The UK’s former Health Secretary plotted to “deploy the new variant” of Covid-19 to “frighten the pants off everyone” into complying with lockdown, leaked text messages show.

The damning messages between Matt Hancock and media adviser Damon Poole in the run-up to Christmas 2020 show the behind-the-scenes planning to use “Project Fear” to prepare the British public for another Covid lockdown.

They are part of a massive trove of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages obtained by the UK’s Telegraph, dubbed the Lockdown Files, showing how government ministers and officials used scare tactics to force compliance at the height of the pandemic.

In the conversation on December 13, revealed by The Telegraph on Saturday, Poole informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “rather than doing too much forward signalling, we can roll pitch with the new strain”.

“We frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain,” Hancock agreed.

“Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change,” Poole said.

“When do we deploy the new variant,” Hancock asked.

Poole then warned they needed to be “cautious”, saying the “big risk with the variant” was that “right wing papers go for a renewed push for let it rip on the basis the vaccines strategy is undermined”.

“That’s why we reassure on the vaccine,” Hancock replied.

At the start of December 2020, the UK had emerged from its second national lockdown, a one-month “circuit breaker”, and entered a tiered system which saw different areas of the country under different restrictions.

One week after those messages, Hancock did the rounds of national TV to spread the message. “The new variant is out of control and we need to bring it under control,” he told the BBC.

“This news about the new variant has been an incredibly difficult end to frankly an awful year, and it’s important for everybody to essentially act like they might have the virus. That’s the way that we can control it together.”

In another interview with Sky News he warned Covid cases in the “tier four areas” had “absolutely rocketed”. “So we’ve got a long way to go to sort this,” he said.

“Essentially, we’ve got to get that vaccine rolled out to keep people safe … I think given how much faster this new variant spreads it is going to be very difficult to keep it under control until we have the vaccine rolled out.”

British authorities’ use of so-called “nudge” tactics to scare the public into Covid compliance has previously come under fire, with a group of psychologists last year describing the behaviour of civil servants and government scientists as “grossly unethical”.

During the pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government denied it was scaremongering, with Hancock’s department describing those accusations as “misleading”.

But the devastating leak of Hancock’s messages in the Lockdown Files has revealed UK officials explicitly plotting to do just that.

In one conversation during the third national lockdown in January 2021, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case said the “the fear/guilt factor” would be “vital” in “ramping up the messaging”.

The Lockdown Files have broadly called into question decision-making behind the Covid response — from lockdowns and school closures to social distancing and face masks — showing that “despite public claims to always ‘follow the science’, key decisions were made on the fly for political reasons”, The Telegraph writes.

In one set of messages, Case and Hancock mocked members of the public who were forced to isolate in “shoebox” quarantine hotels.

“I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoebox,” Case wrote. “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?”

Hancock replied, “None. But 149 chose to enter the country and are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”

“Hilarious,” Case wrote back.

The revelations have sparked outrage.

“My mate who had to spend two grand to be locked in a s**t hotel room in Heathrow for ten days so he could get home to see his terminally ill father before he died did not find this anywhere near as hilarious as Case and Hancock did,” wrote digital consultant Sharon O’Dea.

“Hotel quarantine was disastrous for families who paid thousands, those with disabilities and the travel industry. Plus it was found to do sod all in stopping Covid spread. Good that [Matt Hancock] and Simon Case thought it was a jolly old laugh then,” said The Times journalist Ben Clatworthy.

Former NHS surgeon Dr Anthony Hinton wrote, “Look at the date. Remember the Kent variant — that’s why I got locked down in Switzerland having arrived from UK. All just made up theatre. These people should be in prison.”

The WhatsApp messages, which have not been independently verified, were provided to The Telegraph by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who co-authored Hancock’s book Pandemic Dairies.

In a statement last week, Hancock slammed Oakeshott for the “massive betrayal and breach of trust”.

“I am also sorry for the impact on the very many people — political colleagues, civil servants and friends — who worked hard with me to get through the pandemic and save lives,” he said.

 “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach. All the materials for the book have already been made available to the inquiry, which is the right, and only, place for everything to be considered properly and the right lessons to be learned. As we have seen, releasing them in this way gives a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda.”

He continued, “Isabel and I had worked closely together for more than a year on my book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office. Isabel repeatedly reiterated the importance of trust throughout, and then broke that trust.”

Hancock said he would not be commenting further “on any other stories or false allegations that Isabel will make”.

“I will respond to the substance in the appropriate place, at the inquiry, so that we can properly learn all the lessons based on a full and objective understanding of what happened in the pandemic, and why,” he said.

In response to the leaks, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said last week that the official Covid inquiry was the “right way” to investigate the government’s handling of the pandemic, rather than relying on “piecemeal bits of information”.

Hancock resigned in disgrace in June 2021 after being caught on camera having an affair with an aide, in breach of his own Covid restrictions.

- Frank Chung, news.com.au