How can a man have such good and bad judgement? Matt Hancock’s wife is an absolute babe, but his career – and marriage – came to an abrupt end when he chose to snog his (admittedly gorgeous) aide during the strict social distancing of a pandemic lockdown. What a clown.
Now Hancock is jungle-bound. By taking part in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! he’s following in the footsteps of political titans like Edwina Currie and Lembit Opik. It’s been said politics is show business for ugly people, and though the reality TV choices of politicos can range from the sublime (Michael Portillo, sassy and classy on various train journeys) to the ridiculous (George Galloway wearing a pink leotard and pretending to be cat) there is always something grimly appropriate about it. These are people who love to show off and get paid for it, and I’m A Celebrity gets a damn sight more viewers than the BBC’s Parliament channel.
Hancock has been stripped of the Tory whip and branded a ‘total halfwit’ by a friend of his wife. Rishi Sunak’s spokesman responded to the news about Hancock’s reality TV career by tutting that the PM would prefer MPs to be ‘working hard for their constituents’ at a ‘challenging time for the country’. He then dealt a killer blow: the PM, he said, is ‘unlikely’ to tune in. The opposition are having a field day. Shadow health minister Andrew Gwynne tweeted: ‘To be fair to Matt Hancock, I’d sooner eat wallaby anus than be a Tory MP too.’
In his defence, Hancock says he wants to use his time in the jungle to highlight his dyslexia, though how chowing down on an emu’s nipple will make us better disposed towards bad spellers I’m at a loss to understand. He has also promised to make a donation to a hospice in his constituency and insisted that he can serve his Suffolk constituents just as well while simultaneously serving as a mid-morning snack for over-excited rats ten thousand miles away.
With a book – Pandemic Diaries – to promote, a salary of £84,000 as an ‘independent’ MP and an estimated £350,000 payday whether he leaves in the first week or the last, it appears public mockery will not shame Hancock now he finds himself with two households and three children to support. Indeed, he seems to revel in his own shamelessness, swanking that: ‘It’s important to engage with voters, especially younger voters, no matter where they are, and show the human side of politicians.’
But we know all too well just how human politicians are. While Boris Johnson normalised pratfall politics by grinning on that zip-wire and spilling red wine on Carrie’s new white sofa – ‘Cripes!’ – they’ve been with us for quite a while; think of John Prescott rampaging around breaking toilet seats, or John Major and his Tory chum stripping off to do the dirty deed. We crave politicians who display dignity and discretion: this is part of Sunak’s appeal after three years of sitcom gold at Number 10.
But with the Carry On quality of politics right now, who can blame Hancock for looking for a moral compass in an underground tomb filled with creepy-crawlies? Our view of politicians is now so subterranean that it’s hard to imagine we could respect Hancock less, even as we watch him guzzling witchetty grubs while singing ‘Touch My Bum’. (Was there any better epitaph for modern politics than Opik hooking up with a Cheeky Girl?)
Looking at the career trajectory of say, Alastair Campbell, it’s hard to believe that hogging the spotlight (rather than performing selfless public service in the assistance of democracy) wasn’t what some politicos craved all along. Seeing him gauntly entreating us to let him entertain us on Channel 4’s Make Me Prime Minister is a bit like seeing Beria attempt to join in with The Great British Bake-Off.
Credibility is like negative equity. If you’re going to borrow against it in order to keep that all-important oxygen of publicity coming, you shouldn’t lose sight of that fact that ‘I’ll just tune in to see that buffoon make seven sorts of fool of himself’ can quickly become ‘O no, not that buffoon again – quick, switch over!’
In this, Matt Hancock could learn a lesson from me; first I swerved Extreme Celebrity Detox (‘It’s going to take a lot longer than three weeks – I’m practically 75 per cent cocaine,’ I told them) then Celebrity Wife Swap (with Samantha Fox and her missus; Mr Raven and I squabbled to the point of separation over who, in theory, would *get* Sam) and finally a cool half-a-million for Celebrity Big Brother. They got Germaine Greer instead, though I’m sure she didn’t get that much and, as I watched the greatest mind of a generation on a roundabout, vomiting, with a colander on her head, I knew I’d made the right choice.
It’s not like I look down on reality TV: it can be a great start in life for bright kids who didn’t go to a ‘good’ school and the right ‘uni’ to build a network that will buoy them up for life, no matter how untalented they may be. For youngsters, it can be a springboard – a gap year for the non-academic – but for those of us past the first flush of youth, it will always be a something of a swan-song.
A petition led by the pressure group ‘Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice’ is demanding that Hancock is removed from show before he even gets started:
‘Families were ripped apart by Matt Hancock’s actions, and turning on the TV to see him being paraded around as a joke is sickening. If he had any respect for families who lost loved ones to Covid-19, he would be sharing his private emails with the Covid Inquiry, not eating bugs on TV.’
But on the other hand, it could be seen as due punishment; the deputy chair of his local Tory Association said he was looking forward to seeing Hancock ‘eat a kangaroo’s penis’ while others have vowed to make surely he gets chosen for every single task. Because watching someone gag on a big slice of humble pie is an even more enjoyable spectacle when it comes served with a garnish of crocodile testes.
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