As the celebrities are indeed got out of there (and hats off to Jill Scott – I said she should win) a new phrase is born: jungle-washing. It’s when you go into the I’m a Celebrity … jungle as a politician despised from every angle, and come out of it just a regular guy, trying his best. The mechanics are opaque: Matt Hancock didn’t do anything special. He is neither altruist nor schemer, tough guy nor gadabout; you couldn’t pin anything on him that’s remotely like a personality. And yet the viewers saw a person in there anyway, and he finished in the top three.
The entire offer of his presence on the show was that it would be a chance for some meagre revenge: for everything that could have gone better during the pandemic; for every excess death and dodgy PPE contract; for each hypocrisy; hell, for the rampant destructiveness of the past 12 years. Hancock’s bland, rosy face was just waiting there like a dartboard, but the darts never came.
