Boris Johnson backs health minister faced with calls to quit over affair row

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday stood by his beleaguered health secretary after he admitted to breaking COVID rules during a newly-revealed affair with a close aide.

Opposition parties demanded Matt Hancock‘s resignation, accusing the government of hypocrisy over breaches of lockdown rules which have seen many members of the public slapped with fines.

Hancock conceded he had let the public down but insisted he was staying on, after The Sun newspaper published a security camera still obtained from a whistleblower showing him kissing the aide in his office on May 6.

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“The prime minister has accepted the health secretary’s apology and considers the matter closed,” Johnson’s spokesman told reporters, adding the Conservative leader retained full confidence in his pandemic pointman.

“I accept that I breached the social distancing guidance in these circumstances. I have let people down and am very sorry,” Hancock said in a statement responding to the Sun photograph.

“I remain focused on working to get the country out of this pandemic, and would be grateful for privacy for my family on this personal matter,” he said.

The main opposition Labour party said the government needed to answer questions about the undisclosed appointment of the aide and former lobbyist Gina Coladangelo to Hancock’s top advisory team. Both she and Hancock are married.

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“The appointment followed all the correct procedures,” Johnson’s spokesman said.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said Coladangelo would have gone through an “incredibly rigorous” process to get the job.

“There are no shortcuts to that, as anyone who has had anything to do with the appointments system in the civil service knows,” he told Sky News.

Shapps declined to comment further on what he said was an “entirely personal” matter for his cabinet colleague.

Last week, Hancock rejected criticism of his handling of the COVID pandemic after private WhatsApp exchanges emerged in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to describe him as “hopeless”.

Hancock has also previously faced allegations that he lied to Johnson and awarded a contract to an unqualified friend.

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He has faced further questions about his ownership of shares in a family company that won a COVID-related contract from his ministry last year.

In May 2020, scientist Neil Ferguson resigned from a government advisory panel after breaking rules on social distancing, following media reports that he had allowed a woman said to be his “lover” to visit him at home.

At the time, Hancock said Ferguson’s behaviour had left him “speechless” and that the scientist had been right to quit the role.

But when Johnson’s then-chief adviser Dominic Cummings broke strict lockdown rules to travel across the country last year, causing a public uproar, the prime minister refused to sack him.