Matt Hancock book
(Picture: Matt Hancock book)Whatever you think of Matt Hancock, as Health Secretary he was dealt a very difficult hand. He had to deal with the worst pandemic in a century. And he had Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings as bosses. It is a fate I would not wish on anyone. But I have to admit, after struggling through this book, in moments of weakness I wished it on Matt Hancock.
The former health secretary – now famous for eating unmentionable body parts of innocent animals in an Australian jungle for money – has good qualities. But it is important to remember that – most people I speak to hate him. Those who know him speak of his affableness, his energy, his sharp mind. Hancock correctly recognised that a vaccine was not only possible but probable and based his strategies on – and directed his energies towards – that end. In The Pandemic Diaries he quotes from a briefing to a newspaper: “Matt Hancock is the only person here who thinks there is actually going to be a vaccine… It’s a running joke with other departments”. If the vaccine doubters had won the arguments, I shudder to think of what would have happened.
Hancock follows up the above report of negative briefing with a line that sounds like something Alan Partridge might say: “I’m certainly not going to let it deflect me from pushing vaccines at maximum speed”. It is typical Hancock: something good and then something annoying or aggravating.
This is a theme of the book – and examples of the latter quickly being to outweigh the former. In fact the frustrations begin as early as the prologue. Hancock says he has produced this book “to tell the story of what actually happened, as I experienced it”.
But even before we reach that sentence, his ego has got in the way. After describing the devastation wreaked by coronavirus on the country, Hancock writes “I was in the hot seat,” and follows that self-regarding sentence with another “From the first warning signs in Wuhan through to the massive national response, I was at the centre of events”. How are we supposed to feel about this – all that suffering, pain, death and loss, and somehow it’s a story about Matt Hancock?
It’s more than a story about him too – it’s a chance to kick his opponents, justify himself (not least over the disastrous handling of care-homes), and persuade the haters. There are certainly more than enough of those.
Something about Hancock has always invited derision – his puppyish need to be liked, his shamelessness (hidden on first glance by a well put-together and serious exterior), his Patridgism.
This book is full of the latter. When Sajid Javid sensationally resigned from Boris Johnson’s government in 2020, Hancock writes that he heard the news “sitting in my office (on my director’s chair with ‘Hancock’ across the back, a present from Pinewood Studios on a visit as Culture Secretary)”. In a fateful entry from June 2021 about the discovery of his affair with Gina Coladangelo he muses: “What price love? I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything”.
But it was the worst – and most famous – moment of Hancock’s career that turned derision into something darker and stronger: the extra-marital, handsy clinch with Coladangelo, his adviser and old university friend, caught by an intentionally repositioned CCTV camera in the Department of Health.
A man underappreciated
In part the book feels like a frustrated blast from a man who, as Hancock would point out, helped lead the vaccine drive but ended up hated. The implicit plea is: how did that happen? Yet it is no wonder that Hancock cannot understand the emotions directed at him. He is the kind of person who can write, of telling his wife he is suddenly leaving her for someone else, “it was – and remains – the very worst conversation of my life”. We hear nothing of how it might have been for Martha Hancock.
Perhaps it was this shameless disregard for those close (or ostensibly close) to him that inspired Hancock to choose Isabel Oakeshott as his co-author, an eyebrow-raising choice. Oakeshott, though her author bio from the publisher tactfully does not mention it, was behind the hatchet job biography on David Cameron, Hancock’s former boss, which included the salacious and untrue allegation involving Cameron, a pig’s head, and a part of the future Tory leader’s anatomy.
More seriously, the addition of a co-author – for a Diary? Really? – points to a crippling weakness at the heart of this book. Is it really a contemporaneous account, or has it been burnished after the fact to reflect a golden glow on the author? He explains in the prologue that it was “meticulously pieced together” later from various papers, voice notes (I heard from one political journalist that Hancock had been recording into a Dictaphone at the end of each day), emails, texts, and also, recently, interviews. That does not necessarily mean the entries have been touched up. But there are good reasons to suspect they have been.
One brief aside near the start of the book caught my eye. Hancock writes of the disgraced doctor – and harmful pusher of the MMR vaccine hoax – Andrew Wakefield that he cannot believe Wakefield “used to date the supermodel Elle Macpherson”. That entry is dated 14 January 2020. But while the improbable relationship he describes (and it was truly improbable) had dissolved by then – that fact was not known until nearly two years later, in December 2021, when Macpherson revealed she and Wakefield had split “two years ago”. Hancock could not have known they had split when he wrote that entry. That is on page 11. Thereafter whenever Hancock comes out well from his clashes with others, or makes any sort of prediction, I heard the voice of Mandy Rice-Davies ring in my head: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
Score settling
Those clashes form an important part of the book. There is much score-settling with an array of opponents: Kate Bingham, Andy Burnham, local government leaders, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson. The latter most deservedly so – he comes across as supremely unbothered and self-centred and is notable for his absence in the early entries of 2020. After Johnson texts Hancock in October 2020 (with the second covid wave brewing fast) complaining that the new hospital in his constituency won’t be finished until 2030, the latter writes “I stared at the message, suppressing the urge to scream”. He does not suppress the urge to scream when it comes to others, but he does with Johnson. It doesn’t reflect well on Hancock that he seems so often unable to stand up to Johnson.
What really rankles, though, with the score settling is the discrepancy between Hancock’s sunny, go-getter optimism and his bitter and petulant side. “Who dares bollock you?” Nadhim Zahawi asks Hancock at one point, “Unfortunately, plenty of people,” Hancock writes. I have seen this side of him myself. When I was a diarist he was the politician who was most unexpectedly spiky – in a matter of seconds he would shift from smiles to cold fury. Very few politicians are actually like this, even with (sometimes impertinent) diarists and I was surprised. After reading this book, I now know that I shouldn’t have been. He makes frequent catty, sneering asides that don’t fit with the sunshine public persona he tries to promote.
The constant encounters with these two sides of Hancock – the catty and the sunny – eventually shed light on his character more deeply. The most unintentionally telling passage comes at the end of July 2020. “Today a whole posse of my ‘One Nation’ liberal Conservative friends received peerages: Ken Clarke, Jo Johnson, Philip Hammond, Ed Vaizey, Ruth Davidson and Patrick McLoughlin. They are mostly Remainers who have been somewhat in the political wilderness since David Cameron stepped down”. Hancock is a natural bedfellow of these Tories. So why is it that they ended up in the political wilderness and he did not? They stuck to those one nation, liberal conservative values – and by throwing his lot in with Boris Johnson in 2019, Hancock did not. Perhaps he decided to serve under Johnson because he believed in public service.
But really, the inescapable impression from that passage – and this book – is that he did so because he is a man who loves the limelight : he was one of the first MPs with an app (‘Matt Hancock’, it is a social media-esque platform for his constituents in Suffolk), he relished the centre stage in the pandemic, he jetted off to the jungle in Australia and prime time TV, he wrote this book.
Anyone hoping to learn much new about the government’s response to the pandemic is likely to be disappointed by the Pandemic Diaries. Hancock wants to be liked, perhaps even loved, and he thinks he has a fair case and can persuade people, if only they will listen. To an extent, his third place finish on I’m A Celebrity proved some of that.
But when it comes to this book, Hancock’s “natural optimism” (as he refers to it) is badly misplaced. The covid pandemic was – and is –traumatic for many people in this country. In rushing out a book, attacking his opponents, justifying himself, and focusing the spotlight (both intentionally and not) squarely on him, Matt Hancock has insulted those who died and those who suffered. That incident with Gina Coladangelo, which ripped many lives apart, was no doubt deeply stressful and humiliating for almost all concerned. Part of me wonders if Hancock has gone head-first into reality TV – and being all over the media – because bullish shamelessness is the only way to survive that level of public derision. But it is a pity that such shamelessness has also impugned the dignity of so many others.
