Matt Hancock ‘wanted to treat French Covid patients in the UK at the height of the pandemic to relieve pressure across the Channel’, leaked WhatsApps reveal

• Messages show Matt Hancock hoped to offer ‘spare’ ICU beds to France
• At the time French President Emanuel Macron was battling huge Covid outbreak 

Matt Hancock wanted to bring Covid-19 patients from France to the UK for treatment during the pandemic, it was reported last night.

The former health secretary drew up the plan despite lockdown restrictions being in place to protect the NHS.

In WhatsApp messages published by the Daily Telegraph, Mr Hancock hoped to offer ‘spare’ intensive care unit (ICU) beds to French President Emmanuel Macron.

At the time, France was facing a major outbreak of the virus and Mr Hancock wanted to offer help.

The exchanges reveal that the Health department created a secret plan to take Covid patients from the busiest French hospitals to the UK, despite the risk of importing the virus.

Leaked WhatsApp messages showed Matt Hancock was considering lending ‘spare’ intensive care unit (ICU) beds to France

At the time France was facing a major outbreak of the virus and Mr Hancock wanted to offer help

French doctors treat a patient suffering from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Robert Ballanger hospital in Aulnay-sous-Bois near Paris during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease in France, October 26, 2020

Britain was under a second national lockdown at the time, which was justified by ministers as being necessary to prevent a ‘medical and moral disaster’ by overwhelming the NHS.

On 13 November 2020, Mr Hancock shared a letter with advisers that he planned to send to French health minister Olivier Veran.

According to the Telegraph, the letter said: ‘I have seen the pressure on your hospitals, and that some patients are being transferred abroad.

‘We have our epidemic largely in the north of England, and some spare capacity in London and the south.

‘We could provide some ICU beds to which you could transfer some patients.

‘Would that be helpful to relieve pressure on your most affected regions? Our countries have always stood by each other in times of need.’

It comes after the relevation that Mr Hancock had joked that Bill Gates ‘owes me one’ because of ‘how many people I’m getting his chips injected into’ during the pandemic. 

The then Health Secretary referred to unfounded claims that Gates had developed Covid-19 in a lab and used the vaccine to implant microchip tracking devices into billions of people.

Hancock at the time was hoping to get the Microsoft billionaire to help in promoting the country’s expertise in identifying coronavirus variants around the world.

On January 25 2021 Hancock’s media adviser Damon Poole asked him via WhatsApp if he had spoken to the director general of the World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus about the New Variant Assessment Platform (NVAP) – a service offering the UK’s expertise in detecting new variants of the virus.

Mr Poole then said: ‘No promises but I’m trying to land a Bill gates endorsement of the platform.’

In a response, Hancock said: ‘Tell him that considering how many people I’m getting his chips injected into, he owes me one!’

Conspiracy theorists claimed that Bill Gates (left) had developed Covid-19 in a lab and used the vaccine to implant microchip tracking devices into people, which Hancock (right) joked about

The revelation is one of many published by The Telegraph after the paper was handed more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages from Mr Hancock’s phone by the journalist to whom he entrusted them in order to ghostwrite his book, Pandemic Diaries.

Journalist Isabel Oakeshott claimed ‘he didn’t tell me he was going’ to Australia for I’m a Celebrity and he ‘vanished to the jungle at a critical moment in very difficult dealings with the Cabinet Office’. 

She subsequently handed The Daily Telegraph 100,000 of Mr Hancock’s WhatsApp texts, which she has described as a ‘cache of very raw communications’.

The MP has since said her actions were a ‘massive betrayal’ used to produce ‘a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda’.

Other messages have revealed that Hancock was given advice from England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty to test all residents going into care homes for Covid. Yet he did not follow the recommendation — which, he claims, was due to test shortages at the time.

Texts set out that Cabinet Secretary Simon Case joked with Mr Hancock about locking up travellers arriving in UK in quarantine hotels.

And Mr Hancock told ministers to ‘get heavy with police’ to enforce lockdown rules, according to the messages. 

The most recent revelation revealed that Hancock took his lover Gina Coladangelo to private dinners with the US Secretary of State at a G7 summit before later removing the suggestion he invited her.

The Health Secretary, who was later forced to resign after his affair with Ms Coladangelo emerged, brought his lover, who he had been seeing for a month, to two private dinners with his US counterpart as his guest.

Representatives for Matt Hancock have been contacted by MailOnline for comment. 

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