Memo to Matt Hancock, start answering these letters if you care – Tom Richmond

Like you, I’m becoming sick and tired of the Minister not knowing what is going on in his own department and then his crocodile tears when anyone has the temerity to criticise him.

Here are the latest examples of Hancock and his team’s indifference to those seeking guidance over the public health response to Covid-19 – or offering practical suggestions of their own.

First, callers to Radio 5 live explaining their heartache at being unable to visit loved ones in care homes and the non-response of Hancock to letters asking for there to be some leniency in the application of rules.

Next, complaints by MPs that their correspondence was being ignored. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the Commons, promised to take this up – and accepted “tardiness” was no longer justifiable. “I think, six months in, that sympathy is not as great as it previously was,” he conceded.

Then, this shocking intervention form Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi about the backlog of cancer cases. She asked Hancock this week: “The Secretary of State has had four months to respond to a letter I sent as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on cancer, requesting a national cancer recovery plan.” He replied sheepishly: “I will respond right away.” It’s only an issue of life and death.

Finally, Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle’s condemnation of Hancock for keeping the Commons on the dark about the new lockdown announcement. “I have already sent a letter to the Secretary of State. I think the total disregard for this Chamber is not acceptable,” he went on.

These are not isolated examples. They’re part of a familiar pattern from a two-faced Jekyll and Hyde politician whose praise of Tory backbenchers is becoming nauseating while his contempt for opponents who criticise him reveals a serious deficiency when it comes to statesmanship.

No one – let me point out – is denying the invidiousness of the task facing the Health Secretary. No one is questioning his work ethic. As a dewy-eyed Hancock told a Tory backbencher who had lavished praise on him: “I do my best.”

But there are countless occasions when he does not himself and his department’s appalling record on communications and correspondence is just one failing that needs to be remedied.

After all, how can Matt Hancock claim his department is on top of Covid-19, and its many ramifications, when he is either ignoring letters sent to him with the sincerest of intentions – or they’re not being forwarded by his officials?

Like you, I await the Secretary of State’s response with interest. I’ll keep you posted – pun intended – but I’m not holding my breath...

MORE holier than though sanctimony from Jeremy Hunt who says that this autumn is the time “to grasp” the issue of social care reform and funding.

As the longest-serving Health Secretary in history, he had six years from 2012-18 to tackle this generational and societal issue. Hunt did not do so.

And until he comes up with a satisfactory explanation, he will remain a diminished chair of Parliament’s influential Health and Social Care – and devoid of the credibility, and respect, required for such a role.

CONTRAST Jeremy Hunt’s smug superciliousness with this intervention by former Pensions Minister Ros Altmann on why immigration rules need to be tinkered with so care homes have sufficient staff.

“We cannot move forward and improve the quality of social care without staff. We cannot mechanise this. Care workers may be low paid, but that does not mean they are low skilled,” she told the Lords.

“They are essential to enabling increasing numbers of people to live decent lives. We are not talking about bringing in low-paid shelf stackers; we are talking about the emotional, physical and mental well-being of some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

I couldn’t have put it better.

JACOB Rees-Mogg deserves an A* grade for aloofness after the Commons leader paid this tribute to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson: “He is an A* individual and an A* Secretary of State.”

I doubt the Old Etonian would have been so charitable, and praising his colleague for doing “an absolutely first class job”, if any of his six children had been caught up in last month’s exams fiasco and Williamson’s many mishaps over the reopening of state schools.

TALKING of Gavin Williamson, he was asked by MPs this week about the importance of investing in early years education in parts of the North.

“My hon. Friend tempts me into a discussion that I probably have to have first with the Chancellor,” said Williamson. In other words, he has he not done so. The Comprehensive Spending Review is under way now – or doesn’t he realise this? I despair.

FINALLY, Dido Harding – whose horse Cool Dawn won the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup – has been busy.

Chair of NHS Improvement, she has been leading the Government’s ‘track and trace’ work and is now interim head of the National Institute for Health Protection as Public Health England is wound up.

Yet, despite the Covid crisis, the nation’s meddler-in-chief also found time for meetings at the Jockey Club where she is embroiled in the row over the acrimonious resignation of chief executive Delia Bushell.

Now is not the time for two jobs, Baroness Harding.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson