The depths to which Matt Hancock is willing to sink really do know no bounds.
The disgraced former health secretary may be gagging at the thought of his next Bushtucker Trial, but his antics down under are making the rest of us sick. It’s not even all that gushing and gurning at the I’m A Celebrity cameras – it’s the brazenness of his fake sincerity that makes me want to heave my guts up.
Wide-eyed, warm-hearted Matt insists he’s embarked on his three-week televised jaunt in the jungle not for the money but out of patriotic duty.
“It’s as clear as day that politicians like me must go to where the people are – particularly those who are politically disengaged,” he said last week. “We must wake up and embrace popular culture.”
That’s right. The man you can never unsee groping that bottom, in that office, on CCTV, wants you to believe he’s on a moral crusade in Australia – as though eating a plate of kangaroo anuses 9,000 miles away is somehow an act of public service.
If you absolutely must lower the tone and mention the money, Hancock is extremely keen to casually stress that he’s donating an unspecified fraction of his £400,000 ITV appearance fee to a hospice in his local constituency.
As a palliative care doctor myself, I struggle with the notion of a serving MP trying to sweeten public opinion towards his money-grabbing stunts by broadcasting to the nation his apparent generosity.
We all know how zealously Shell, Esso and the other big oil firms try to greenwash their brands, but Hancock has taken this to new depths of distastefulness.
He’s actually attempting to “deathwash” his primetime ITV slot – using patients at the ends of their lives to persuade you that his TV appearance is, in truth, an act of magnanimity towards others.
He must think the British public are idiots. Hancock thought nothing of sending hospital patients with Covid back out to their care homes, causing thousands of potentially avoidable deaths.
Then, rather than apologising for this casual disregard for human life, he stood up in parliament and lied through his teeth, insisting that “right from the start” he’d thrown a “protective ring” around our care homes.
He lied about PPE too, claiming there were never any real problems with PPE supply – even as woefully unprotected NHS nurses and doctors were thrown to the wolves, dying of the Covid they caught while trying to save others.
Most unforgivably of all, he oversaw a staggering 200,000 deaths from Covid – or £2 for every person who died, based on the ITV windfall he’s currently pocketing.
We all know politicians can sometimes be dishonest, adulterous, vain or scheming, but it takes a special kind of dishonourable member of parliament to be all these traits in one rotten package.
While absent Hancock is playing with grubs in the jungle, his constituents – whose interests he is paid £84,144 a year to serve – are facing the greatest cost-of-living crisis in a generation.
Parents are choosing between food and heat for their kids. Increasing numbers of hospitals are opening food banks for NHS staff. The national Covid inquiry has barely begun, yet Hancock is dallying with exotic animal genitalia for megabucks.
To top it all, based on what I’m seeing on my TV screen, he is clearly narcissistic enough to believe he can win over the viewing public by working overtime at being a “genuine” likeable man of the people.
Having shown us, as he puts it, “the human side of the guy behind the podium”, he obviously hopes to emerge from the jungle as some kind of rehabilitated hero. Is it really a crime, after all, to allow yourself to be intoxicated by the power of love? Didn’t lovesick Matt simply follow his heart?
The truth is, Hancock is no celebrity. He’s a failed health secretary and cheating husband who broke the lockdown rules he wrote, doubled down on the lies he told, helped enrich his mates via the infamous VIP PPE lane, and couldn’t resist monetising the infamy he acquired as a result of his ineptitude at managing the pandemic.
I really didn’t think my opinion of the man could sink any lower, but the man is half-human, half-depth charge. Slime, slurry, cockroaches, worms – Hancock is up to his neck in so much more than that.
