Politics latest: Ministers ‘avoided’ emergency meetings if Matt Hancock was chairing them, COVID inquiry hears

The next topic is whether the prime minister’s former advisor Dominic Cummings and the former health secretary Matt Hancock tried to push out the chief executive of NHS England in early 2020.

Sir Simon Stevens says people were not trying to remove him from office “to my face”.

He is then is shown screenshots of messages between Mr Cummings and Mr Hancock in late January 2020 in which Mr Cummings asks: “Where are we with SS [Simon Stevens]?”

Mr Hancock replies that “it’s in train” and that he was getting former health minister under Gordon Brown, Lord Darzi, to “persuade him it’s in his best interests to go now” and that he would “move directly” if those efforts failed.

Ten days later, in early February, Mr Cummings asks for an update, and Mr Hancock explains that the proposal was to announce Sir Simon’s departure in September and to actually leave in December.

But Mr Cummings says he “must get on with it now” and to do it the following week so it would “get lost” in “reshuffle frenzy”.

Asked about the messages, Sir Simon explains that after taking the post in 2014, he had initially intended to serve until 2019, but says “there was a degree of political chaos in the United Kingdom during the course of 2019” so decided it was “not the right moment to create a gap in the leadership of the NHS”.

He says he was looking to depart in 2020, but then “COVID came along and it would have been completely wrong to have left a vacuum during the first wave”.

He says he felt “duty bound” to see through winter 2020/21 as a second wave of COVID was hitting the UK, and after the vaccine rollout, departed in July 2021.

Another message is read out to Sir Simon in which Mr Cummings accuses both him and Mr Hancock of “bulls***ting”.

Sir Simon replies: “By the standards of Dominic Cummings’s adjectives, that’s one of his gentler epithets.”