Inside sympathisers of under-fire health secretary rally to his support before high-pressure hearing with MPs this week
The key questions Hancock faces
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, was calling on the government to take Covid more seriously as early as January last year, his allies have claimed, as he prepares to give his full response to explosive accusations over his handling of the pandemic.
Hancock is set to undergo hours of questioning before MPs on Thursday after Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former senior adviser, said that the health secretary should have been fired on up to 20 separate occasions for various Covid failings. Cummings’s claim that Hancock misled the prime minister over sending untested hospital patients back to care homes – an allegation he denies – is set to be a key focus of the probe.
