UK health minister resigns after breaking Covid rules

Hancock: had resisted calls to resign over the affair.

The UK health minister, Matt Hancock, has resigned after he breached social distancing guidance with a colleague.Hancock has been at the centre of the government’s fight against the pandemic, routinely appearing on the television and radio to tell people to follow the strict rules to contain the virus.His departure means Prime Minister Boris Johnson will have to appoint a new minister to take on the huge department that is responsible for overseeing the health service and tackling the coronavirus, at a time when cases have started to rise again.Johnson had said on Friday that he had accepted an apology from the minister and considered the matter to be closed, but Hancock had faced rising pressure to quit.In letter to Johnson, he said that the government “owe it to people who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic to be honest when we have let them down”.It comes after embarrassing footage emerged of him in a clinch with a colleague on May 6, when the public were still being advised not to hug people outside their household.In written response, Johnson wrote: “You should leave office very proud of what you have achieved – not just in tackling the pandemic, but even before (the coronavirus) Covid-19 struck us.”The health secretary had already faced questions about his relationship with Gina Coladangelo, a university friend who was brought in to be a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).The CCTV footage was taken on May 6, according to the Sun, which obtained the pictures.Under the government’s unlocking timetable, intimate contact with people outside your own household was only permitted from May 17, at step 3 of the process.Hancock had already faced intense pressure in recent weeks, with Johnson’s former aide Dominic Cummings claiming that he had urged the prime minister to sack the health secretary up to 20 times, for allegedly lying to colleagues about care homes, testing, and other aspects of the pandemic response.Cummings subsequently published private messages in which the prime minister called Hancock “totally (expletive) hopeless”.The Queen was filmed earlier this week at an audience with Johnson, calling Hancock “poor man”.In November last year, Labour complained about apparent cronyism after it emerged that Coladangelo, the head of marketing at the Oliver Bonas retail chain, was first made an unpaid adviser at the DHSC and then a non-executive director, a part-time role paid £15,000 a year.Labour said that while ministers were “entitled to a private life”, there needed to be full transparency about whether any rules had been broken over the appointment.Both Coladangelo and Hancock are married, and first met at university.Responding to his resignation Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted: “Matt Hancock is right to resign. But Boris Johnson should have sacked him.”With 128,000 deaths, Britain has one of the highest official death tolls from Covid-19 in the world and Hancock, in the post for almost three years, had been heavily criticised for his initial handling of the pandemic.However, Johnson’s Conservative government has been boosted by a rapid rollout of the vaccine programme, with 84% of adults having one dose and 61% having both, well ahead of most other countries.