feared being labelled ‘racist’ over raising concerns that Covid was spreading faster among certain communities, new leaked messages reveal.  

WhatsApp exchanges from August 2020 show , a key figure at the Department of Health at the time, warn her boss Mr Hancock not to ‘our voters’ because of the ‘behaviour of non compliant communities’. 

She later suggested there could be ‘race riots’ if he chose to lockdown the ‘white working-class’ area of Colne in Lancashire while the virus was quickly spreading in the neighbouring town of Nelson. 

The messages, the latest to be published by , also reveal another Conservative MP told then prime minister, , that local lockdown restrictions were fuelling ‘race relation issues’ in his constituency. 

Texts unearthed today reveal Mr Hancock, then health secretary, told Ms Dorries on August 20, 2020: ‘I don’t want to be called a racist but we’ve got to name it.’

Ms Dorries, who at the time served as minister for patient safety, suicide prevention and mental health, responded: ‘We can’t put whole towns and villages with extremely low R rates in lockdown (our voters) and deprive those people of work and family bcse of the behaviour of non compliant communities.’ 

MailOnline has not seen or independently verified the WhatsApp messages, leaked to The Daily Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who helped Mr Hancock write his book Pandemic Diaries. If you have any type of questions concerning where and how you can use slot mania terpercaya, you could call us at the internet site.  

The R rate – which epidemiologists use measure a disease’s ability to spread – is, in essence, the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.