Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The hypocrisy of Matt Hancock

People were banned from kissing under laws that Hancock came up with. Is that fair?

Matt Hancock pictured with his aide Gina Coladangelo (Getty images)

Matt Hancock has not, we can agree, made it his business to lighten the public mood during the pandemic. That lugubrious face was designed by nature for a downbeat message. Who can forget his injunction to ‘hug carefully’ and responsibly as lockdown eased? (Before that, his regulations meant no one got within hugging distance of anyone.) He would, he said, be hugging his parents outside: ‘I’m really looking forward to hugging you, dad, but we’ll probably do it outside and keep the ventilation going: hands, face and space’.

Well! Hands, face and space weren’t quite what came to mind looking at the completely fabulous if grainy pictures in the Sun of Hancock in a clinch – a real adolescent snog – with his adviser, Gina Coladangelo, an old university friend and PR boss. 

You may recall the fuss last year at him employing his close friend as an adviser on a £15,000 contract paid by the taxpayer. What were the attributes Hancock found most compelling in his decision to appoint his old friend? We were never told, though it has emerged that the salary may be – or has been – raised by a princely £5,000. A friend of the Health Secretary told the Sun about the story that ‘no rules have been broken’. Quite so.

The pictures of Hancock’s snog are from 6 May this year, but obliging Whitehall whistleblowers told the Sun that the pair have been regularly caught in clinches together – ‘clinches’! It is one of those words you normally only see in stories like this. The other is ‘tryst’, which never appears in any other context. As in (from the Sun‘s report today): ‘The office where the tryst happened is where Mr Hancock famously hangs his Damien Hirst portrait of the Queen’.

Tory sex scandals aren’t what they were

Oh my goodness! Just think of that.

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