Matt Hancock has spoken candidly of his passionate love affair with special advisor Gina Coladangelo in a tell-all interview on a business podcast.
Speaking to Steven Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO podcast, the former Health Secretary revealed his struggles in school, the decision to allow Covid patients back into care homes and being accused of crocodile tears on Good Morning Britain.
Mr Hancock spoke of the devastation of hearing The Sun would be publishing CCTV images from his office of him embracing Gina and the “very public” fallout that destroyed both of their marriages.
He revealed they fell in love as she worked for weeks “ironically” advising him on how to communicate in an “emotionally intelligent” way as Health Secretary.
“I’ve known Gina for more than half of my life,” he added.
“And we first actually worked together on student radio back in the Oxford days.
“And so we spent a lot of time together, ironically, trying to get me to be able to communicate in a more emotionally intelligent way.
“And we fell in love. And that’s something that was completely outside of my control. And of course, I regret the pain that that’s caused and the very, very, very public nature.
“Anybody who’s been through this knows how difficult it is, how painful it is doing that in public is incredibly painful, but I fell in love with someone.”
His 15-year marriage to his wife Martha broke down in the wake of the scandal.
Mr Hancock has three children from his marriage.
Ms Coladangelo also has three children with her multi-millionaire husband Oliver Tress, who founded Oliver Bonas.
“It was awful because we obviously knew what was going on, but we wanted to do this as unpainfully as possible,” Mr Hancock said.
“And by the release of those images, obviously, that caused a huge amount of pain.
“Anybody knows how difficult it is ending a relationship, and we have six children. It’s tough. But Gina and I love each other very deeply. Seven, eight months later. It gets a bit easier with time. I don’t hold it against anybody because I take responsibility.”
But a more relaxed Hancock, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, even joked about personally helping put a journalistic exemption of data privacy laws through Parliament that may have allowed those fateful pictures to be published.
He finished by saying he wanted to have a “happy, loving and fulfilling relationship” for the rest of his days.
“We’ve been through a lot together”, he said. “That’s the joyous bit. That’s the easy bit. There’s a lot of very difficult things that I have to deal with. And having fallen in love with Gina, that’s the easy bit.”
Hancock also joked about not being invited to any of the alleged Downing Street parties and Boris Johnson’s grovelling apology when texts describing Mr Hancock as “totally f*****g hopeless” were leaked by Dominic Cummings.
Showing that it was all water under the bridge, Mr Hancock compared his boss to former US President Barack Obama.
He said: “Boris has a background as different from the voters of Hartlepool as it’s possible to get. But he can reach people. I put him in the Barack Obama category, actually. For people of a different politics.
“Because he’s one of the few people who really just will withstand the sort of criticism of the next day’s press in order to try to actually say how he feels. He’s a very emotionally engaged person.”
The Diary of a CEO episode can be listened to here.
