What does Matt Hancock offer the Conservative party? He’s a former Remainer who has stayed loyal in Theresa May’s Cabinet and so has a bit of a tricky pitch to make to a party furious about the outgoing Prime Minister’s failure to deliver Brexit. He also hasn’t got an eye-catching drugs story to get attention, for better or worse.
His solution this morning was to offer a slightly trippy leadership launch at which he went entirely overboard on the optimism, energy and bizarre motivational aphorisms. He told a slightly bewildered and haggard-looking press pack that “you are the future of Britain!”, gesticulated at the view behind him and declared “I look at the world around me and I think wow!”
The world around him was, incidentally, looking grey and drenched in the pouring rain. It was pointless, he argued, to be prime minister unless you knew your heart. And he offered an “emotionally-charged platform”. Guests had all been handed Matt Hancock-branded goody bags containing a charger, which now seemed a rather ominous gift. What would happen if you plugged it in?
This rather cheesy pitch is sincere Hancock, but it also had a serious purpose, which was to get him some attention in a noisy and angry race, and to suggest that he is a candidate who wants to cheer Britain up a bit. Buried under all the cringe-worthy slogans is a reasonably serious policy platform, too, with Hancock trying to argue that he has a respected Brexit delivery plan, that he’s got plans for social care and that he knows how to deliver these things. He tried to pitch himself as the realistic candidate, too, taking a shot at the others’ proposals for tax cuts by saying he would only cut taxes when the country can afford it.
This was the first launch in a veritable Freshers’ Fair of events today. Hancock needed to make himself memorable, and he has certainly done that. But he may well find that motivational phrases aren’t enough to convince an anxious and angry Tory membership that he can be trusted to deliver Brexit.
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