The decline and fall of Matt Hancock

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God.

Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence.

Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing demeanour; he looked cocky and guilty at the same time. We might politely say he was lacking in gravitas, or less politely that he had the air of someone in Year 7 who’d had their lunch money nicked. When they complained, their bag was thrown between two bullies, and the teacher on playground duty just shook her head sadly, took another drag on her fag, and called, ‘Matthew, you must learn to ignore them’.

If anyone in public life was going to be caught up in an expose, first in the Sun back in 2021 (for his affair with his aide Gina Coladangelo), and then in the Daily Telegraph this week (for his handling of Covid testing during the pandemic), it was our Matt.

The journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who shared Hancock’s messages with the Daily Telegraph, has stated her understandable wish to get all this out into the open before we get clubbed into insensitivity by an interminable public inquiry. But making politicians chary of putting anything at all down in writing might have unintentionally bad consequences.

WhatsApp, the messaging service used by Hancock, is the home of the casual scabrous remark and the bad taste joke between knowing circles of like-minded chums. It is a recorded conversation, and we all know what conversations are like. Imagine if there had been reams of WhatsApps for the Iraq invasion, or for the Suez crisis or the Profumo affair. The pandemic is the first political mega-crisis of the WhatsApp era, so of course it has leaked. Fascinating though it is to rip the lid off, it is surely time, for the wider benefit of smoother government, to bring back the telephone landline.

Hancock is naturally the first focus of the Daily Telegraph’s treasure trove. After his brief rehabilitation in the jungle, a renaissance less about him than about the public sticking two fingers up at ITV and Boy George – for who could resist that? – he was already straight back to being Matt Hancock: launching an unlikely ‘NFTs for Ukraine’ scheme, wearing fashion trainers like any other 44-year-old Tory MP, and pocketing rather higher a percentage of his ginormous Celeb fee than might have been expected.

As always, Hancock has been exposed as a chump; a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. During the pandemic, Britain needed a bland and forgettably managerial figure – a Ben Wallace, or a Nicky Morgan. Instead, we got Hancock.