KentOnline's political editor Paul Francis says it was "inevitable" Health Secretary Matt Hancock would have to resign.

The cabinet minister announced earlier today he was standing down after revelations over his private life and breaches of Covid guidance.

Paul Francis says:

Matt Hancock’s resignation as secretary of state for health was inevitable and followed a familiar pattern.

The first line of defence was that this was a matter of his personal not his political life; a defence which had more holes than a sieve once awkward questions arose about out how his aide had been appointed to a position of an NHS non-executive director.

Nevertheless, cabinet colleagues tried to shore up his position to little avail and further grisly tabloid revelations today only heightened the pressure on him to quit.

The most damaging part of this episode was not the fact that he was having a relationship with his aide. It was that in doing so he opened the door to the charge that he was in breach of the rules he was expecting the public to abide by.

And there is nothing voters like less than politicians instructing them to do something and ignoring it themselves.

In a brief statement that he issued yesterday he offered a perfunctory apology saying that he had let people down.

You got the sense that the only thing he was really sorry about was being found out.

Should he have been sacked? Quite possibly but not by this Prime Minister who responded by saying that he had accepted the apology and that was that.

The Prime Minister was either badly advised or decided not to heed advice from those who felt Mr Hancock should be handed his P45 straight away.

The Prime Minister seems to have a blind spot when it comes to these matters; the convoluted saga involving his former advisor Dominic Cummings is a case in point.

Here too the issue was a senior political figure at the heart of government brazenly flouting the rules that everyone else was expected to follow.

And it is worth remembering that an awful lot of Conservative MPs, including several in Kent, were quick to demand Mr Cummings either resign or be sacked for precisely the same reason that Mr Hancock has been forced to hand in his notice.

Arguably, the demise of Mr Hancock has left the PM facing just as many questions as his hapless former health secretary.

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