Whitehall sources described Mr Hancock's 'fanboy' attitude towards tech and 'tendency to overpromise and only sometimes deliver'
Standing at the same Downing Street podium where he had promised the government's contact-tracing app would"save lives", Mr Hancock now admitted it would not be ready for the lifting of lockdown.
To some onlookers, it was an exercise in deflection."Like when you're playing paintball and you throw up a smoke grenade," as one tech industry source put it. Such is the turnaround that a source close to the health secretary sung the company's praises, saying:"We've been working incredibly well with Apple."
More than a dozen people who witnessed the development of the contact-tracing app, from inside Downing Street, Whitehall, the NHS and the tech world, agreed that the project had two fundamental flaws. The first was the expectations placed upon it. To explain why a highly experimental project was given this prominence, Whitehall sources talk about Mr Hancock's"fanboy" attitude towards technology and what one insider called his"tendency to overpromise and only sometimes deliver"., when Mr Hancock launched a new innovation unit for the NHS, NHSX, and appointed former diplomat Matthew Gould as its CEO.
This dynamic was evident from the outset. At a decisive Department of Health meeting on Friday 6 March, sceptics such as Downing Street adviser Ben Warner argued that the app would not bring enough clear benefits. Two people who worked on the app during this period recall a febrile atmosphere, as a"hodge-podge of suppliers and contractors" tried to move at rapid pace without being entirely sure where they were going.
To imagine how it might have turned out if it had come together, it is only necessary to look at the other initiative launched by NHSX at that moment: a vast data store designed to pull in data from across health and social care. Yet already problems were emerging with the strict rules Apple placed on how apps could use Bluetooth.
"And then a couple of weeks later they say, 'Oh we are going to release a major OS change,' and the rest is history." Faced with the possibility of an app that Mr Ferrari believed would be"plagued by a number of technical limitations", the Italian government quickly approved a move to Apple and Google's framework.
This constraint shaped the entire project, because it was impossible to keep an app based on self-reporting secure without collecting data on how it was used. "That's the key question," says Professor Lillian Edwards, a member of the app's Ethics Advisory Board, who watched with bemusement as the project lost momentum.
Currently being developed by local firm Kainos, the region's app is expected to be released by the end of July. Even the number of downloads was hard to fix. On 14 May, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps declared that 72,300 people,"over half the residents of the Isle of Wight", had installed the app. A few days later, Downing Street put the total at"roughly 60,000".
But the final test which showed that the app was only detecting 4% of iPhones had to be conducted away from the island, an NHSX source said, because it wasn't set up to answer the most basic question of all: whether it actually worked. Now, on 18 July, she made a decisive intervention, seizing on the information as evidence that the app wasn't working. Mr Hancock made the announcement at the daily press briefing, but NHSX sources say the key move came from Baroness Harding.
Some Android phones reported a constant signal strength or spat out numbers at random. Signals changed because of how a phone sat in the hand. "Google and Apple have given governments an abacus in an era of machine learning," wrote Tom Loosemore, one of the founders of the Government Digital Service, in an article shared within Downing Street and the Department of Health.Tom Loosemore, co-founder of GDS
The choice came down to priorities. As one adviser put it, Apple and Google's app would detect everyone, but it wouldn't detect the most risky people very well. With the NHSX app, the reverse was true. Yet, with no timeline set for its arrival, it is still unclear whether England will ever have a contact-tracing app.
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