Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Thursday said he has been “straight” with the public throughout the pandemic in his defense against claims by former government aide Dominic Cummings.
Hancock said the “unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true,” responding to Cummings’ claim that he lied on “numerous” occasions to ministers and the public.
“I’ve been straight with people, in public and private, throughout,” he told lawmakers at the House of Commons where he responded an urgent question by Labour Party.
He said he had worked in a “spirit of openness and transparency” but that “what matters to the British people” is pressing on with the vaccine rollout.
Hancock said “there were unprecedented difficulties that come with preparations for an unprecedented event.”
The health secretary’s remarks at the House of Commons came a day after Cummings’s accusations during a parliamentary committee evidence-giving session.
Cummings accused Hancock of “lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly”, as well as “criminal” behaviour for holding back COVID-19 tests so he could meet the government target of reaching 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.
Cummings also claimed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was unfit for office, “constantly U-turned” and ignored scientific advice to order a second national lockdown.
“Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die,” Cummings said, also offering an apology for not being able to act while he was Johnson’s chief adviser.
Accusing the government of “disastrously” failing the public by reacting slowly to the spread of the coronavirus, he also said the government did not do as much as it could in the early months of 2020, when the first reports of novel coronavirus outbreak had started to come in.
Cummings told the lawmakers that Johnson saw COVID-19 as “a scare story” in February 2020 and he compared it to swine flu outbreak.
- Boris Johnson’s reaction
Johnson on Thursday said “some of the commentary” relating Cummings’ claims “doesn’t bear any relation to reality.”
”What people want us to get on with is delivering the road map and trying – cautiously – to take our country forward through what has been one of the most difficult periods that I think anybody can remember,” Johnson said.
Cummings had caused a great public anger by his trip to County Durham and Barnard Castle in late March 2020 while the country was in full lockdown and intercity travel was banned.
The former aide was the manager of Leave campaign before the 2016 EU referendum, which ended the UK’s decades long membership to the bloc.
He was accused of using fear factor, alongside Boris Johnson and then-UKIP leader Nigel Farage, during the campaign as some of the ads suggested that if the UK remained in the EU, millions of Turks would come to the country once Turkey becomes an EU member state.
Cummings was fired by Johnson on Nov. 14, 2020 after a spat over power sharing within the government ranks, which involved sacking civil servants.
Source: Anadolu Agency