Construction work at the Nightingale Hospital, the jewel in the crown of the government’s faltering response to the coronavirus pandemic, was nearly brought to a juddering halt on Thursday morning. It was a Whitehall farce that lays bare the chaos and confusion that has gripped the government.
The Construction Leadership Council (CLC), a joint industry and government body, had issued guidance on social distancing at building sites. Unless workers could remain at least 6ft apart, it said, “work should not be carried out”. Building firms deluged the council — and at least one cabinet minister — with warnings that they would have to down tools at every construction site in the country, “up to and including the Nightingale”. The guidance was swiftly reversed.
According to the department of business, the confusion was the result of a disagreement within the CLC. But Nadhim Zahawi, the construction minister, and senior figures in the Cabinet Office were involved in resolving the issue. “They were ordered to reverse it,” said one industry insider. “It was a total shambles and BEIS [the business department] should have a better grip on things.”
The suspension of work at the new field hospital at the ExCeL centre in London’s Docklands would have been a blow to the government. Its credibility is already reeling from the worst headlines of Boris Johnson’s premiership over the failure to provide virus tests for NHS staff or to give them the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE). As one political adviser said in despair on Thursday: “There is a total absence of policy or a plan.”
For three days the situation had been made worse by a string of defensive performances by cabinet ministers, including the business secretary, Alok Sharma (described by one Tory aide as “a batsman with no scoring shots”); the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick (dubbed “Robert Generic” by unkind colleagues); the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab (“Britain’s Dan Quayle”, according to one Dutch commentator); and Michael Gove, minister for the Cabinet Office.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, back from a week of self-isolating, helped to steady the ship with a composed performance at the No 10 press conference on Thursday afternoon. He outlined a five-point plan to
raise the number of tests to 100,000 a week this month.
But his turn attracted anger from cabinet colleagues and No 10, where aides said the health secretary had given too little credit to the officials who worked flat-out on the plan in his absence. “There is not much love for Matt Handjob here,” said one No 10 official.
A Whitehall official said: “We are supposed to be saving the lives of the coronavirus victims but in government everyone is trying to kill everyone else.”
Downing Street is irritated by Hancock’s grandstanding and
failure to fulfil public promises; the department of health, in turn, is furious with both NHS England and Public Health England for frontline failures; Hancock is also at odds with Gove, whose department has angered the Treasury by interfering in plans for the labour market; the Cabinet Office is accused of meddling by the business department.
Ministers and their political aides are in a stand-off with Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, over civil service preparedness for the crisis. And looming on the horizon is a philosophical disagreement between Treasury and health ministers over how and when to lift the lockdown. All are watching their backs in anticipation of a public inquiry into their efforts to keep the nation safe.
The most serious rift is between the health establishment and the politicians, who cannot order NHS bosses to do anything since the Lansley reforms gave the health service operational independence nearly a decade ago. Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, was labelled “a megalomaniac, micromanaging control freak” by one senior figure this weekend. He is blamed for failing to get a grip on the PPE supply, for refusing to let private labs take on testing work (a decision reversed last week) and for a system that has repeatedly given incorrect and overly optimistic information on progress to ministers.
A health department source said: “NHS England and Public Health England were reluctant to relinquish their power to private labs. Stevens has this absolutely illogical fear of anyone else getting any say over what happens in the NHS.”
The PPE had been “out of date in the warehouse”, the source added. “It should have been checked and updated as part of the resilience planning. We were being contacted by manufacturers saying, ‘I can make tests. I can make PPE.’ That all went into the machine, but the machine is not ours; it belongs to Public Health England and NHS England.”
Sedwill and other mandarins, meanwhile, are
in the line of fire for the speed of their response. “The civil service doesn’t like doing things it doesn’t normally do,” a political aide said. “They deliver at pace in the structures that they have pre-prepared. They are not good at trying to do things differently.”
Distrust over the ability of civil servants to move quickly has led the health department to hire about 75 project management staff from the “big five” public affairs firms, including Deloitte, to deliver the testing regime and expand hospital capacity.
Sedwill has been criticised for trying to push through rules that would have made every special adviser fill in a form before leaving home — seen as an attempt to freeze them out of decision-making.
But the buck stops with ministers. “If officials are failing, it is the job of ministers to get a grip and squeeze the system so it works,” said one Whitehall official.
According to his colleagues, Hancock is an optimist and has been too ready to believe reassurances from the NHS. “Matt has seen the coronavirus as his stage and his leadership opportunity. He has overpromised and been unable to deliver,” one of them said. Another said that if he failed to deliver on the pledge of 100,000 tests, “he should resign”.
Hancock has clashed repeatedly with Gove, who is said to have “humiliated” him in a cabinet committee discussion on ventilators. “Michael knew the detail and Matt didn’t,” a source said.
Gove’s Cabinet Office officials annoyed the Treasury on Wednesday when they sent over, unprompted, a plan for outsourcing groups such as Capita and Mitie to set up a website where any company furloughing staff could advertise their skills to other firms that might take them on. The plan was killed by Tim Leunig, a senior adviser to Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, but other officials had called it “unnecessary”, Treasury sources said.
Leunig is accused of taking an “ideological approach” to reforms, which meant that businesses had to be rejected for a commercial loan before receiving a government-backed one. Sunak reversed that last week when it became clear that the banks were not lending. “Leunig is a menace,” said one Tory.
Treasury ministers are privately becoming vocal about the economic and health dangers of a long lockdown, placing them on a collision course with Hancock’s team. It could take weeks before scientists know whether having had the virus will give people longstanding immunity, allowing them to be issued a certificate or armband so they can get back to work.
“Ministers are being told that social distancing will need to continue until at least September,” said one Whitehall official. But a Treasury source said: “There are economic implications to a long lockdown, but there are also mental health effects. We also need to consider the health implications of delaying screening and treatment for other conditions like cancer. A deep recession would also cause health impacts.”
With unemployment expected to run into the millions, the business department is fearful of even larger job losses next year. A source familiar with the discussions said: “The period from October 2020 to June 2021 could be a bonfire of jobs. The shops will reopen and government support will be tapered away. Those shops will just hit the wall. This time next year you are looking at a 30% reduction in the service industry. A lot of people will get back on their bike and the bike will just fall over.”
Ministers who are not in the eye of the storm are becoming irritable that their work must remain on hold during the crisis. Participants at one meeting, chaired by Raab, supposedly about repatriating the one million Britons stranded abroad, were bemused when nearly 30 of the 90 minutes was taken up by Liz Truss talking about trade.
Priti Patel, the home secretary, has been holding conference calls with police chiefs and the heads of the intelligence agencies. But the one attempt by the Home Office to make waves was a briefing that Patel wanted the borders closed to flights from virus hotspots.
Ultimately the big decisions will rest with Johnson and his depleted team in Downing Street. Three of his communications staff members were working from home last week, at least one of them with symptoms of the coronavirus. Johnson himself has been in isolation all week, his health worse than anyone in government has admitted. “He is coughing and spluttering through these video calls,” said one participant. “He looks dreadful.”
No 10 finally admitted on Friday that the prime minister was running a persistent high temperature, as it explained why he would not be leaving isolation after seven days as planned.
Last week, despite buoyant public poll numbers, MPs have begun to voice concerns about his performance. “When the shit hits the fan we have been told that this guy is Churchill,” a senior backbencher said. “Now would be a good time to start to look like it.”
Johnson has already taken one big decision this week,
agreeing to the release of 4,000 prisoners considered low-risk or who are near the end of their sentences. That was a move that left both Patel and Robert Buckland, the lord chancellor, “uncomfortable”.
The decisions the prime minister must take next will be more than uncomfortable. “Decisions and mistakes always have a cost,” said one adviser. “In this case the cost is human lives.”