It’s somehow appropriate that Matt Hancock finished third in the 2022 series of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Third is a word that fits him neatly. Third choice. Third wheel. Third rate. Third is the ‘and you did great, too!’ of victories. The day before, Hancock had donned the brass hot pants of ‘the Bronze Bronco’ for the annual Cyclone challenge, as if bottom rung on the podium already belonged to him.
His continued presence in the jungle – as straightforward, likeable contestants such as Charlene White and Mike Tindall, and less affable ‘characters’ like Boy George and Chris Moyles fell by the wayside – had started to rattle some of the commentariat. To be fair, these people are already fairly rattled on a good day. The comedian Emma Kennedy, who has been transformed by social media from personable supporting player to panicky crank, became convinced yesterday that a dark conspiracy was afoot by Hancock’s PR agent and a ‘betting syndicate’ to see Hancock grasp the crown of Jungle King by nefarious means. TikTok was involved in this apparently, somehow. Emily Thornberry started spreading this conspiracy too, which will have done the coffers of ITV no harm at all. It’s especially odd as Kennedy at least must know that all celebrities on reality shows have PR people trying to big up their clients, and that this tactic never works.
There was a flavour of the Leave vote and the 2017 general election about Hancock staying in, night after night
It was also plainly evident that Hancock could not win, and likely not make the final two. He was up against two exceptionally well-adjusted and likeable people in Jill Scott and Owen Warner – young, uncomplaining, funny, game for anything, every parent’s dream kids. In fact, the kind of people who nearly always win such competitions. The loss of Tindall at the last hurdle almost guaranteed Scott’s win, as the single transferable votes of his supporters was never likely to transfer to Hancock.
But Hancock has won a different prize. The announcement that he was joining the jungle was one of those things that’s simultaneously a big surprise and makes you roll your eyes and say ‘oh, of course he is’. Lack of judgement and clumsy self-promotion are what his PR could justly claim are the brand values of Matt Hancock.
The bigger surprise, of the genuinely unforeseeable kind, came as the tasks and challenges of the jungle unfolded. Hancock’s high levels of emotional coolness, his physical competence and determination, were a revelation. Seeming to be one thing – weedy, clumsy, gauche – but turning out to be another is surely a factor in the public popularity that saw him sail through to the final after the initial first few days of being fed to snakes, buried alive, etc. There was none of the expected catharsis for the public in Hancock insouciantly chowing down on camel’s vagina. Not a hint of ‘oho, now he’s suffering!’ We soon tired of it and turned our eyes on Moyles and Boy George.
On the immediate practical level, in a survival situation (or as much as you can get of one in a TV game show format) Hancock, with his blithe physicality and level head, bringing back stars and thus food for his campmates, proved to be useful. And that was something nobody, in the jungle or watching the jungle, expected.
I noticed my opinion of him reverting the moment he crossed the rope bridge for his exit interview with Ant and Dec. Away from any imperative need for those qualities, back in our technological world of plenty, he was instantly just bloody Matt Hancock again, irritating little man, cheat and ‘love rat’, overpromoted and banal, who thinks he is something extremely special. The kind of politician who could invent, with a straight face, their own personally branded app. His immediate public groping of his paramour brought it all back – the over enthusiastic tonguing of the nerdy teenage boy at the school disco displaying that he is one of the alpha lads, after all.
But there’s a bigger lesson to be learnt from Hancock’s surprising survival to the final, and that lesson is about the sheer bloody-mindedness of the British public. We hate being taken for mugs, but we hate being taken for granted even more. There was a flavour of the Leave vote and the 2017 general election about Hancock staying in, night after night; another demonstration of the public pushing back when their compliance is assumed.
If a narrative is set, the temptation to throw a spanner into its works is very strong. This is one of the reasons why I think the Conservatives might still, just possibly, scrape a majority at the next election, particularly when the alternative looks more or less the same. There is nothing of Jill Scott or Owen Warner in Keir Starmer or any of his front bench. We’d do well to keep that in mind.
Comments