Matt Hancock’s recent foray into reality TV is neither charming nor interesting. I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! is an aesthetically depraved television show. That Hancock ever thought it would be a good route back to fortune, however, shows us one thing. He isn’t, and never has been, good at politics.
We could spend a long time talking about the British government’s various PPE scandals, or its historic mistake concerning care homes which likely led to thousands of otherwise avoidable deaths. We could also talk about how the former Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings spoke of Hancock’s habit of lying as though it were pathological.
But, damning as these things are, I think we ought to extend a modicum of goodwill to those charting the course in the early days of the pandemic. They had very little information about the disease, or how it might behave, and certainly inherited no crib sheet from their predecessors. And – although you may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, considering the levels of hostility – Hancock did not create the Covid-19 virus in a lab before personally releasing it on a crowded train.
His Covid rule-breaking extramarital affair was upsetting to some, embarrassing for everyone, and debasing for him. But, it was not much more than that. And if we were forced to compare notes, we would do well to remember that his fellow “jungle mate” Boy George – Mr Hancock’s most vociferous on-screen critic – actually has a criminal conviction for assault and false imprisonment.
No, the problem with I’m A Celebrity is that it reveals that Mr Hancock has not a shred of political acumen or wit. His impulse for self-reflection – if he ever had one – has been strangled and suffocated. If he did not have the foresight to realise reality TV would undermine whatever scintilla of gravitas he had left, did he ever have the nous to navigate a political storm like Covid-19?
It seems that he and his PR masterminds see the show as an opportunity to reach parts of the electorate – the politically disengaged – otherwise closed off. He could show them his real, authentic self, talk honestly about the pandemic – mistakes and all – and win back some unlikely public support, then return to the fringes of Westminster with a revitalised public reputation. And it might just have worked, if it weren’t for the one snag that you can’t reanimate a corpse.
“It’s our job as politicians to go where the people are – not to sit in ivory towers in Westminster,” Mr Hancock wrote in The Sun, paying heed to the obvious. He added: “Reality TV is a very different way to communicate with the electorate – it’s both honest and unfiltered.” This both patronised the electorate and displayed a rather poor grasp of reality TV.
Hancock has made himself the spectacle. He is the joke, not the comedian
The first mistake he made – among many – was to think the show had any interest in making him appear likeable, rather than a lightning rod for public derision. The second was to think the producers in ITV have any interest in fomenting genuine communication between Mr Hancock and the public, as opposed to making him eat entrails to appease a baying mob.
Whether he is relatable, or funny, or interesting is of no relevance to the raison d’être of a show like I’m A Celebrity. It is far more interested in making a horrible jester out of the semi-famous.
The most charitable suggestion might be to say he is just in it for the money, £400,000 to be precise. It is as good a reason to do it as any. Because it is ludicrous to think for a second that Mr Hancock would have ever come out of a show as wretched as I’m A Celebrity with an enhanced reputation. No one does. But, perhaps Matt Hancock is the one man just un-self aware enough to think that particular clause does not apply to him.
[ I’m a Celebrity: Matt Hancock staggers on. Can he see Love Island on the horizon?Opens in new window ]
He may think he could pull a Boris Johnson – return from the political wilderness with a restocked supply of cultural capital and a personality so magnetic that voters will forget that he is devious, lascivious and calculating too. He will fail. Because Mr Johnson. for all his folly, actually knows how to give people what they want. Give them bikes, give them bridges, give them scruffy hair and personality, give them the best Olympics the world has ever seen, and all of a sudden the public are a lot sweeter.
Mr Johnson also understood that the core principle behind these panem et circenses is that you merely provide the public with them, instead of actually climbing into the amphitheatre and wrestling the lion yourself. Hancock, instead, has made himself the spectacle. He is the joke, not the comedian. He’s in the colosseum eating insects. And all of this points to something that should be overwhelmingly obvious to everyone, and simply not grasped by the one person to whom it matters most.
Matt Hancock doesn’t get politics, political appeal, or personal marketing. None of this is the end of the world. There are crimes far worse than being cringey. But it does speak to a total dearth of talent in British politics at the moment. Was he really, after all consideration, the best person on hand to navigate Britain’s health service through one of the greatest health crises the world has ever faced? The man who willingly made himself the national punchline?