My blazing bust-up with Kate Bingham over vaccines

Monday, May 4, 2020

Boris suggested Kate Bingham

[as head of the new Vaccine Taskforce]. She’s a formidable venture capitalist with a background in the pharmaceutical industry and will be ideal.

Friday, June 19

A massive blow-up with Kate. She simply doesn’t see the need to order 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine – she wants 30million – and can’t seem to grasp almost everyone may want or need it.

I warned her during today’s meeting that if we don’t get our ducks in a row on this one, we risk a complete car crash.

She pushed back hard. But with the other elected Ministers on my side, I won the argument

[for buying 100 million doses].

‘I’m not happy with that meeting,’ Kate snapped afterwards. ‘Nor me,’ I replied.

‘We will create a guide for you to explain what we are doing – there are enormous risks with this,’ she said, as if I don’t spend all my time thinking about how to save lives.

Kate pressed on, claiming that the technology that underpins the vaccine Oxford is working on ‘is neither proven nor scaled’, and that she has ‘an expert team who are working round the clock, pushing hard’.

I told her: ‘We need to have tried everything feasibly possible to accelerate delivery. I’ve been asking the same question over and over again and not yet had a satisfactory answer – hence my frustration.’

This only seemed to wind her up further, prompting a mini-lecture about the dangers of trying to go too far too fast.

‘The worse case is we kill people with an unsafe vaccine,’ she said. ‘We need to tone the comms to register the fact this is risky and unproven.’

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being patronised.

Monday, July 6

The Vaccine Taskforce have consistently argued that we only need to back three [vaccine] brands. My view is that, to hedge our bets, we need more. Any one of the vaccines could fail in clinical trials.

Fortunately, Rishi and Steve Barclay at the Treasury are totally onside.

Sunday, October 4

Kate has been telling the Financial Times we should only vaccinate the vulnerable. Except she has nothing to do with the deployment – only the buying. And what she’s criticising is the Government’s agreed policy. ‘We absolutely need No 10 to sit on

her hard,’ I told the spads [special advisers], adding that I consider her ‘totally unreliable’.

Tuesday, October 6

The Economist has got wind of an old vaccine deployment plan. I instinctively asked my spads if Kate might be behind it. ‘I have some evidence to suggest it might have been – ie the fact she had a meeting yesterday with the journalist who has the story,’ came the reply. Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sunday, November 8

The Sunday Times has done a hatchet job on Kate, revealing that she spent £670k of taxpayers’ money on hiring eight full-time spin doctors. I had no idea it was at public expense.

‘Who the hell signed this off?’ I asked the team. Blank faces all round. Turns out the contract went through the Department for Business, not us, so we had no opportunity to block it. I’ve no idea what Kate was thinking: we have plenty of brilliant comms people who would have been more than capable.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

A senior member of the

Vaccine Taskforce is threatening to resign. It transpires he and Kate have a fundamental problem with us buying vaccines from India. It explains why we didn’t get the Indian doses last year: he and Kate were working against it, and completely ignoring ministerial steers.

‘That’s why we kept getting bull **** excuses,’ I told Boris.

Friday, February 19

We finally managed to secure almost ten million extra doses from India. We could have had them in December, had Kate and her allies not been working behind the scenes to block them.

MATT HANCOCK today reveals the depths of his anguish over the affair which ended his marriage, calling the moment he told his wife as the ‘very worst conversation of my life’.

In his explosive pandemic diaries, the ex-Health Secretary describes his ‘terrible black dread’ at the prospect of his affair with Gina Coladangelo being revealed, and recounts the ‘devastating implications of our feelings for each other’.

The MP also writes about how then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson was the ‘kindest of confidants’ throughout the drama, and even filmed Mr Hancock’s resignation statement on his mobile phone.

Among today’s other revelations, Mr Hancock:

● Describes his war with former No10 adviser Dominic Cummings, who was ‘shelling’ him and ‘itching for me to fail’, while calling the aide’s infamous lockdown ‘mega breach’ in Barnard Castle, a ‘s***show’;

● Sets out the extraordinary tensions with Vaccine Taskforce tsar Kate Bingham, calling her ‘totally

‘In utter turmoil I headed home to talk to Martha’

unreliable’ and describing a ‘massive blow-up’ over her alleged obstructions, including trying to block vaccines from India;

● Admits a total ‘screw-up’ which meant the Covid app couldn’t take data from NHS tests was his fault;

● Writes that Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was endlessly ‘on manoeuvres’, using the pandemic to try to further her separatist cause;

● Condemns the EU’s handling of the vaccine, which was ‘enough to make a Brexiteer out of anyone’;

● Tells how the Transport Department pushed for a 24-hour delay before introducing self-quarantine for travellers from Spain because Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was on holiday there;

● Calls border enforcement a ‘mess’, telling how most passenger locator forms went ‘straight in the bin’;

● Says he feared that Rishi Sunak’s ‘eat out to help out’ initiative would lead to a spike in cases;

● Recalls being jubilant at hitting his testing target, writing: ‘let naysayers put that in their pipe & smoke it’.

The most passionately personal sections of the diaries, being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, The Mail+ and MailOnline, concern Ms Coladangelo, who was on the ITV set in Australia to greet Mr Hancock when he emerged from the I’m A Celebrity... jungle last week.

The relationship with Ms Coladangelo, a friend of Mr Hancock since their Oxford days who worked with him in the Health Department, was exposed when The Sun newspaper obtained CCTV images of the couple in his offices, in breach of his own social distancing rules.

Mr Hancock writes: ‘Accompanying the joy of falling in love – if you are supposed to be happily married – is the turmoil. You know, with terrible black dread, that sooner or later the relationship must be revealed and everything will come crashing down.’

The MP says the pair ‘knew the devastating implications of our feelings for each other [but] ‘were trying to work out the least painful way of being together’.

After the call from The Sun saying they had the CCTV footage, Mr Hancock said he ‘knew immediately what I had to do. I needed to tell [my wife] Martha right away, because it needed to come from me and nobody else.

‘I also knew I had to tell the children – it was going to be incredibly painful, but I couldn’t hide away from them for ever.’

Before going to see his family, Mr Hancock alerted Mr Johnson, whom he describes as ‘no stranger to personal turmoil and, it turned out, the kindest of confidants in these ghastly circumstances’.

Mr Johnson said he would ‘stand by’ the Minister, on the grounds that although Mr Hancock had breached guidelines he had not broken the law. Mr Hancock writes: ‘With those words ringing in my head, and in utter turmoil, I headed home to talk to Martha. It was – and remains – the very worst conversation of my life.’

Mr Hancock went into hiding in a futile attempt to ride out the storm, and adds : ‘Gina’s feelings of shame and guilt were nearly overpowering her. The jokes and cartoons on social media were excruciating. We were being publicly humiliated, again and again... It is all my fault, of course. I knew I had to take responsibility. I knew in my heart that I had to resign’.

Mr Hancock then travelled to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, to tender his resignation, with Mr Johnson filming his words on his mobile phone.

‘In the end, the great machinery of the State was nowhere,’ Mr Hancock notes. ‘It was just me and the PM, fumbling around with an iPhone. It wasn’t perfect, but I was beyond caring: I had to get it out.’

Mr Johnson then offered a last, characteristic piece of advice: ‘Time to dive beneath the ice cap.’

Ms Bingham last night hit back at Mr Hancock’s claims, saying the diary extracts published so far ‘suggest that, among other things, Matt was not aware of the pubembracing lished and agreed government vaccine procurement policy, did not read the reports about the work of the Vaccine Task Force, and did not understand the difference between complex biomedical manufacturing and PPE procurement.

‘When it came to deployment, he has somehow forgotten the policy that he and other Ministers were committed to at the time.’

She added that after a row over supplies of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, ‘I received several calls of apology from those present for Matt’s behaviour at this meeting, so it seems the attendees thought it was me who was being abused.’

She also denied she had employed her own team of spin doctors and said that the decision over vaccines from India came after she had left the taskforce.