Don’t say I didn’t [warn] you when Panorama or Horizon run an exposé documentary on all this’,” Hancock continues, in his diary entry for June 18, 2021. What’s never quite explained is exactly how Coladangelo morphed from old university friend sending helpful texts about his choice of socks into a quasi-official role helping him “communicate”, and ultimately a job on the Department of Health board, some months before they got together. Matt concluded that the testing of people leaving hospital for care homes should be prioritised because of the higher risks of transmission, as it wasn't possible to mandate everyone going into care homes got tested.

In other newly-released leaked messages, Mr Johnson spoke of the need to get "absolutely militant" on social distancing in Covid hotspots, saying there had been a "general collapse" in rule following. Just for a moment, you feel the burden leaders carry of knowing the things most of us would rather not. The judgement was taken that at first the asymptomatic testing would only be done for those admitted directly from hospital as those people were deemed at highest risk. This unique book, based on the author's contemporaneous records of those extraordinary months, candidly recounts firsthand the most important events and decisions as they unfolded throughout this unprecedented global emergency. In an exchange on 16 February 2021, Simon Case, who holds the most senior position in the civil service as cabinet secretary, asked Mr Hancock if he knew "how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday".Hancock claims: “The reaction was somewhat ‘shrug shrug’ – essentially because they didn’t really believe it. Honestly, I got annoyed whilst reading the book, for the past 2 years I've hated Matt, but the truth is.

In his Pandemic Diaries memoir, Mr Hancock wrote that on Nov 17 he was “pushing hard to reduce isolation periods for people who test negative using lateral flow kits.Or, more generally, entirely failing to respond to the knowledge that 820,000 lives were at risk by taking decisive action – in the process dismissing the advice of Tory grandees and former prime ministers, who (as Hancock acknowledges in his diaries) were sending desperate text messages demanding restrictions as early as February. It was amazing work by our intelligence agencies and the private-sector company who first spotted it, and just goes to show that we were not being paranoid. The diary is so enduring and broad in scope that it isn’t merely a report of parliamentary politics, but a social document on pretty much the entire Victorian era. Back then, he achieved notoriety for (among other things) allowing COVID patients to be sent into care homes and for securing lucrative testing contracts for his friends. A month after Sir Chris gave his advice, isolation was reduced to 10 days - a length which continued to wreak havoc on businesses and services.