round. Yeah. But the thing I felt at the time, and this is true in any organisation I've been in, is that if you want people to perform at their best,

they have to know that if they screw up, they're not going to get shouted at. The question is not who did that. It's how do we fix it? Yeah. shouted at the question is not who did that it's how do we fix it yeah and that was a that attitude was a big part of um of how things you know we managed to get better you know testing is another example right testing first it was you know it was far we didn't have any we built as fast as we could that needed to go much faster by this christmas the americans were saying why can't

we have a testing system like uh like the uk you know and my view is that uh dido harding did an amazing job but every time we had a screw up the question that we asked was how do we fix it not whose fault is it did you actually think that was a gotcha question because you do you think do you think i'm the type of person that would sit here i don't think you are which is why i called you out on it because yeah because i it's every question i ask is honestly honestly genuine yeah because and then you're right there's so many things that we did better than all of these other nations and i'll be honest i'm sat here really lucky that we're able to do this in person right because of the decisions that the uk took so no what i meant by uh gotcha is that you know the the question of um will you get the guy to say he that there was x screw up is a

classic of the today program i base my and actually frankly makes some of the decision making harder i i know i i understand what you're saying um my question was that is that was the the increase in death at the start does is that evidence as people claim that we made in hindsight because that's all we have now in hindsight the decisions are wrong and also there's this other exacerbating factor which was i mean the world health organization at the time and even i tweeted it said that there wasn't we couldn't wait for a vaccine they said that we that's what they said they said we couldn't wait for a vaccine because sometimes vaccines i mean there's not a vaccine for sars still sometimes they take five or, there's not a vaccine for SARS still.

I never believe that. I never believe that. So you thought there was always going to be a vaccine? Yeah. And it's true that sometimes, yeah, in number 10, he was basically the only other person who agreed with me. Why did he say the take it on the chin thing?

Because I use that in my tweet. I remember that. He was actually trying to argue against that. He was saying, he was saying, it comes down to how difficult it is to communicate uncertainty. He was saying you have to both have the actual conversation, but also every single word you say... Can be twisted. ...will be taken and analysed, for better or for worse, and I don't hold this against the media particularly,

but they will look at those words both within the context and out of context. And so, you know, this is true of this interview, but I knew that coming into it and have decided just to try to answer the questions um the um but that is part of communication so i the the you know boris saying that um some people say we should just what i can't remember the exact word take it on the chin right but i don't think that's the way we should do it instead we should do it that way it was written up as boris floats idea of taking it on chin well he did float the idea but he then immediately rejected it for a different proposition i i did read the sage minutes and to to his and your credit you don't mention herd immunity as a

as the strategy to take forward in those minutes. Correct. From what I saw. So although that was a widespread narrative, it's not actually what was going on in the meetings. The truth there is that some people were pushing the herd immunity idea. Right. And then it bubbled up and came to a head. Yeah. And I went out and killed it. So it was like, no, we are not doing that.

So you knew that a vaccine was going to be... I had, at first it was faith, right? At first it was faith. And it gradually became more and more real. And I just, I knew that we'd got a vaccine for Ebola. Right. And the Oxford vaccine actually comes from the work several years before to get

an Ebola vaccine and I had I just had this belief and maybe it's because I'm an optimist once the data came out in about May that showed that only you know this tiny proportion of the public had had antibodies and had had exposure and And therefore, it was obvious and categorically impossible to get to the levels of antibodies you need across society without a huge amount of suffering and death. I.e., the people who'd been promoting herd immunity were now evidently and scientifically wrong. It wasn't just it was a bad idea it was provably a bad idea once we got to that point there was only one way out and that was a vaccine and you know i believe in the power of human ingenuity and i believed in the team in oxford um and i also thought that

when the whole world is searching for something then then somebody was going to get it right. And so we brought in people to go and buy from around the world, like Kate Bingham. And we took this attitude, which was, sure, we back the British one, but we absolutely, we're going shopping as well, right? And money is no object. And that's what we did and thank god

we did it was there a tipping point where because in the sage minutes there's this there's this understanding that this is going to go through the population and really the the central objective has to be to protect the nhs and then was there a tipping point where you realized the vaccine was going to come and it was going to come quickly yeah so the strategy then has to go to like the vaccines on its way so now it's about actually limiting death as well so it was going to come quickly. So the strategy then has to go to like, the vaccine's on its way. So now it's about actually limiting death as well. So it was, once we found out that only a small proportion of the population had had it, it was obvious from then on

that the only way out was through a vaccine. And therefore the policy became to suppress the virus until a vaccine makes us safe. And I then repeated that all the way through the summer the autumn and in the autumn i was arguing for you know to keep this thing under control because the vaccine's around the corner and people were briefing against me that no you know hancock's the only one who believes in the vaccine and it's a running joke that there's only one person who thinks the vaccine is going to happen and and and partly to try to stop some

of the complications that had happened in testing i report i just spoke directly to the prime minister on this one and didn't go through his then advisors in number 10 and and and it and it came good you talked about the some of the procurement rumors that one of them particularly that you meant you wanted to mention about a pub a friend that runs a is a publishing or something yeah so so i mean this is an example of why of how you need to go through these things properly and how narratives can sort of spin out of control and this is true on social media which you're a great expert in but it's also true in the mainstream media so for some reason that i that is lost in the mists of time some of the papers got the idea that the landlord in the village that i had previously lived in in suffolk um who had then gone on to run this factory had got a contract that i had given him and you know it was on the

front page of The Guardian for several days. And it's just all, it's not true. He didn't have a contract with the department. He didn't have a contract with the NHS. Yes, he flipped his factory to making those little plastic tubes, you know, the ones that you stick your test thing into. But we needed millions of these things and somebody had to.

I didn't have anything to do with the contracting arrangements because he was a subcontractor to another business. So there's no way that we, I mean, it's just a total, it's a total nonsense. And so in a stressed period like a pandemic, a lot of conspiracy theories got going.

This was one of them. There've been loads on vaccines from the anti-vaxxersxxers and dealing so you've got to deal with that misinformation at the same time as trying to make the best decisions as you can and that is one of the that is one of the hardest things to wrestle with in in terms of how we communicate the um the rumor around that time was that he'd sent you a whatsapp message and you'd like forwarded him on to someone and that led to him getting a a deal yeah so he i mean these whatsapps have been been published under foi the whatsapp was about something incredibly banal it was about standardizing the size of these tubes across different suppliers

so that they could be made more efficiently i mean like a really in the weeds bit of policy right and i just pinged this onto the people i mean i was it was okay it was at a level of detail about eight below where i was okay um operating there was in 2000 may 2021 there was there's some minor inadvertent breach because you held shares in a firm that had got a contract? No. No? So that's not true either. There you go. I mean, this is, I was given some shares in my sister's company, right? And they had a contract, an existing contract,

with the Welsh NHS. And I wasn't responsible for the Welsh NHS. So it's another example. Are you familiar with that rumour? Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, I have to deal with these rumours all the time. Sometimes people stand up in Parliament so it's another example how are you familiar with that rumor yeah of course of course yeah i mean i have to i have to deal with the these rumors all the time and sometimes people stand up in parliament

and say it and you just have to hit it on the head every time it comes up it's just not true but but there's an underlying problem which is that you know the people working to save lives in this period were working incredibly hard to just deliver that as best as they could and all the people who now try to sort of say oh no no you were trying to contract for this it's just all total rubbish i mean you can't the there is no other description of it on the 8th i think it was the 8th of december it was yeah where that that first vaccine was administered and you went on tv and got very you cried i did yeah yeah yeah talk to me about that day and those feelings and what's going through your mind well that was it was incredibly emotional it was because because we'd put everything into this and the very first vaccine

down the track so to speak had worked right We bought six vaccines, including the Oxford one. Actually, one of them only got approved about two weeks ago. And imagine if that had been the case for all six. So the fact that the very first one sailed through and has worked brilliantly and then the oxford one like the home the home um vaccine that also has gone brilliantly although the you know there was a load of noise in the politics of it and the europeans getting shirty but on a clinical basis has been amazing um and And so on the 8th of December, the first person receives it.

And this is the way out of this terrible situation that we're all in. And all these people had died. And I knew that science was going to save us. But that wasn't the worst, you know, that was, then the problem was at the same time, you know, we were having the second wave getting really big. So it was a really mixed period because we had the joy that the vaccine was working. But at the same time, you know, cases growing.

And I was on Good Morning Britain and I hadn't seen the image, you know, the video of Margaret Keenan getting, I'm sure you're thinking of it now, right? We can all remember it. But I hadn't seen that image. And they showed the image and I completely lost it. And I was in floods of tears and totally lost control of my body and my voice. And then I tried to pull it together and they said in my ear you know we're coming back to you in five and um and i tried to pull it together i just about

got it together and then started talking to i think it was piers morgan again and on twitter they were like this guy's making it up he's not authentic he was just trying to cry the honest truth was if they'd come back to me like five seconds earlier, I would have been in a complete mess. And I was trying to hold myself together. And maybe as politicians, we do that too often. Maybe I should have just been more relaxed about it. Because I got a load of abuse for looking inauthentic, because I was trying to sort of be professional and not cry. Well, for me, that was actually the first time that I thought you did have empathy right i know that right because because i i've said on this podcast which you've listened to

i said that i thought you were an emotionless robot yeah and i genuinely outrageous genuine tonight i'm just being honest like i genuinely like genuinely i i've i think jacinda in new zealand has felt much more i don't know know, like human and emotional. And I think that gives, gives me as a muggle, as a normal person, a sense that they understand me. So when I see politicians being a bit straight faced and tough, you know, he was really good at that. Barack Obama, he would cry after Sandy Hook and these, these kids shootings, he would just cry. He would stand in front of the nation and he would cry. And it made me realize that he felt the same way that i did whereas i the reason i said you were i thought you were an emotionless robot and i know you heard it was because i'd never seen that and part of the

reason i'll be honest i've got to be fair part of the reason i'd never seen that is because you're put in situations where they are trying to always just get you like five ten minutes well that's that's part of your defensive yeah so one of the things i've learned without a shadow of a doubt is that you've just you've got to um you've just got to let that show and i find you know as a i find that um i find it hard um and um you've just got to let that emotion show more um and and and just just try to be just try to say it as you feel it um the podium doesn't help right the very formal communication method you know to union jack's oak background um so the podium doesn't always help to because it puts that a barrier in place but then you mentioned barack obama and you know he stood but the podium wasn't a problem for him but he's an extraordinary communicator right he is an extraordinary you said you find it hard to show that emotion yeah

because the my the natural instinct when you're under especially when you're under pressure and questioning, is to sort of go alpha male. It isn't always the best answer. I think that is a problem with politics. I think that the political leaders, that probably will end up doing really well. And honestly, I don't see this on either side of the aisle. But you know, because I'm relaxed now and the way that we're talking,

there'll probably be something on Mail Online tomorrow, you know, Hancock's in such way that we're talking, there'll probably be something on Mail Online tomorrow, you know, Hancock's in such and such a screw-up, right? Because that's how, I don't know what it is, I mean, we've been talking for so long, but there will be, that is how the media reacts. And so once you're kind of experienced in seeing that reaction, right, you also then, it tempers how you talk.

So actually coming in, one of the reasons I wanted to come in and talk to you was because I want to just talk freely and I don't care if that is on, you know, item 10 of the Mail Online tomorrow. I'm just trying to answer the questions as best I can. And I genuinely think that is a better way of uh of of communicating in politics and it's definitely something that i've learned yeah and it's something that i've just seemed to be so absent on both sides of the

aisle is um a real sincere feeling of like empathy and i think that makes politicians feel like they're not us yeah more distant yeah yeah yeah, and there ends up being a language of politics. Yeah. And some people thinking that they don't understand the code of, you know, it's as if it's a code. And, you know, there is a, and it's just, it's not helpful because it puts a barrier up. I work really hard at trying to do that. That's why I was so upset when I heard you say it.

It's something I really respect. Saying that I'm an emotional wreck or whatever. No, it's an emotional wreck. The opposite. It's an emotionless robot. Thanks. No, you keep saying it. No, but honestly, for me, it's important to say,

because A, it's what I said and what I felt. And B, it's actually not just you. It's generally like the politics as a whole. I'm like, what I see in normal people is real empathy and you're not you're not the other thing is it's language yeah when you when you when you do those interviews on good morning britain or whatever yeah the language is not human language it's very political and very controlled and i think pr training is honestly a curse in politics i work so hard not to do that but it's political training but. But it is. And it's,

but it's in particular in response to the aggressive questions. Yeah. So you, you have not asked any aggressive questions. You've asked insightful questions instead. But when you're on, you know, when you get that type question,

you give the type answer. Yeah. And that, and I think that's the issue is how do we get to a state where politicians go do you know what that was a bit of a mistake and i know hindsight's a wonderful thing you know i'll say i'll tell you a story um the first time i did any questions uh when i was new in parliament um i um you go for a meal before you do any questions and um nigel farage was on as well and he had two pints and i and i said to, and he had two pints.

And I said to him, you had two pints before going on any questions? He said, yeah, because otherwise I can't talk freely. And I sat next to him, and he managed to get every single question to answer, to an answer about why Europe was awful. But he just absolutely, you know, he had a couple of pints

and he sounded like he'd had a couple of pints. Now, you know, whatever you think of his politics, his ability to communicate in a relaxed way, and I remember thinking every time I then saw him, that was years before the referendum, every time I saw him, like, you've obviously been drinking.

I mean, maybe that's one way to, but i feel like it shouldn't have to i think that the the people that are really going to resonate with the public are going to be the normal people that break through without political pr training yeah i think they'll resonate way more with people i think obama was he felt like one of them to me i know people some people hate him and there's lots of things with drones and whatever but he felt like someone in the way he spoke that i could relate to because i felt the sincere emotion i don't really get that from boris i don't necessarily feel like boris has the same and then we go back oh i just i disagree with that i think that one of the reasons that boris relates to people and people relate to him is because he he doesn't speak in as you call it political speak um one of the reasons he is such an effective communicator whether you agree with

him or not um is that uh is that he he he doesn't play by those rules i i i understand what you're saying he doesn't he didn't entirely feel like a politician. Come back to this question about, when we were talking about at the start, about people's backgrounds. Yeah. Right. Boris has a background as different from the voters of Hartlepool as it's possible to get.

But he can reach people. And I think that's actually, I think he's a good, I put him in the Barack Obama category, actually. Really? Yeah, for people of a different politics. Yeah, I would. Because he's one of the few people who really just,

you know, will withstand the sort of criticism of the next day's press in order to try to actually say how he feels he's a very very um emotionally engaged person let's talk about some of the stuff that you haven't really been able to speak about at length which was in september 2020 we there was laws established that well not laws but there was guidance given to stop us engaging within um having casual sex with people outside of our household, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Do you think you can ask the question

in a little bit more respectful way? So in September 2020, you said, this is what you said, established couples shouldn't be having sex. There should be boundaries. You warned against casual sex, advising the public to stick to well-established relationships and joking, I know I'm in an established relationship. and he told us to remember the basics of hands face space yeah

and and throughout that period hugging was not i remember you saying that you were looking for your mom in um the 17th of may and then all of this stuff comes out with the sun the cctv leak and everything in between yeah there's a couple there's obviously just start this section again how would you like to start it i don't mind it all of it except the opening bit about casual sex okay fine i haven't had casual sex with anybody okay i fell in love with somebody you weren't so and we're gonna and let me ask the question and you can crack the question right so there's there's all of this stuff which what i'm saying is from let's start this bit again okay and i'll relax okay fine but

you've got to let me ask the question. Absolutely. This is what we do here. We just talk. There's no, this isn't- Yeah, but you've got, you've researched a bit about casual sex. No, no, no.

I've not even asked the question yet. Okay, let's do, get to that bit. So in September 2020, you said that when asked that established couples, only established couples should be having sex. There needs to be boundaries you know no okay so um those rules yeah were not in place that was that was advice on tv yeah but those rules were not in place when this all this happened so there's a way that we can do this bit of the

conversation but we cannot do it with you starting talking about casual sex. Can I ask the question? You can ask a question, but let's ask a question in a reasonable way. Okay, so I'm going to ask a question. This bit is really hard for me as well. I completely understand. I completely understand. I actually haven't asked the question yet. This is all just a preamble. No, no, it's not. The point that's been levelled at you is very simple. It's that there's a contradiction in what you said and how you behaved.

That's what I'm going to do. I totally get that bit. So can I ask that question? Yeah, go for it. So the point that's been levelled at you is there's a contradiction in how you behaved versus the guidance you were giving as health secretary. Yes. This is not a revelation.

It is not a revelation. Exactly. This is what everyone's been saying. Hugging was advised against distance. There was this whole hands, face, space thing, which we what everyone's been saying. Hugging was advised against, you know, distance. There was this whole hands, face, space thing, which we were all told to obey. And couples were, when asked, you were said to stick within well-established relationships. And you jokingly said, I know I'm in an established relationship. Then this CCTV stuff comes out. My question is, you know, you talked earlier on about funerals

and people going through an immense hardship people say you you were a contradiction yeah what's your response to that well how do you how do you receive all of that when everyone this is what everyone says this is not yeah i said it for the first time no it's whatever the whole world is saying at you this is the central thing yeah and this is ultimately why you resigned that is my absolute that is my response so i resigned because i broke the social distancing guidelines yeah um by then they weren't actually rules they weren't the law but that's not the point the point is they were the guidelines that I'd been proposing. And, you know, that happened because I fell in love with somebody. And, you know, I've known Gina for more than half of my life. And we first actually worked together on student radio back in the Oxford days.

And I brought her into the department to help with public communications in the same way we brought loads of brilliant people in who were experts in their field um and so we spent a lot of time together ironically trying to you know get me to be able to communicate in a more emotionally intelligent way. And we fell in love. And, you know, that's something that was completely outside of my control. And I, of course, I regret the, you know, the pain that that's caused and the very, very, very public nature.

Anybody who's been through this knows how difficult it is, how painful it is. Doing that in public is incredibly painful. But I fell in love with someone. Did you fall in love while working together? Yeah. Okay. So, you together yeah okay so you know

nobody you know we we it all happened quite it all happened quite quickly it actually happened after this sort of thing stopped being after the rules were lifted but the guidance was still in place so I'm not trying to claim that yeah I hold no bitterness about about this because um i broke the rules you know i fess up i broke um the uh the the guidance um and you know there were only two people responsible for this um and and and ultimately that's why i resigned i i took responsibility for my decision and i resigned um when that cctv stuff happens and i'm not going to go into the details of because i don't want to drag people into this but i want to understand how that feels i can only imagine having dealt with a pandemic and they're getting this call from the sun yeah they're about to leak something

yeah i i'd have to know this is the this is the i would i don't like i don't have the words to describe yeah how that must have all felt yeah but tell me when you get that it was it was it was awful um it was awful because you know we obviously knew what was going on um but we wanted to uh to to do this as unpainfully as possible. And by the release of those images, obviously that caused a huge amount of pain. And it's been, I mean, anybody knows, anybody knows how difficult it is.

You know, ending a relationship. And we have six children, you know, it's tough. But, you know, Gina and I love each other very deeply. And where are we seven eight months later it gets a bit easier with time and but I have no sort of

I don't hold it against anybody because I was because you know we were I take responsibility have they figured out where that footage came from yeah you know so many people ask me this question everyone's asked the question and um do you know my honest the honest feeling i have in response to that question is i just don't care right the actually this there's a funny story which is that um the best i know is that it was one of the

security guards in the department um there's a current ico investigation i don't know any of the details of that investigation i haven't got any inside information other than that which is public however the investigation uh is based on a law, data protection law, that I took through Parliament, into which I personally put a journalistic exemption. So I don't hold it against the journalists for publishing it. But obviously, you know, it was a very serious data protection breach, if you like. The thing that we've learned, and I think all my other colleagues in Cabinet learned immediately,

is why did you have a CCTV in the Secretary of State's office? Obviously, I didn't know about it. And because even who's in the office is an important fact and a sensitive piece of information. But all of that is by-the-by, because it is not the responsibility of others that those social distancing guidelines were broken. That is my responsibility, and I took responsibility for having done that.

You took responsibility, you went to for having done that you took responsibility you went to Boris you said you know you'd apologize to him and he considered the matter closed and then that's kind of where people thought it had been left off but then I think the media noise and the pressure built and eventually the narrative is that you then resigned after yeah after 24 48 hours it wasn't really after the... It wasn't really the press. It was that, you know, some people I really respect got in contact and told me about things that they had been not able to do. Like what?

Like, you know, seeing dying relatives. And, you know, even though it... You know, and... And I realised that it was unsustainable. Would you class that as the worst time of your life? Being health secretary is not nearly as difficult as worrying about your children in a very public divorce. Undoubtedly, this, you know, going through that

is undoubtedly the hardest thing I've ever done by a long, long way. And as you go forward on that particular situation, what's your, like, strategy? Because you've come from a home where your parents weren't... They'd broken up, right? Yeah. So what's your strategy going forward now to... To try to mend, to try to be kind,

to try to... To try to make... You know, on the fact... Obviously, try to make things better. And then on the professional side make you know on the fact obviously try to make things better um and then on the professional side you know i've got a other things i'm interested in i actually don't miss the job as much as i expected right i'm i actually i i'm really enjoying the freedom of being on the back benches on the professional side and um i'm i'm you know i'm i'm absolutely you know um i'm absolutely in love with gina and that that helps a bit a lot of the um since you've departed

the front the front bench there's uh i mean now there's there's a lot of party gate stuff going on and it's kind of almost reminiscent of your situation because the claim level that the government is that there was a contradiction. There was all these parties going on and then 10 Downing Street, it sounds like it was a bit of a nightclub while the rest of the nation were locked down and obeying the rules.

Yeah. You've not really been brought into that as much. No, I wasn't invited. You weren't invited but what's your what's your take on that what's your because i'm sure you get asked about this well that's obviously very difficult um but i do think you've got to look at the big picture of you know we're coming out of the pandemic now and that's in part in large part because of the the big calls but you resigned when when you had the i'll be, you had the decency to say,

right, I have been a contradiction here and I've let people down. So you resigned, but. Yeah, but you know, the prime minister has so many other things on his plate as well, right? He's got Russia, Crimea, and he's got the, you know, getting out of the pandemic. That was a big call, especially the response to Omicron, getting that right and coming through first. So he's got all these other big things on his plate. What do you make of, I don't really have much to talk about on this particular topic, but there's all this Dominic Cummins stuff. He's become a very interesting character, a bit of a whistleblower, exposer type. And, you know, you've been supportive of Boris Johnson pretty much the whole way. Even as you say, with the Partygate party gate stuff you say we need to look at the bigger picture but he released some text messages

that apparently are very critical of you where Boris said that you you fucked up ventilators and that you're totally fucking hopeless yeah but remember at that time it subsequently transcribed that Dominic Cummings was trying to get me fired right and if you look at those text exchanges they're like a diatribe against what i was up to right and um that didn't actually reflect what was going on so you know the the boris has apologized for uh the way that came over but actually if you um and for you know for sending those messages but actually if you look at it in context the context is this guy was trying to get me fired he sent a load of aggressive

messages to the prime minister the prime minister responded as he did in a private setting never expecting that to become public so um i'm completely you know what what yeah there are there are there are people who really want to fix things and improve things in life and um uh and uh i'd rather be that type of person speaking of fixing things yeah one of the things you're really focused on fixing at the moment and i've seen you talk about this in parliament and in several other places and a lot of the interviews you're doing on twitter is this issue of dyslexia in our country tell me why you alluded to earlier why this is personal to you so so i was only identified as dyslexic at university. And I know, despite

really good teachers, it would have been so much easier for me because before I was identified, I just thought I was stupid and bad at English. And some people say you shouldn't identify, you shouldn't tell dyslexic kids they're dyslexic because then they'll be labelled. But I labelled myself as useless with words. And kids do that. But still, today, only one in five children are identified at school. And I think this is ridiculous, especially in a world where you can have online assessments that can't then they can't give you the formal diagnosis, but they can give you the data that says this person's height this child's highly unlikely to be highly likely to be dyslexic

so i'm campaigning for that and in a way it's one of these things that you know now that i've got i can choose how i spend my time as a backbencher this is something i really care about i never got around to doing it in government i actually had assembled a little team to push on this in the department for health after the election before but those people got moved on to have to deal with the pandemic. So for me, this is unfinished business. And for the, you know, hundreds of thousands of dyslexic kids out there, if I can show them, if I can show just one of them that you can you can succeed as a dyslexic person and you can make it so long as you get the support you need so long as you get you know you get identified um then then it will have been worth it so it really really matters to me and i'm sure we can make loads of progress

when you when we talked about you having this conversation with me here, there was, I remember you saying there was things that had been said that you wanted to kind of have a chance to address and rebuttal. Do you feel like you've had a chance to address and rebuttal those things? Yeah, I have. I feel like,

you know, because we've been able to have a long conversation, you know, there's a few of those, a few things I've been able to explain, explain the thinking behind um but i also hope that we can have a proper um debate about how this how the pandemic side is dealt with properly in the future and um we can learn learn the lessons as best we can and i think that's important every guest in this podcast

you might be aware of this tradition leaves a question in the diary of a ceo and i don't read it and i swear on my i swear on all my family that i that i don't read it until i open the book so forgive me if it takes me some time to read the handwriting okay here we go so the last guest on the driver's podcast left this question for you if you were lying on your deathbed what three things would you want to have achieved in life oh well that's a great three things three things you would want to have achieved in your life pretty ambitious um the number one is i want my children to be happy and and and have fulfilling lives that is that is undoubtedly number one the second is that i will have what i want to have a happy and loving and fulfilling um life and relationship you know for the rest of

my days just because of what's happened with gina gina's actually here today it's worth saying yeah that's okay to say that yeah um because of what's happened i'm, Gina's actually here today. It's worth saying. Yeah. That's okay to say that. Yeah. Because of what's happened, I'm guessing it's made, it's the scrutiny around, because relationships are hard already. Yeah.

But the context and the scrutiny around that. Yeah. What's happened must, it can't make it easier. We've been through a lot together. Okay. And, you know,

that's the, that's the joyous bit. That's the easy bit. There's a lot of, you know, that's the, that's the joyous bit. That's the easy bit. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of very difficult things that I have to deal with. Um, you know, and, um, having fallen in love with Gina is the, that's the easy bit. And the third one?

And the third one, um, I hope i hope that i hope to have i mean it's sort of both it's so obvious um but it and i'm going to put some i'm going to try to answer it more specifically um i hope to have improved the country that i love um And, you know, if, for instance, that is making sure that every single dyslexic child gets both the capability to read and write and be effective, and the self-esteem that comes with that, then that would be wonderful. And I'm lucky to have a platform in Parliament and through the fact that I'm fairly well known to be able to try to affect change. And that's what I want to do. Thank you.

Thank you for both your time, because I know it's in tremendous demand, but also thank you for choosing to have this conversation here. These conversations aren't easy, so it's often easier to avoid them. And, you know, we talked about the importance of emotion and relatability in politics. So I want to thank you for taking the time to have a conversation where you didn't set any restrictions

on me, my line of questioning at all. And you let me ask the questions, which as a quite naive person who isn't really political, would have. And I think that's a credit to you and I thank you for that and yeah Well thanks for giving me the chance, I don't think you're naive at all you're self-knowing and that's the most important thing to know Well thank you Matt Thanks for watching!