Matt Hancock

Talking of corruption...

Matt, how I like to call him, Wancock, you have been in court over the last few years.

Three and a half years.

So you've been duelling with Matt.

What's

the latest? Well, what I've done for three and a half years is he's tried to stop my application.

If it wasn't for the crowdfunding, there's no way I could fund any of that.

It wasn't for the support, the excellent support.

And that was a deliberate action.

You know, the ring that Matt Hancock said that he was putting around care homes, there wasn't any sort of protective ring being put around them and health resources were literally being directed away from them.

And it was impossible for them to get hold of things.

And you spoke to care workers on the front line, including Owen Cooper's, when we get onto adolescence, Owen Cooper's mum worked in a care home during COVID.

Nursing workforce shortages continue, along with poor pay, terms and conditions, and a host of other challenges.

So has anything changed? Will this coruscating report lead to real improvements, or is it simply another reminder that Johnson, Hancock and all the rest of them were people woefully out of their depth in a system that was doomed to collapse? long before the first COVID patient had a do not resuscitate order scribbled on their notes.

Christina, let's start with you.

For those of our listeners who haven't read the report, could you summarise its key findings, please?

And so, again, it's this treatment of the care service as a secondary thing, as a thing that matters less.

Can we look at the protective ring that the government said had been thrown around the care system in the end? It was a phrase that was bandied about a lot at the beginning of this decade.

In the years since, Matt Hancock has kind of dismissed it as being a bit of political rhetoric, but it landed heavily at the time.

Does this report finally and completely disprove the government's claim to have thrown a protective ring around the care system?

I walk through the living room again.

He's just there going, look at this bastard, Matt Hancock.

I'm like, okay, all right, all right, okay, I understand, all right.

But for reasons which none of us can fathom, not one of us, he's just sat there going, look at this bastard, Mary Berry.

Baroness Hallett highlighted a number of issues, which included a failure to recommend isolation for patients discharged from hospital and the fact that visits to care homes were banned, which led to immense emotional harm for the residents and left them feeling abandoned.

The COVID-19 bereaved families for justice group said that many still carry feelings of guilt to this day that they could not be with their dying loved ones and campaigner Jean Adamson singled out former health secretary Matt Hancock in particular.

Most at risk people in our society, the sick, the elderly, many of whom had a full and long life ahead of them were failed by our government.

who abandoned them and left them to die.

It said that failings allowed the virus to spread like wildfire and resulted in thousands of deaths, despite a claim that there was a protective ring around care homes.

The then Health Secretary Matt Hancock's claim, made in May of 2020, was unfounded, the UK COVID-19 Inquiry Chairwoman, Baroness Heather Hallett, said.

Quite the opposite was true, she added.

The inquiry found that vulnerable care home residents were left with insufficient protection as patients were discharged from hospitals without knowing if they had the virus.

Speaking on behalf of the group, Jean Adamson, the daughter of the Windrush pioneer Aldrich Adamson, who died having caught COVID in his care home, said that the report was a devastating account of one of the darkest episodes in our country's history.

She said it shows that the government knew that the care sector was extremely vulnerable to a pandemic and yet it did nothing, failing to act until it was too late.

It shows that Matt Hancock's claim to have shown a protective ring around care homes was a cruel lie.

The most at-risk people in our society, the sick, elderly, many of whom had a full and long life ahead of them, were failed by a government who abandoned them and left them to die.

And it should have gone

to Matt Hancock.

Matt Hancock.

And it went to the Lib Dem MP, Mike Hancock, who had a, let's not talk about his other famous event, but...

He said, this obviously wasn't for me, deleted it, told them what had happened, deleted it and didn't mention it to anyone.