Piers Morgan grills Health Secretary over cabinet ‘boycott’ of GMB

Piers Morgan has grilled the Health Secretary over the apparent cabinet ‘boycott’ of Good Morning Britain and demanded to know why he had not resigned. 

Piers suggested the driving force behind banning ministers from appearing on GMB was ex-communications boss at Downing Street Lee Cain, who last week left with Dominic Cummings.

He branded both Cummings and Cain ‘boneheaded little twerps’, announcing that ‘the 201-day government boycott on GMB has been dramatically ended’ as Mr Hancock appeared on the programme.

Piers started the interview by saying: ‘Good morning to you, Health Secretary. First question: given that we live in a democracy, where the hell have you all been for the past 201 days?’ 

He went on to brand the country’s testing policy a ‘complete shambles’ and demanded to know, ‘given that we now have over 50,000 deaths in this country, which is the worst death toll in the whole of Europe, why are you still Health Secretary, and why haven’t you offered your resignation?’ 

Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid interviewed the Health Secretary Matt Hancock today 

Mr Hancock said: ‘Well it’s very nice to hear your voice again, Piers, Susanna. Well last week you asked me to – I was on, actually, albeit briefly – and you asked me to come back as soon as diaries would allow and here I am.’

Piers asked Mr Hancock whether he ‘supported the boycott’ – saying that there had been no cabinet minister on GMB for more than six months.

The Health Secretary said: ‘We haven’t been away I’ve been on, working incredibly hard for instance building the sort of testing capacity… making progress on the vaccine which is really good.’

Piers Morgan went on to ask why Mr Hancock had not resigned.  

Mr Hancock said: ‘Well because we’ve been building the response to all of these enormous challenges of this unprecedented pandemic.

‘The first thing is, on testing, we’ve hit each of the targets that I’ve set – half a million tests a day capacity now, and I’m here to tell you that we’re going to double that over the next few months, and that means that we can use testing in order to find where the virus is.

Mr Hancock said: ‘Well it’s very nice to hear your voice again, Piers, Susanna. Well last week you asked me to – I was on, actually, albeit briefly – and you asked me to come back as soon as diaries would allow and here I am.’

Piers suggested the driving force behind banning ministers from appearing on GMB was ex-communications boss at Downing Street Lee Cain, who last week left with Dominic Cummings 

‘And crucially, we got those turnaround times down so that people can get the result back faster and then can isolate if needed.’ 

Piers Morgan asked whether Mr Hancock was prepared to admit to any mistakes – to which the Health Secretary responded: ‘Sure, of course, we’ve made mistakes, absolutely.

‘When we first put out the guidance for funerals in the first peak it was interpreted as being so tight that even your spouse couldn’t go to the funeral of somebody who’d died of coronavirus.

‘Now, that was wrong, and we changed it. Absolutely, we’ve been learning.’

The GMB host also asked why the Government does not publish the number of people who are tested each day, compared to the number of individual tests carried out.  

Referring to an April tweet from Boris Johnson’s account that said the Government would be testing 100,000 people a day by the end of the month, Piers asked if that target had been missed, given that figures of the numbers of tests are published, not the number of people who have been tested.  

Mr Hancock said: ‘The target was set to have 100,000 tests a day and we delivered against that.’