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But when Hancock told the Cabinet he says the reaction was ‘somewhat shrug, shrug’

MATT Hancock was warned a ‘very large number of people will die’ from Covid more than two months before Britain went into lockdown.

The former health secretary was told on January 17, 2020, that there was a ‘50:50 chance’ it would cause mass deaths in the UK, his explosive pandemic diaries reveal.

Just 11 days later, chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty privately conceded the virus could kill as many as 820,000 people across the country in a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’.

When Mr Hancock shared this information with the Cabinet, the reaction was ‘somewhat shrug shrug’, according to his diaries – serialised in the Daily Mail today.

The former minister has also spoken to this newspaper about his affair with Gina Coladangelo and appealed for forgiveness after the pair broke social distancing rules.

Describing their relationship as an ‘affaire de coeur’, he admits his ‘political judgment was off’ as he was ‘deeply in love’ with Miss Coladangelo. However, Mr Hancock says he is not asking for forgiveness for the way he handled the pandemic, insisting he ‘woke up every single morning’ determined to do his best in ‘impossible’ circumstances.

At the time that he was getting the initial dire warnings about the spreading virus, the Government was still officially telling the public that the risk to the UK was ‘low’.

The first lockdown was not ordered until March 23 – almost two months later.

Detailing the most extraordinary period in modern politics, Mr Hancock recounts how he battled for weeks to get the Government, Whitehall and Britain’s public health machinery to respond with sufficient urgency to the emerging Covid threat.

Extracts from The Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid, which were co-written with journalist Isabel Oakeshott, will appear on The Mail+ and in the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday in the coming days. Among the many claims in his diaries, Mr Hancock reveals:

■ In a ‘classic government fail’, more than one billion items of PPE were left stuck in a warehouse for weeks because it only had one access door;

■ Public Health England, which he calls the ‘sloth’ quango, had ‘basically given up’ on trying to trace new cases by early March;

■ The Daily Mail was ‘right’ to be ‘highly critical’ of the Government’s failure to ramp up Covid testing at the start of the pandemic;

■ The Government repeatedly refused to call a Cobra emergency meeting to discuss the crisis because it would be ‘alarmist’;

■ He was shown figures suggesting the NHS was short of 150,000 beds and there were ‘nowhere near’ enough ventilators;

■ The head of the World Health Organisation was ‘scared stiff’ of criticising China for fear of losing funding for his private office;

■ He thought Donald Trump was ‘awful’ and admits he had to fight the urge to tell the then-president to take his own advice and ‘drink bleach’ when he caught Covid;

■ Ministers were ‘stunned’ when they were told there was a 50:50 chance Mr Johnson would be put on a ventilator after catching Covid;

■ The Cabinet was ready to nominate one of its members to take charge without a leadership election if the PM died of Covid;

■ Mr Hancock also reignites his feud with No10 aide Dominic Cummings, who he says blocked early Covid preparations because he did not want to distract attention from Britain’s exit from the EU;

■ Mr Cummings continued pushing for NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens to be sacked even as the pandemic got under way;

■ He felt ‘haunted’ by the Hollywood thriller Contagion, which is set in a pandemic.

His revelations will raise serious questions about the Government’s response to Covid in the early weeks of the crisis, and are likely to be a major focus for the forthcoming public inquiry into the disaster.

The fallout from the book could also play a pivotal role in determining whether the former Cabinet minister is able to return to politics after having the Tory whip suspended for appearing in I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! last month. Describing the events of January 28, 2020, Mr Hancock says he gathered Mr Whitty and 30 officials in his office to go through possible Covid scenarios.

It was, he says, ‘a proper “oh s***” meeting’ as the scale of the potential disaster began to hit home for the first time. He writes: ‘In his characteristically understated way, sitting at the back peeling a tangerine, Chris Whitty quietly informed everyone that in the reasonable worst-case scenario as many as 820,000 people in the UK may die. The transmission is so high that almost everyone would catch it.

‘The whole room froze. We are looking at a human catastrophe on a scale not seen here for a century.’ At a Brexit Day Cabinet meeting in Sunderland three days later, Mr Hancock shared the grim forecast with fellow ministers to little effect.

‘The reaction was somewhat “shrug shrug” – essentially because they didn’t really believe it,’ he writes. ‘I am constantly feeling that others, who aren’t focused on this every day, are weeks behind what’s going on.’

Mr Hancock has also given an exclusive interview to the Mail – his first since he left the I’m A Celebrity jungle.

In it, he appeals for ‘forgiveness’ over the embrace he shared with Miss Coladangelo, which was caught on CCTV and led to his affair being revealed, the breakdown of his marriage and his resignation from Government. The clinch broke his own social distancing guidelines, which Mr Hancock admits was a ‘failure of leadership’.

But he insists he had fallen ‘deeply’ in love with the married mother-ofthree, now his girlfriend, and says: ‘I am not asking for forgiveness for how I handled the pandemic because I know I did my very best every single day. But I do regret that failure of leadership at the end.’

He goes on: ‘I’m just not going to give excuses. I put my hands up and I take responsibility. And I took my responsibility by resigning.’ Discussing the start of their relationship, he admits: ‘I felt every conflicting emotion because I was in love but, at the same time, I was causing immense pain to the people I loved.

‘We realised what was happening was of huge consequence that would last for the rest of our lives but... this was an affaire de coeur and therefore my political judgment was off.’

‘Failure of leadership’ ‘Looking at a human catastrophe’