Sir Keir Starmer has insisted that Boris Johnson still faces “huge questions to answer” following Matt Hancock’s resignation over his affair with a friend and paid adviser. The Labour leader said the government must clarify how Covid contracts were awarded, why Gina Coladangelo was given a parliamentary pass by another health minister, and how the CCTV footage that led to Hancock’s downfall was leaked.
Coladangelo, who was appointed as a nonexecutive director at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in September 2020 with a salary of up to £15,000 a year, stepped down from her role over the weekend. Caroline Slocock, a former private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, expressed “quite significant concerns” that the focus on Hancock’s breach of Covid rules had overshadowed “potentially an abuse of public money”. She said it was “quite hard to see” how Coladangelo, a communications director, was qualified to advise on health and social care policy.
Tory MPs have also raised questions about Hancock’s use of a personal email account for government business, his decision to take Coladangelo to the G7 summit, and the “apparent favouring” of family and friends for Covid contracts. One former minister said these issues needed to be clarified, while another suggested the answers would influence whether Hancock could return to the frontbench.
Labour has written to the cabinet secretary and information commissioner over the personal email claims. Deputy leader Angela Rayner said “the buck doesn’t stop with Hancock” and called for an investigation into how wide the secrecy extends. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey challenged new health secretary Sajid Javid to “abolish Conservative cronyism” at the DHSC, starting by ruling out Tory peer Dido Harding as the next chief executive of NHS England.
Javid is expected to address the Commons on Monday, likely confirming that England’s final stage of lockdown easing will not go ahead on 5 July. Meanwhile, Tory MPs loyal to Hancock have criticised the installation of CCTV in his Whitehall office, calling the monitoring “utterly unacceptable”. Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis said the matter needed to be investigated due to the sensitive nature of government work.
