Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary who gained notoriety during the pandemic both for his part in the deadly and totalitarian response and for his hypocrisy in breaking his own social distancing guidelines by having an affair with his married aide, has said he will not stand for the Conservatives in the next general election. The Telegraph has the story.
On Saturday, Mr Hancock’s spokesman told the Telegraph: “He has no intention of standing down or stepping away from politics.”
But on Wednesday, he said: “For my part, I want to do things differently. I have discovered a whole new world of possibilities which I am excited to explore – new ways for me to communicate with people of all ages and from all backgrounds.”
Listing his accomplishments, he said he was proud of establishing three free schools, the A11 dual carriageway, supporting the horseracing industry and expanding Newmarket Hospital.
He also commended himself for supporting Rishi Sunak in his bid to replace Liz Truss as Prime Minister during a turbulent year for the Conservative Party.
The ex-Tory MP returned to Westminster last week from Australia following his controversial spell on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!
Mr Hancock was stripped of the Conservative whip after it emerged he was joining the reality TV show, prompting speculation about his political future and whether he would stand again at the next general election in around two years time.
Matt Hancock’s resignation letter, in full:
I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to stand for the Conservatives at the next General Election. I am very grateful for my conversation with the Chief Whip last week, in which he made clear he would restore the whip in due course, but that is now not necessary.
It has been a huge honour to serve as Member of Parliament for West Suffolk over the past twelve years. I am very proud of what we achieved, including the establishment of three Free Schools, dualling of the A11, supporting the horseracing industry, and expanding Newmarket Hospital. I will of course continue to represent all my constituents between now and the next election.
I am incredibly proud of what we achieved in my nine years in Government: the massive expansion of Apprenticeships, the introduction of Traineeships, support for small and growing businesses, the digitisation of public services and starting to establish rules for the digital economy, restoring the nation’s finances, support for the NHS with record numbers of doctors and nurses, and of course the response to the pandemic: the first vaccine in the world, and a shorter lockdown, fewer jobs lost, and lower mortality than comparable countries.
I am incredibly grateful for the loyal members of my team in Suffolk, in Parliament, in Government, and in the NHS who helped make all this possible. I am proud to have supported you to become Prime Minister and wish you the best in facing the challenges ahead.
The Conservative Party must now reconnect with the public we serve. There was a time when I thought the only way to influence the public debate was in Parliament, but I’ve realised there’s far more to it than that. I have increasingly come to believe that for a healthy democracy we must find new ways to reach people – especially those who are disengaged with politics. The revival of modern conservatism over the next decade will I suspect take place as much outside Parliament as in it.
For my part, I want to do things differently. I have discovered a whole new world of possibilities which I am excited to explore – new ways for me to communicate with people of all ages and from all backgrounds. I look forward to championing the issues that are dear to my heart, including better support for dyslexic children who get a raw deal from the education system.
It has been an honour to serve in Parliament and represent the people of West Suffolk. I will play my part in the debate about the future of our country and engage with the public in new ways.
Your ever
Matt
No apology for wrecking the country, destroying lives and stunting prospects, of course.
Worth reading in full.
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If the APPG truly do represent all parties in Parliament, Democracy in the UK is DEAD!
We truly will be locked IN in GB – never mind locked down – not allowed to leave but watch those private jets take the wealthy powerful and connected to ALL sorts of destinations
Including those permitted to go abroad to ‘prepare their second homes for renting’.
About a fortnight should do it.
The chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus (APPG) is a liberal democrat.
This dotty idea is neither liberal nor democratic.
Socialist fascism.
Never mind, there’s always staycation.
They have all been added to the list
They can discourage me all they like. I will be going to my little house on a Greek island as soon as possible. Variants my a..e! Need to top up on hot sunshine and bright light to keep the immune system functioning properly. Can’t do that in grey Britain where everyone shuffles round dismally wearing muzzles. Give me a nice hot beach, a taverna with good food and some local wine.
Seriously this nonsense must stop. The agreement with the government was that vaccines would let us “cry freedom” …. So where’s the freedom?
Do you know what the current entry requirements are for Greece, and what their plans are?
Also do you know the current level of coronabollocks restrictions in force there?
Asking for a friend.
Hi Julian, you need to take a private PCR test within 72 hours before departure and fill in a Passenger Location Form from the Greek Government.
if you have had the vaccine then you do not have to self isolate at all.
Coming back to the UK however……now that is a completely different matter.
p.s all bars and restaurants open for indoor and outdoor dining this coming Friday
Why come back?
Thanks. How long are you meant to self isolate in Greece and how well enforced is it?
Regarding bars and restaurants opening, I guess my criteria for coronabollocks may be a bit too demanding. Indoor dining is opening in the UK at some point I believe but it makes no odds to me – until there are no masks, track and trace, limits on numbers, distancing, curfews, test requirements then I’m not interested.
They are certifiably off the rails insane over by you guys. We’re in Wisconsin and at least our town is mostly normal. They make the restaurant staff wear muzzles but most of the patrons don’t bother. No tracing, no contact bullsh*t, no testing, no curfew. And our local hospital has been underutilized.
Hi Julian – if you wait until after 14 May which is when tourism officially opens in Greece this year, you can go with either proof of two Covid vaccinations OR a negative PCR test taken 72 hours before flying and arrival in Greece OR positive antibody test. Your choice. Some random people will be tested on arrival using the fast lateral flow tests as well. That said, I don’t think one British person tested positive on arrival on my Greek island last year out of all the thousands that arrived. I’m not sure yet what restrictions will be in place on the islands by end May. They are coming out of a hard lockdown – had to send texts to leave your house which is why I’ve stayed in Britain and not gone to my house out there. I’m resident so I could have travelled. But Greece are in desperate need of British tourists this year so they will make it as easy and free as possible. The Passenger Locator Form you fill in before travel to Greece is simple compared to the British one to come back! That was just ludicrous and if English isn’t your first language you’d stand no chance. My suggestion would be to stay in Greece for the full 90 days now allowed under Schengen rules for visitors if you can and hope that the nonsense over here in Britain of the traffic light system has quietened down a bit by then.
The world has gone barmy, the whole thing is a complete nonsense, but at least sitting it out somewhere hot and sunny helps a lot!
As JHB says on TR: If people ( morons/sheep/collaborators in my opinion) want to wear their face nappies and social distance, LET EM! but leave us normal people alone to live our maskless lives in peace.
Indeed. I received a letter from my MP, in reply to a somewhat critical one, to the effect that they are betting on the “vaccine” to get out of jail. That was a few months ago.
I wonder how many of the APPG and members of Par-liar-ment will holiday abroad in 2021 anyway?
well of course, it’s only the peasants that need to be discouraged.
None, they will be on fact finding missions to Antigua, Bali and San Remo; all with Diplomatic Privilege of course.
Love the parliarment word
Variants mean sweet FA. As Mike Yeadon says maximum difference of about 3% between any of ’em. If you’ve been infected once you can’t be infected again by a fucking variant. They should know this and probably do, so this is palpably another part of the whole control mechanism
I believe a person who already has immunity (either from vaccination or previous infection) could be infected by some variants, but it would be just a bad cold rather than a potential killer.
Certainly not worth the extreme policy response (sealed borders à la Australia/NZ) that would be required to stop it…
“I believe” Well, I think costly public health policy interventions ought to be evidence based.
Bad choice of language on my part, but my point is that there’s no point in half-hearted travel restrictions: only a total ban like those of Australia and NZ would actually be effective, and such a drastic measure is only justifiable if a variant renders the vaccines completely useless (which there is no evidence for).
Puts me in mind of the week or so before lockdown 1. when we were ‘strongly discouraged’ from visiting pubs or restaurants.
The government refused to order those places to close in order to save paying them compensation (which sums would, of course, count as nought given the squillions paid out in business support since then).
Total ban wont work in the UK.
We have and require 7000+ trucks a day in and out for food and the economy for starters.
We’re not an island thousands of miles away from anywhere else with no reliance on land, sea and rail links to a big continent next door.
We’d starve.
The country is too interconnected and small to survive at all with a total ban.
Yeah, and what about all the dear little immigrants who come flooding into wicked, racist Britain?
The illegal immigrants crossing the Channel in makeshift boats are indeed another argument that an Australian-style border policy would be impractical for the UK.
If we did try such a policy, who wouldn’t bet that those illegal immigrants would be joined by British citizens who would otherwise be stranded abroad for months as they waited for a quarantine hotel slot to become available?
Perhaps such a border policy would be easier if we hadn’t demolished the Royal Docks (through which we used to import much of our food) in the 1980s?
0.3%
Mike Yeadon went on to say that the difference between SARS1 and Covid is 20% (30%?) but those people in Asian countries that had SARS1 still have considerable protection from Covid
two decades on.
Yeadon is talking through his arse.
“3%” is meaningless. A single amino acid change can alter the shape of the protein and completely change how things interact with it.
Given thats basic school level science you’d assume he knows this and is therefore deliberately misleading.
Ditto for the flu. There are no flu vaccines (in the sense of permanent immunity), only ‘jabs’ based on the most likely variants for a given year. These may reduce symptoms, but certainly don’t prevent infection, etc.
Hmmmm, sounds sort of familiar.
Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy – Giovanni Apolone, Emanuele Montomoli, Alessandro Manenti, Mattia Boeri, Federica Sabia, Inesa Hyseni, Livia Mazzini, Donata Martinuzzi, Laura Cantone, Gianluca Milanese, Stefano Sestini, Paola Suatoni, Alfonso Marchianò, Valentina Bollati, Gabriella Sozzi, Ugo Pastorino, 2020 (sagepub.com)
Covid 19 antibodies found in blood samples taken a early as September 2019(Italy)
Covid 19 likely to have arrived in Europe during the late summer of 2019.
By implication Covid 19 spread throughout Europe during the winter of 2019/20
Closing boarders and lockdowns starting in March 2020, a waste of time.
Could the samples not have been contaminated since their collection?
It seems unlikely that Covid could have arrived by the autumn of 2019 given that it didn’t start killing people until February 2020…
How do we know it didn’t start killing people until Feb 2020?
Maybe it spread slowly to start with.
Italy sewage study suggests COVID-19 was there in December 2019 | Reuters
Similar reports from Spain, the USA and South America.
Covid has been identified in waste-water samples from March 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ
And if it was in Spain then it was likely also in France – those pesky viruses don’t recognise something like a land border. I picked up a horrendous virus in France in the summer of 2019 – and I know of others in France who did likewise. I am convinced that given the similarity of the symptoms that it was covid. Took me months to recover even when throwing the kitchen sink at it.
Yes a friend’s son returned from a skiing holiday in France with a horrendous cough. Everyone else in the family caught it, but the degree of symptoms varied widely
Covid was certainly making people ill (granted anecdotally and in retrospect) during the winter of 2019/20 but we will never know how many died of it then because they were not being tested for it.
One of the early indicators that Covid was around in 2019 was a limited number of bodies labelled as pneumonia victims were subsequently tested Covid positive, mostly in Italy if memory serves.
Until February 2020 there was no test for SARS-CoV-2.
Therefore any person with symptoms prior to then could have a SARS-CoV-2 infection but it not be known or named. People who died or were very unwell in the autumn of 2019 would have been diagnosed with pneumonia or other upper or lower respiratory tract infection; clotting disorders etc with no identification of any underlying pathogen.
One cannot find what you are not looking for. Drosten invented his test in January 200 and it was not pushed widely as a diagnostic tool until much later.
There was no testing of respiratory patients until February, so we’ll never know if people dying in late 19 had flu or covid. My Grans care home lost 9 residents in 10 days in Nov 19 (Gran included), could have been flu, or anything really, none were tested for anything. They were all 85+ and expected to die within the year or so.
I don’t know a soul who had covid-19 in Jan/Feb/March 2020. But loads of folks had a respiratory infection that dragged on through Autumn/Winter 2019 and either became a mighty chest infection, pneumonia or what would now be characterised as long covid.
That Autumn (2019) we also had more pneumonia deaths than I’ve seen in ages amongst the extra elderly (we live between 4 elderly care facilities, and there were a lot of silent ambulances, and funerals that winter), and people dying suddenly of “strokes” or out of the blue suffering with seizures.
So from my own experience I would say this is true.
Closing boarders?
Could be painful.
Makes sense to me, w.r.t. the timing of it’s ‘arrival’. It’s existence is not the same as the time and location of it’s first identification. I kind of mentioned this to my letter to my GP (‘trimmed’ copy below). No comment from them on that; they just want to dish out the so-called ‘vaccines’ for so many pounds a head.
I had it in Dec 2019 – Jan 2020, with three episodes over six weeks. It was bad (OAP, asthmatic) but I would rather go through that again than the pneumonia resistant to multiple antibotics following a dose of flu in 2017/2018.
Further evidence, as if any were needed, that the dominant mindset within the institutions controlling things is one of zero covid. Anything more than a handful of “covid cases” and “covid deaths” will not be tolerated without increased restrictions.
I agree with your assessment. There has to be a overreaching global political hand behind this that is pulling the strings, not only in the UK but in other countries too. Any ideas whose hand this is?
The usual suspects: our friendly neighborhood globalist filth. The billionaire old money elites Rockefellers, Rothschilds, soros, among others. That criminal psychopath Gates is heavily involved. My crazy conspiracy theorist‘s tinfoil hat could come up with several others too.
Big Pharma is in it for the money. Mandatory ‘vaccine’ purchases during a ‘pandemic’ are a licence to print money. Under the new definition of pandemic concocted by the vaccination trade organisation (aka WHO), even the common cold or flu could be deemed a pandemic. Kerching.
“Prof Rowland Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh and member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, who was not involved in the report, said new “escape mutant” variants with the ability to infect people more easily or cause more severe illness…”
What “escape mutant” variants? Have any ever been identified?
Has any variant been demonstrated to overcome natural or vaccination immunity? No. Has any variant been demonstrated to cause more severe illness? No (pace a lot of junk-science about the UK variant). Is the emergence of a such a variant virologically plausible, after study of the thousands of variants which already exist? No. What proportion of the UK population has antibodies? 60-something% at last count, probably closer to 70% now.
The APPG have basically bought the whole bullshit story. Variant = danger. Danger = must lock down (in spite of the immunity level in the UK population).
‘Escape’ is a curious choice of word. Escape from where? Wuhan ?
Evolved might have been better unless Prof Kao made a Freudian slip.
Not really.
Escape mutant is a well known, old, accepted scientific term.
I stand corrected
Does it apply to Hero Turtles?
APAU: All Parliamentarians Are Useless.
In the meantime the ‘Government’, you know, the one we taxpayers fund, awards a £320M contract to a company to create covid adverts until 2022…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IV5dbO6Lqo
Would a real pandemic require such blatant propaganda? Come on, wake-up.
The cretinous buggers are obviously going for zero covid, otherwise known as Sticking Your Head In A Hole In The Ground.
Zero Covid = perpetual war because it can’t be achieved.
Oceania (ie The West) has been involved in this only with Eastasia thus far, wait until Eurasia joins in.
Eastasia is an ally. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
“But, but, but…I’ve had all my jabs so I COULD go on holiday!” Are these people getting it yet!!!!
We did warn them many months ago.
Layla Moran. Enough said….
Why are some many people desperate to prevent anyone ever returning to normal life? Do they hate normal life so much they don’t want anyone to experience it any more?
They can go f*-k themselves. I’m going abroad. As often as possible.
This was the lead story on a lot of the lunchtime radio news.
Interesting that it was across different stations (although Global have a franchise i believe – look them up) offering Alexander Johnson the perfect opportunity to present the cautious reopening meme to the public while keeping everyone on tenterhooks.
Classic bait and switch.
What has happened to Graham Brady and Desmond Swayne lately?
The problem with this is that viruses are not going to be imported like grains of sand stuck to your beach towel. It’s only going to happen if you are infected abroad. Highly unlikely to catch a cold in the Med when you literally don’t go indoors for a fortnight. And if that’s a risk people are prepared to take then why should you stop them?
Can just one of our shabby supposed journalists ask WHEN the “threat” from new variants will go? Because rationally, if this was a genuine threat, I cannot see any point, now, in the past, or in the future, when we won’t have the exact same “threat”?
The ‘threat’ from the now endemic new novel coronavirus will go away when the ‘threat’ from the old normal coronavirus(*) goes away.
It’s quite likely ‘normalised’ itself, joining the club with enigmatic names like OC43, HKU1, NL63, 229E, considered to cause about a third of ‘common cold’ infections. Maybe they should delete the first few letters, like ‘SARS’, if it’s not really that severe for the majority.
They don’t want us to travel, but how many press and attendees will come from overseas for the G7 Summit in Cornwall?
In other news, serial child abusers insist more child abuse is neeeded.
If people in this group like Layla Moron really believed the UK was at risk from foreign contagion they would ban all immigration. But of course they can’t do that, because muh racism.