NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens stays tight-lipped when asked whether Matt Hancock is ‘hopeless’
NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens has failed to confirm he has confidence in Matt Hancock.
Asked repeatedly if, having worked alongside the health secretary during the pandemic, he has confidence in his ability, Sir Simon refused to give Mr Hancock his support.
Pressed on whether the health secretary is hopeless, the NHS boss smirks after an awkward pause and fails to answer.
“I mean, that is a political question,” he added.
Matt Hancock has said he does not think he is hopeless
It comes a day after Dominic Cummings published expletive-laden WhatsApp messages, allegedly from Boris Johnson, in which the PM appears to call Mr Hancock “hopeless”.
The PM’s former senior aide published the messages as part of a 7,000-word blogpost which appears to include a series of claims about Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock, including that the prime minister considered removing responsibility for PPE from the health secretary.
In one exchange, which Mr Cummings said was part of late-night messages on 26 March 2020, he and Mr Johnson appear to be discussing actions from “MH” in boosting the UK’s COVID testing capacity.
The screenshot shows a reply from the prime minister stating: “Totally f****** hopeless”.
On Wednesday, Dominic Cummings published messages allegedly from the PM
At a lobby briefing on Wednesday, Downing Street did not deny the messages were authentic, but assured journalists that the PM has full confidence in the health secretary.
“I am not planning to engage with every allegation put forward, the prime minister has worked very closely with the health secretary throughout and will continue to do so,” the spokesman said.
Asked if there were security concerns about Mr Cummings’s disclosure of messages, the spokesman added: “I don’t plan to get into individual cases, there are rules published for former advisers to observe.”
As he left the Department of Health for the House of Commons on Wednesday, Mr Hancock was asked if he believed himself to be “hopeless”.
“I don’t think so,” he replied.
Pressed again on the matter on Thursday, the health secretary said: “I’m not going to get in to that.”
But when the text messages were put to Sir Simon on Thursday, he could not say that he had full faith in the health secretary.
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‘Are you hopeless Mr Hancock?’
Sir Simon is due to step down as head of NHS England at the end of July after having overseen the COVID vaccination rollout to adults.
The PM has previously praised Sir Simon for leading the NHS with “great distinction” and he is due to become a peer in the House of Lords following his departure.
But there has not always been such an amicable relationship between Sir Simon and Mr Johnson, who attended Oxford University together, with tensions occurring between ministers and top health officials throughout the pandemic.
There were concerns earlier in the year that the NHS would not be able to successfully roll out the vaccination programme.
But those sceptical have since been proven wrong, with Mr Hancock announcing on Thursday that all over 18s will be able to take up the offer of a jab.
Possible successors to Sir Simon include Conservative peer and former head of the government’s Test and Trace programme Baroness Dido Harding.
Baroness Harding, who is the wife of Tory MP John Penrose, formally entered the running to become the top boss of England’s healthcare system on Thursday.
German law enforcement seized 34 million euros ($38 million) in cryptocurrency from eXch, a cryptocurrency platform allegedly used to launder funds stolen after Bybit’s record-breaking $1.4 billion hack.
The seizure, announced on May 9 by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Frankfurt’s main prosecutor’s office, involved multiple crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Dash (DASH). The move marks the third-largest crypto confiscation in the BKA’s history.
The authorities also seized eXch’s German server infrastructure with over eight terabytes of data and shut down the platform, the announcement added.
eXch exchanged crypto without AML
In the statement, the BKA described eXch as a “swapping” service that allowed users to exchange various crypto assets without implementing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures.
The platform had operated since 2014 and reportedly facilitated about $1.9 billion in crypto transfers, some of which were believed to be of “criminal origin,” including assets laundered during the Bybit hack.
“Among other things, a portion of the $1.5 billion stolen from the Bybit crypto exchange, which was hacked on Feb. 21, 2025, is said to have been exchanged via eXch,” the authorities wrote.
Multisig, FixedFloat among laundering cases
According to a post by crypto sleuth ZachXBT, eXch was also involved in laundering millions of funds from other crypto thefts and exploits, including Multisig, FixedFloat and the $243 million Genesis creditor theft.
Those were in addition to “countless phishing drainer services over the past few years with refusal to block addresses and freeze orders,” ZachXBT said.
ZachXBT was among the first security analysts to report on eXch’s links to laundering $35 million of crypto assets stolen from Bybit soon after the hack was confirmed.
Related: Hacken CEO sees ‘no shift’ in crypto security as April hacks hit $357M
“Lazarus Group transferred 5K ETH from the Bybit Hack to a new address and began laundering funds via eXch (a centralized mixer) and bridging funds to Bitcoin via Chainflip,” ZachXBT wrote in a Telegram post on Feb. 22.
eXch announced termination of services by May 1
After initially denying involvement in laundering funds from the Bybit hack, eXch eventually announced it would cease operations by May 1 in a Bitcoin Talk post published in mid-April.
“Even though we have been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure […], we don’t see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] simply because some people misinterpret our goals,” it wrote.
Addressing the seizure, senior public prosecutor Benjamin Krause stressed the importance of action against “quick and anonymous opportunities for money laundering for any amount.”
“Crypto swapping is an essential component of the underground economy, used to conceal incriminated funds from illegal activities such as hacking or trading in stolen payment card data, thus making them available to perpetrators,” he said.
Magazine: Finally blast into space with Justin Sun, Vietnam’s new national blockchain: Asia Express
Politics
Red Wall MPs should focus on two-child benefit cap rather than winter fuel, Harriet Harman says
Red Wall MPs should push for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted rather than a reversal of the winter fuel payment policy, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Baroness Harman, the former Labour Party chair, told Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this would hand the group a “progressive win” rather than simply “protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer” over winter fuel.
Earlier this week, a number of MPs in the Red Wall – Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north of England – reposted a statement on social media in which they said the leadership’s response to the local elections had “fallen on deaf ears”.
They singled out the cut to the winter fuel allowance as an issue that was raised on the doorstep and urged the government to rethink the policy, arguing doing so “isn’t weak, it takes us to a position of strength”.
Labour’s decision to means test the policy has snatched the benefit away from millions of pensioners.
But Baroness Harman said a better target for the group could be an overhaul of George Osborne’s two-child benefit cap.
The cap, announced in 2015 as part of Lord David Cameron’s austerity measures, means while parents can claim child tax credit or Universal Credit payments for their first and second child, they can’t make claims for any further children they have.
Labour faced pressure to remove the cap in the early months of government, with ministers suggesting in February that they were considering relaxing the limit.
Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby that this could be a sensible pressure point for Red Wall MPs to target.
She said: “It could be that they have a kind of progressive win, and it might not be a bad thing to do in the context of an overall strategy on child poverty.
“Let’s see whether instead of just protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer, they can build a bridge to a new progressive set of policies.”
Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Red Wall group, suggested that her party’s “connection” to a core group of voters “died” with the decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
“We need to reset the government,” she told Electoral Dysfunction. “The biggest way to do that is by tackling issues such as winter fuel payments.
“I think we should raise the thresholds so that people perhaps who are paying a higher level of tax are the only people who are exempt from getting it.”
Pic: AP
A group of MPs in the Red Wall, thought to number about 40, met on Tuesday night following the fallout of local election results in England, which saw Labour lose the Runcorn by-election and control of Doncaster Council to Reform UK.
Following the results, Sir Keir said “we must deliver that change even more quickly – we must go even further”.
Some Labour MPs believe it amounted to ignoring voters’ concerns.
Read more:
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One of the MPs who was present at the meeting told Sky News there was “lots of anger at the government’s response to the results”.
“People acknowledged the winter fuel allowance was the main issue for us on the doorstep,” they said.
“There is a lack of vision from this government.”
Another added: “Everyone was furious.”
Downing Street has ruled out a U-turn on means testing the winter fuel payment, following newspaper reports earlier this week that one might be on the cards.
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