You only get one career and Matt Hancock’s not the kind of health secretary to let something like coronavirus get in the way of his.
He’s bigger than all that, and better too. Nothing can stop him. No river wide enough, no mountain high enough. No obstacle he cannot find a way to slither under.
No turn of events can ever be sharp enough to stop Matt Hancock rocking up on some stage somewhere to talk fluent Matt Hancock, as only Matt Hancock does.
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Today he took his chance to deliver his vision for the future of the NHS, and it was a vision in which words no longer carry meaning but are evaporated down to a sort of base essence of intensely concentrated noise.
It was vintage Hancock. This, you will almost certainly have forgotten, was the same guy who stood to be leader of the Tory party by saying the words: “I offer an emotionally charged platform to improve lives that is rooted, rooted in objective fact.”
Matt Hancock’s vision of the NHS involves tech. Like many politicians, Hancock loves tech. He doesn’t, like, really know how any of it works. He’s certainly never actually developed any of it. But tech is the future and so is he, so it’s probably all down to him in some way.
We would learn that the Great Fire of London had provided opportunities for innovation, at least for those who survived it, and coronavirus would be just the same.
We would learn that the social care sector had told him that it “won’t survive without its fax machines” but he didn’t listen to them, and now the social care sector is much the better for it, its yearning for fax machines displaced by a very small green badge and a very large lack of PPE.
It also, like London in 1666, has been provided with incredible opportunities for innovation by the blaze of Covid-19 that is now understood to have started by accident, in the office of a secretary of state for health and social care, and then ripped through it with devastating consequences.
While Mr Hancock spoke, the Office for National Statistics published its latest comparative analysis of excess deaths between February and June, and it turns out that England had the highest opportunity for innovation anywhere in Europe.
Just as the Great Fire of London had led to the creation of the fire brigade, coronavirus would finally bring about the chance to see your doctor over WhatsApp. Coronavirus would finally make it possible to deliver babies over Zoom. If you can regrout your bathroom tiles solely using YouTube video tutorials, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same with open heart surgery?
We will never get this chance again. Which is to say, it is the only chance Matt Hancock is going to get, and absolutely nothing is going to stop him grabbing it with both hands.
