Hancock blasted for 'hard right' slur against sceptics

The former health secretary used the term in a leaked WhatsApp message when he implied Rishi Sunak was pandering to political extremes by trying to relax Covid rules.

- Lucy Johnston

MATT HANCOCK needs to “grow up” and understand that criticising lockdown does not make you “hard right”, a former Supreme Court judge has said.

But referring to the messages, Lord Sumption said: “The only hard right position on Covid was Matt Hancock’s.”

The revelation is one of the latest to be released from more than 100,000 of Mr Hancock’s phone texts, leaked by journalist Isabel Oakeshott who had ghost-written his memoir Pandemic Diaries.

In the exchange, dated October 2020, the MP for West Suffolk suggested the then-Chancellor’s attempts to stop a second lockdown were to “show ankle to the hard right”.

Mr Sunak had suggested that a temporary national lockdown was “a blunt instrument”.

And he added it would “cause needless damage to parts of our country where virus rates are low”.