The news that Matt Hancock is to appear on the ITV show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here fills me with, well, nothing. I’ve never seen the show, never wanted to, never will. I know little about the show, apart from the gruesome fact that the celebrities, some of whom I have actually heard of, eat insects, various animals’ anuses and are subject to other ‘challenges’, but I don’t know why. I don’t know how someone wins either. Is it the contestant who is covered by the most spiders or eats the most Kangaroo testicles? There’s no need to answer because, frankly, I don’t give a damn. Nor does the fact that the show is introduced by Ant and Dec, not least because I am the only person in the land who has never seen a show in which they have appeared. The idea I’d be remotely interested in seeing Matt Hancock in ‘the jungle’ is absurd, but then millions will and that’s why he is there.
Hancock has already defiled the office of Secretary of State for Health during Covid when he presided over thousands of needless deaths, particularly those sent to their death when thousands were discharged from hospital and sent to unprepared care homes. That his disastrous period in charge of health ended when he was caught snogging and groping someone who wasn’t his wife and so breaking the rules he and his government had imposed on the rest of us. Not, perhaps, as dreadful a human being as Boris Johnson, but in the opinion of this minor blogger he is not someone who should be showing his smug face in public so soon after the event.
Forget all Hancock’s bluster about why he is there. The truth is that he has a book to sell, his version of his role in the Covid disaster, co-written by the hard right ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott. Incredibly, he will be able to continue to draw his MP salary whilst arsing around with various other D-listers, essentially taking the piss out of the rest of us.
Clearly, I’m in a minority again. Millions love this show and will be delighted to watch Hancock make a tit of himself. The producers won’t have signed him up if he thought viewers were all like me. I suspect that as well as flogging his book, this is a conscious effort by Hancock to rehabilitate himself in the public eye, perhaps with a view to a permanent career change. Personally, I think the man’s a twat and a wrong ‘un, whose incompetence during Covid cost many lives. No amount of anuses and testicles consumed by him can make up for that.
