Matt Hancock has said that he had “an absolute bucket of **** poured over my head” because of the Covid rule-breaking affair that broke up his marriage.
Mr Hancock, 44, who was forced to quit as health secretary after being caught in an embrace with aide Gina Coladangelo that broke social distancing rules, spoke out after he returned to the Commons for the first time in five weeks, the Mirror reported. It followed the stint in the I'm A Celebrity reality show jungle which is reported to have earned him a £400,000 fee.
In a newspaper interview published on Friday (December 2), the disgraced former minister said that public anger over his "decision to live life" had made his existence a misery. He pleaded for “forgiveness” from the public as he insisted he is “only human”.
“As a consequence of our decision to live life, we have… had a shockingly awful 18 months,” he told the Daily Mail. “It’s been absolutely horrific. I’ve had an absolute bucket of **** poured over my head. The even bigger bucket of **** has been poured over Gina’s.”
Meanwhile, Mr Hancock, who is now living with Ms Coladangelo after leaving his wife and three children following the exposure of their affair, is using a new book to point the finger at care workers for spreading Covid-19 to the elderly. He has been criticised for the decision to discharge hospital patients into care homes without tests - which has been blamed for deaths.
But in his memoir he seeks to shift the blame on to the workers in the homes. He claimed: “The vast majority of infections were brought in from the wider community, mainly by staff.”
He also reveals that Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty warned that coronavirus could kill as many as 820,000 people in the UK two months before the country was put into lockdown. And he claims that when he shared this information with his Tory Cabinet colleagues soon afterwards, the reaction was “somewhat shrug shrug”.
Mr Hancock also gave an account of how he fell in love with Ms Coladangelo, a friend from his university days, after she started working for him during the pandemic. He said: "We both realised we had feelings for each other which were as strong as they were. It was very sudden and took us both by surprise."
And he gushed about how in her role as an adviser on his speeches, his lover “help[ed] me reach emotional depths I couldn’t reach on my own”. He added: “We talked to each other and communicated at a very profound level.”
Mr Hancock left his family home on the night his affair became public last year. But he insisted that reports he woke up his son to tell him he was leaving were incorrect. "He was awake," he said.
The West Suffolk MP, who has insisted he is not leaving politics despite colleagues saying openly that his reality show escapade will mean the end of his career, added: “I want forgiveness for the mistake I made, the failure of leadership at the end of the pandemic when I fell in love with Gina and I broke the guidance that I'd signed off. I want forgiveness for the human error I made... but I'm not asking for forgiveness for how I handled the pandemic.”
He yesterday told MPs he was "honoured" to be in the Commons as he made his first appearance since heading off for his lucrative TV stint. He finally got back to work - as an independent MP because he had the Tory whip withdrawn when he went to Australia - as he tried and failed to pass a law for primary school pupils to be screened for dyslexia.
Mr Hancock has defied calls to resign for abandoning his constituents to take part in bush tucker trials involving eating a camel penis and a cow anus. He came third in the competition, won by former footballer Jill Scott.
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