Hancock's Half Hour
Hancock's leaked texts are the latest sorry episode in a career defined by hubris and incompetence.
Earlier this week, a series of WhatsApp messages purporting to have been sent by Matt Hancock were leaked to the Telegraph newspaper. These messages appear to show that Hancock ignored advice in the crucial early days of Covid-19 that everyone going into care homes should be tested for the virus. As the source of these texts was the non-too-reliable Isabelle Oakshott, an outspoken critic of – amongst other things – government lockdown policy, and given where they were published, they should perhaps be treated with some degree of healthy scepticism, and a Hancock spokesman initially claimed the messages had been ‘doctored’. The former health secretary has since issued a statement calling the leaking a ‘massive betrayal and breach of trust’ and claims there is ‘no public interest case’ as all the material had already been given to the Covid-19 public inquiry.
Whether or not these messages can be taken at face value, their release is just another episode in the sorry saga that has been Matt Hancock’s public life.
The veracity or otherwise of these specific texts seems of almost secondary importance, as with Boris Johnson’s alleged ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ comment. Johnson denied ever having said this, but the fact remains that his mismanagement of the pandemic ensured that he did let the bodies pile high in their thousands. Equally, regardless of any missing context with these texts, Matt Hancock did send the elderly to care homes to die in huge numbers. Perhaps people believe that being able to confirm these comments and messages acts as some kind of smoking gun that proves the government was being consciously reckless, but while I won’t rehash the grim stats and harrowing personal accounts here – we all lived them, we all remember them - the facts already speak for themselves. The government got call after call wrong, and, be it dodgy PPE contracts, catastrophically bad calls, or breaking the social distancing rules he was instrumental in pushing by having an affair with a colleague, right at the heart of all this was Matt Hancock.
It wasn’t just the negligent we had to endure from him, it was also the bizarre. If he wasn’t engaging in Partidge-esque attempts at parkour, he was telling shadow health secretary Rosena Allin-Khan, an A&E doctor by the way, to ‘watch her tone’. Then there was the series of increasingly unhinged TV appearances. Witness his eccentric Kay Burley interview in May 2020, during which he grinned and gurned inanely and laughed awkwardly when challenged about the expensive and ineffective track and trace app.
Worse yet was his pitiful attempt at stage school tears while being interviewed by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain in December 2022. A truly embarrassing attempt to convey human emotion that wouldn’t pass muster at the most amateur of amateur dramatic societies.
It takes some doing to be largely culpable in the unnecessary deaths of arguably tens of thousands of your own citizens, as well as at the centre of so many PR gaffs, and none of that to even be your professional nadir.
Since the pandemic effectively ended, Hancock has been on a mission to detoxify his public image, no doubt with an eye on his post-politics career.
The fact that his first public project outside of politics was to appear on ITV’s “I’m A Celbrity, Get Me Out of Here” speaks volumes about how he sees himself. Appearing on the show at all was tasteless enough, but was made infinitely worse by the rumoured £320,000 fee he received for it. Early on in his stint in the Australian ‘jungle’, Hancock told fellow contestants that he was looking for ‘forgiveness’, and to raise awareness of dyslexia. He also claimed he would be donating his fee to charity.
Having finished as a runner-up on the show, it transpired that Hancock had donated just £10,000, equivalent to less the 4% of his fee, between two charities.
Then came his memoirs. Published in December 2022, ‘Pandemic Diaries’, ironically co-written with Oakshott, the woman who would come to leak those texts, was Hancock’s telling of his story at ‘the forefront of Britain’s battle against the virus, trying to steer the country through the crisis’. It took a truly hubristic self-regard to believe that his story was one that needed to be told at any time, let alone so soon after some of the worst days of the pandemic, but this is the level of narcissism we have now come to expect.
I haven't read the diaries, and it's heartening that not many have, but the few extracts I've been able to stomach are staggering in their levels of self-aggrandisement. Hancock pictures himself as the daring hero of the hour. In Hancock’s eyes, this is all HIS story. Not ours. Not those who buried their loved ones (or who were unable to do so), it's all about him. He's the doomed romantic hero. He’s the man leading the batte charge. Equal parts Romeo and Dustin Hoffman in ‘Outbreak’. If these extracts are anything to go by, this is the ultimate piece of political fan fiction, but one where the fan has cast themselves in the lead role.
Throughout all of this, Hancock’s TikTok account has truly been something to behold. By which I mean something horrendous. From posting videos of himself hanging out with his new celeb jungle chums Boy George and Sean Walsh, to dancing in a London nightclub or flipping pancakes at home. The undoubted worst of all this was a video he posted in support of Newcastle United ahead of their League Cup Final appearance against Manchester United at Wembley. His attempts to convey his fandom were about as convincing as David Cameron’s attempts to convince us all he was a lifelong Aston Villa fan. Pretending to be a football fan is one of the oldest and most transparent ways for politicians to portray themselves as one of the people, and the one is just an ordinary chap energy evident in this clip is astonishing. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, many people pointed out that he was wearing the very same shirt he supposedly auctioned for charity three years ago. In a follow up video, Hancock claimed the person buying the shirt had given it back to him as a gift, but this did nothing to detract from how awkward the first clip was. In fact, I hope no Newcastle players view it, or they'll cringe so hard they'll tear a hamstring.
And maybe that’s his tactic; to post so much of this stuff that his negligence in public office will simply be buried under a deluge of cringe. If so, it won’t work.
I don’t know who is advising Hancock on his various ‘projects’, but with these attempts to rebrand himself and somehow offset the part he played in the worst years most of us can remember, he is inadvertently pushing his failings further into the spotlight. The best thing he could have done would have been to quietly disappear from public life and slink off to some cushy, well-paying gig in the private sector. His ego has led him down another path, one that leads to him writing himself deeper into our modern history, and for all the wrong reasons. Despite his efforts to reverse-engineer his public imagine, when history remembers Matt Hancock, it will not do so fondly. People will forget neither his clownish recent behaviour, nor his part in a hellish few years, and few will be willing to offer him the forgiveness he sought in the jungle.
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