Helen MacNamara recalls how Matt Hancock pretended to be cricketer in bizarre exchange.UK Covid-19 Inquiry
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00:00 You've included in your statement this account and also his response,
00:04 which is, "He reassured me that he was 'loving responsibility'
00:10 "and to demonstrate this, took up a batsman's stance
00:14 "outside the Cabinet Room and said, 'They bowl them at me,
00:18 "'I knock them away.'"
00:20 This is an intriguing exchange that you've chosen to include in your statement.
00:27 And it does partly go back to my point about, kind of,
00:32 nuclear levels of confidence that were being deployed,
00:38 which I do think is a problem.
00:41 This failure to appreciate all the time that what we were doing
00:45 was making decisions that were going to impact on everybody's lives,
00:49 and that meant lots of real people with real consequences,
00:52 and I don't think there was ever enough attention paid to that.
00:57 You were trying to engage with Mr Hancock about the incredibly onerous scope
01:06 and impact of the decisions he was going to have to be making,
01:10 the impact on the lives of everyone in the country of those decisions,
01:16 and he thought he was playing cricket.