What drives Matt Hancock? What propels the erstwhile health secretary to fly home after getting trench foot in Thailand on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, then to almost immediately fly out to the Australian rainforest, pausing only to update his out-of-office bounceback in case West Suffolk constituents want to contact him about boring little things like their problems? Is Hancock himself right when he answers that question by identifying as “an adventurer”: the hero of his own story – and perhaps yet the world’s?
No. No, he is not. To watch I’m A Celebrity’s latest campmate for more than two minutes is to know what was already abundantly clear from his career as a minister: Matt Hancock is driven by the urge to resist self-knowledge at all costs. Matt Hancock is a fugitive from self-reflection; a flight risk from the truth; a guy compelled to loudly self-narrate in order to drown out the real story. There is a chasm between thinking you’re a good person who made mistakes, and accepting that things were always going to end the way they did because of who you are. Matt Hancock’s greatest fear is not snakes, as he told the show producers, but of crossing that chasm.
