YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Hancock

lines on the record: 112
first: 2022-02-28
most recent: 2022-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So on this foresight hindsight thing, I know for sure. That I did my best. And I know that the team around me is Worked with the right motives to get through as best we could. The importance of learning how best to handle this situation. For God forbid if it happens again Is absolutely vital. But I worry as much about learning the wrong lessons as learning the right lessons, so that's why it's important that we have this sort of discussion about the care homes in particular.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, and the other thing we were worried about, so we were worried about a different problem that didn't happen. And sometimes this, you know, it's important to think about at the time the things we were worrying about. So in Spain, a whole care home full of elderly people had died because the staff had all gone home. So we were also worried about making sure that the care homes remained staffed because people in care homes die if the staff aren't there. So thankfully that never happened, but we were worried about the opposite problem at the same time. And thankfully, we avoided one But the other one came to pass.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we'd known that that was going to be the thing that would say, stop it. As much as it did, obviously we would have done that earlier. But again, it comes down to not knowing.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but that's because there's lots of reasons for that. You've got to unpack it. So, firstly, it is the most vulnerable people who live in care homes. So their vulnerability to the disease is much greater. Secondly, the nature of care homes is obviously that the disease can spread more easily. And every European country had this problem. But the broader point about the SAGE minutes around that time, action was taken. But we didn't get to the policy that I think had the best impact, which was the stopping people from working in more than one care home for several months afterwards. Yeah.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The staff movement policy much earlier, and we hadn't spotted that that was the route. And so, you know, there's an inquiry that will come and go through all these things. And I'm actually looking forward to it because there's a whole series of points where we've got to make sure we learn the right lesson. And then there's a couple of other things that are upper there that, you know, just aren't true and need to be like this whole, you know, we talked about criticism as a politician, right? One of the things I've been criticized for is for giving a contract to the local pub landlord, right? I don't know whether you read that story. Yeah, I've heard all of that stuff.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a few false notes that have got going about the pandemic, and that's one of them. The truth is, and we couldn't say it, we didn't want to say it at the time because we didn't want to demotivate people, but the truth is that the main root of the virus getting into care homes sadly was from staff because staff live in the community and this disease was rife in the community. But I didn't want to stand at that podium and give the impression I was blaming the staff. The thing that we then did was we changed And in the second wave the number of deaths in Caesar was far, far lower. And we had the testing. So actually what we needed to have done was do the”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That criticism is wrong. But there's a different criticism, which is more accurate. The reason that's wrong is twofold. There's been a piece of work that's a piece of analysis that's done that's shown that approximately 2% of the infections that got into care homes were from that root. And the reason for that is that when those people went into the care homes, they then isolated in the care homes because they weren't tested, because the tests didn't exist. Now, I wish to God that the tests had existed and that was a big part of my life trying to build this testing system, but they didn't exist. And most of those people who left hospital actually went home, not into care homes. The truth is that the peak in the care homes came about a month later. So the facts don't even stack up this narrative.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so, okay, this is a really good example of learning from what you're seeing on the ground. So the criticism runs that the NHS made a decision to get people out of hospitals because we need hospital space and send them into care homes and that took COVID with them and a lot of people died”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you know what the overriding sets is that I'm trying to articulate not particularly well is a sense of duty, right? When the really bad stuff happens. And you're in the job, you've got to stand up and be counted.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not in a medical, I didn't feel that in a medical sense. I basically felt like I got up in the morning. I did my level best and then I went to sleep and then I woke up and repeated the exercise. And for me, that was the only way to get through it without sort of collapsing in a hoop.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's relaxation I got through exercise but in the health department the sense was a total sense of mission And I've never been in the military, but some people say this is what it's like when you're on a military operation as well. As in there was a focus over how to optimize how we could make decisions. You know, of course there were sleepless nights, but really we thought when we had some, you know, Chris Whitty himself is a brilliant advisor on how to keep yourself personally in the zone. So the sense of mission that we were trying to solve something that was incredibly difficult as best as we could was very, very strong in that period.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh Well, so my alarm went off at six o'clock every morning. And I basically had about. Half an hour with the kids in the morning, and then I'd get picked up at 7 30, maybe 7 o'clock. And then work unbelievable until about midnight. And my permanent secretary, Chris Wimwold at the start, said this is not going to be over in a couple of weeks, right? You've got to get, we've all got to get ourselves into a position where we can just keep going. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And there was a weekend basically meant that we didn't start work till about nine. And so that was the, you know, that was the time off, so to speak. Was like that for three or four months during that period.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in hindsight, some of it looks like these were sort of hard and fast and obvious decisions. They weren't obvious decisions at all. And we were constantly sort of questioning ourselves in terms of whether we got the judgment right.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just details about the things that really, really matter to people. I'll give you one example funerals We brought in rules saying that six people could go to a funeral, I think it was, very, very restrict But for some people, especially people who were shielding The rules were interpreted as the In some cases even the spouse shouldn't go to the funeral if they were shielding. Now That was that was terrible. I remember watching that. The film of a young boy who died. who was buried by people in hazmat suits without his parents there. You know, that was just awful and You listen to that, right? And we changed the rules and made it clear. So, you know, that was all the time. I'd say, you know, all the time we were on the lookout for, okay, what do we need to be doing differently? Because it was unprecedented. And there was a...”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah Obviously something I'll always think about. If I search for what I really believe about that and the honest truth is, the honest truth is that when We didn't know. And of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing. It was judgment based on. On the balance of these two scales. I think that whenever you go through a period of history, ultimately it's about learning from it. You know, you've got to make sure that if a pandemic disease happens again, we'll be far better prepared. And I think that the Far East was far better prepared because they'd been through Mers and SARS. And honestly, how I feel is like, I really wish we'd known then what we knew now.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Participating in decisions that were going to have a more devastating impact on businesses and people who rely on social contact in order to survive and thrive. So we were hugely aware of the pain that would come from the decisions. As well as the pain that would come from delay. And the other thing that we didn't know was how the public would react. And there's an optimistic story, which is the public were amazing. And the advice that we were getting was we're not sure whether the public will put up with lockdown for very long. And so you've got to time the period of lockdown. Actually, the public were amazing once you explained that, you know, there's a serious problem. We're all going to have to do something. It's going to be uncomfortable, but we'll get through it together in the public. We're amazing.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big picture, we were much closer Them than we were being the best estimate by the best people who were in Sage, the scientists. You know, what it felt like was this is an enormous call. So the costs of action are huge. The costs of inaction are also huge. So we knew when we were sitting around the cabinet table making these decisions that the balance between these two was an enormous, enormous unknown. with an unprecedented virus with very little data. We were essentially doing these things that were so, we knew we were very were going to be very damaging. If you think about the story about, I told earlier about coming in, I came into politics partly because I had this searing formulative experience of something completely outside of our control, nearly knocking out the livelihood of my family, right? And here I am”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we reckoned that we were several weeks behind them in terms of the progress of the virus that, as in it, had come to those countries first, then from them to us. But either way.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Delay, yeah. So it's funny that the previous conversation we had was about how you should have the experts making the decisions. The truth is, we didn't have the experts didn't have the data either. So these were difficult calls actually in terms of where we were on the curve, we pulled the levers ahead of other countries because we were a bit behind Italy and Spain.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To stop all unavoidable social contact. And you probably remember that being said. And the really frightening time was after we'd done all those things, brought in the lockdown, we'd done everything, right? And if this disease had carried on going up, there was absolutely nothing more we could do. We'd shut the schools, we'd shut hospitality, you know, we'd pulled, we'd set out at the start of March of options of levers that we could pull to try to stop this thing. And by the middle of March, we'd pulled every lever. And it was, so the next two weeks as the numbers carried on going up for about 10 days because of the incubation period, that was really scary. And then they started to turn. And then we knew we could get this thing under the criticism.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what happened was we saw those predictions of the reasonable worst case scenario. But the big problem was we were going up the reasonable worst case scenario. You know, and I remember, of course, I remember the day that the first person in the UK dived of COVID. But I remember the day that oddly, something like the 32nd person died. And it's a funny say that number, but there's a reason for it. I was sitting on the side of my bath at home, and I got the news that we'd had thirty thirty two deaths, and suddenly that was a, this isn't, you know, one person of whom we've got a protocol of how you manage that. Terrible as that is. This is like big numbers. And it was a big jump in the number. And I knew that that number was going to get bigger. And the worst period, the most sort of frightening period of the whole thing was after we'd done the lockdown, we'd pulled every lever we could. So I remember sitting in the cabinet room and saying, we're going to have to tell people.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking people's blood and got a representative sample. It took ages to get this thing up and running. And we eventually got the data through that said that something like in London 15% of people had had it. And outside London it was under five. It's like Christ, that means almost nobody's had it and still we've had all these deaths. And that means that was the moment we knew we had a major problem because there was no way through this other than the vaccine.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Complete lack of data. That was the problem total positive data. We had a testing regime. We had to build that from scratch. And so you didn't know how many people had it. We didn't know the characteristics of the disease. We didn't know what the symptoms were largely because the symptoms of COVID are so varied that they didn't have a full symptom list. One of the things that we didn't know for ages, which we now take for granted knowing, is how many people have had it and have got the antibodies. There was a big debate after the first peak of some people saying they're optimists like me, but it turns out far, far too optimistic, right? Saying, oh, yeah, three quarters of the people must have had it by now, so basically we're fine and we're through it. And then, so I got a survey done.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was the moment when it was obvious it was coming And I remember having a call that my German opposite number who I became very close to, he'd phoned me up, he said, have you seen these pictures out of Italy? I was like, he was like, this is it. He's like, yeah, this is it. So that was the end of February.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if everything goes well. And I said your mission is to have a vaccine by Christmas. And he and the team that we built pulled it off. So we were getting things moving. And then it was when we saw the pictures from Italy. Do you remember that was the moment? That I knew it was global”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. I was giving statements to Parliament and what have you, and we were preparing inside government for what needed to happen. So at the end of January, JVT came and said, I said, how long will it take to get a vaccine? He said, well, normally it would take five years, but we think we can do it in a year to 18 months.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to get the testing system up and running. And then we had this surreal month during February when nobody else was sort of thinking that this was a big thing. And we still thought it was 50-50, but 50% chance of a global pandemic is very, very bad. And I remember standing next to the speaker's chair in the House of Commons for a PMQs watching every single question was about something else. And nobody asked a question about what became known as COVID. And I remember thinking at the end of the session, the end of half hour, every single question that has been asked is totally irrelevant because it's all about other things. And we've got this one fact in China, and it is. It's totally dominant.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cold end of January. So the Chinese published the sequence of the genome of the virus. So we then knew it was a coronavirus. That was bad news, right? Because we had a stockpile of flu vaccine for this sort of emergency if it had been a flu. And the fact that it was a coronavirus and spreading this rapidly in China was bad news. And then at that point, I remember Chris Whitty saying to me, is 5050? Something this contagious, either they can hold it in China. Or if it gets out of China, it's going to go global. So we were by the end of January, we were onto developing the vaccine, for instance.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I remember seeing the Chinese publication on the 1st of January. So it was New Year's Day. And I saw this thing on the inside pages of one of the newspapers to say the Chinese have just announced that there's a new disease. And nobody knew, we didn't know it was a coronavirus. It might have been a flu. And nobody knew whether it was serious or not. But I remember thinking, well, maybe this is it. But I didn't really think it was until a couple of weeks later.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You knew he would win. Yeah, it was obvious that he was going to win. Also, I came to the view that he could sort the problem that we were stuck with of Brexit better than any of the other candidates. And also, I thought, you know, this guy has great capabilities.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course, that's one of the consequences. I basically had an argument I wanted to make, which was, okay, Brexit decision's been taken. Let's get that done and get onto building a stronger economy in the future and basically get it done as quickly as we can and move forward. That was the argument I wanted to make. And then I pulled out.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but I had fun trying. No, I didn't think I'd win, but I wanted to get some arguments made, right? I worried that. I worried that the party was talking not enough about how its enterprise that leads to prosperity.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you might have a view on some of the details of that, but essentially I saw my job as saying, this is the mission, and then communicating how we get there and then being advised on the way from A to B. Because the thing you lose if you go for your model is you lose the democratic input, and that can lead to things going wrong.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the essentially technocratic over there. Actually, I think that our system is better than the US system because these two things are emerged together. Because you get, in taking these decisions, you get incredible advice, you get access to all the industry experts that you want to talk to. Ultimately, you're making balanced judgments. The way the UK does it as well is the civil service will never put forward a proposal that they don't think is workable. That's the deal, right? So you do have these long-term experts who have been in the field. And they'll say, okay, this is the way I tried to do it was I'd say this is where I think we need to get to how should we best get there. And then the experts will come up with a plan of how to get there.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's quite a common critique of politics. And different countries deal with it in different ways, right? So some countries, the entire cabinet is made up of people who aren't in parliament, like, you know, the US cabinet is made up of people who have to by law not be in the Senate or the House of Representatives. But then you get even more of a divide between the sort of political and the democratic over here.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think actually it's better for the health secretary to essentially be somebody who is there on the side of the patients. Of course you listen to the clinical advice, you know, and some of the most amazing brains in the world, right? Like Chris Whitty, Jonathan Vantam. These people are amazing, wonderful communicators, very shrewd advisors. Ultimately, it's right that the person taking the decisions is representing the people through the democratic process we have. And not representing the producers, if you like. That is a better way of structuring it.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is obviously something not in your wheelhouse. No. So I'm, doctors ask me, you know, why should a non-doctor Be responsible for the health service. Now, two answers to that. First is, well, it's pretty arrogant of doctors to say it should be a doctor. What about a nurse, right? Because there's more nurses in the NHS than doctors. Park that minor local issue, right? The reason is because I am there as the representative, not just of those who work in the health service, but of the people who use the health service, which is to say all of us.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it is democratic to ensure that somebody who represents people ultimately making the decision, but if they're any good, they'll listen to the advice that you get.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The experts can become so focused, but also they can't sometimes provide the leadership that To say we're going over there. And like, yes, of course we're going to take on Facebook over some of the harmful content. Yeah, of course we are. We're not just going to lie down and save that they can make the rules up.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because a democracy, Stephen. It's democracy. And that's good and right, right? Because when you have technocratic government, you just get experts are so focused on their area That sometimes they just don't see the big picture. So you're saying you need to impose. Yeah, that's what I tried to be as a minister. And also, so it's about lifting people's eyes to the big social... Trade offs, and I mean that in the best sense that the trade-offs within society, how free to be versus how safe to be in the internet is an absolute classic of political philosophy, right? And people have been worrying about that question in the offline world for 300 years. And we were bringing that sort of Into the online world as opposed to just leaving it as a completely libertarian space. But the job is to synthesize the expert view, but not just follow it.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding what the public is expecting. Sometimes experts can get so close to their subject matter That you got to be like, yeah, but there's 60 million people over there who aren't experts. They need the voice in the room as well.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I can code and I understand a bit about technology. But the big question was, how do you keep children safe online And how you take the internet from a sort of a wild west. Social media to a place where people have more protection. That was the most important question in that area at the time. And for that, yes, you need experts, but you also need you basically need a view of where you want to get to. You need to set the mission and the direction.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know anything about any of that stuff Five, six different things. Yeah, because that's not the job. So it's not the job to be the master. In a way, it's the job to be the people's representative amongst the experts. So your job as the minister is to be able to be the representative of the people. who is responsible for the direction of that policy area, and you have endless experts, your job is not to be an expert, it's to listen to the experts and then decide democratically what direction do we want to go. So take, I mean, an area that I do know, I did have a background in, take on the future of the internet.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I thought, oh, this isn't going to go very well. I walked in and I was, she'd been running about 15 minutes late. So I walk in and there's a clock on the wall in her house commons office and it says 11.05. And I said, oh, it's gone 11. So I guess this is going to be okay. And because I thought, well, you know, at least make her laugh if she's going to be firing me. Why make it unpleasant? And she said, well, that depends how you react. Because there isn't a space for you in my cabinet, but I know you're really interested in digital. And that's one of the big things that's going on in the world. So would you like to be the number two in DCMS and be responsible for digital policy? And just keep your head down and sort that out. And I left at it. It was absolutely wonderful.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She fought him pretty brutally, and I was just, you know, head below the parapet enough to get through. And she demoted me. I was attending the cabinet at the time and I remember the meeting. They had told the press that they were going to fire people until 11 a.m. and then start hiring people. And I was asked to go and see her at 10.50.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look at actually give Miss Credit, look at who Boris Johnson has put in his cabinet, right? And I know that you're immediately thinking of people he was at the same school and university as. Right. But there are an awful lot of people who weren't. And I don't want to go through the individual backstory of, you know, the guy who arrived age nine from Kurdistan with only his dad with only a pound in his pocket. Sajaj Javid, who grew up in one of the poorest streets in Bristol and made it from there. And by the way, who's from a family of amazing, amazing men, I think he's got four brothers, there's five of them, Rishi Sunak, right? He grew up in his mum's a pharmacist. He grew up in a pharmacy, right? There are loads of people who have made it from difficult backgrounds. actually I'm sad that you have the impression that you're...”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cannot you can't empathize with others and others' situations. You can't have lived somebody else's life. But you can seek to try to understand where they're coming from. And I certainly do that. And that's part of representing a constituency. I think it's actually really hard to communicate in politics. The empathy point because it's really easy to generalize. And it comes down to the fact that if you poll people, right, most people think that politicians are useless, but when you name a politician, they tend to think that they're there. Their local person, their local MP, they tend to think that they're great, right? So there's a gap Between what people think of politicians as a whole. Think of individuals who they've interacted with.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, you can get in. You'd be, I'll sign you up now. It depends which party you want to join. I can only speak for one of them. But go for it. So firstly, that's my actual response. But the other thing is it is wrong to say that you...”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm grinning because there's two ways to answer this, right? But the thing that's absolutely screaming at me to say to you is. That is why you should go into politics.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Politics is where you're going and what you're trying to achieve. And one of the most important skills that I think is incredibly hard to communicate in politics, but is vital to doing the job well, is empathy. And you can't. Walk other people's shoes except through empathy. And the lived experience of a particular background is incredibly important. And I'm a big fan of welcoming people, trying to get people into politics from all sorts of backgrounds. So I'm not disagreeing with your critique. The point is each and every one of us has our own background, the way that you can try to get over the problem that you describe is through empathy. And that's incredibly important.”
2022-02-28 · The Diary of a CEO · Matt Hancock: Opens Up About His Affair, Mistakes & The Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT