Every time I pass a television showing Matt Hancock in I’m A Celebrity (it’s on in the next room), a small part of me feels very angry. I don’t know how the show works – how certain people are chosen to eat animal penises, vaginas and testicles or how you actually win the thing and I have no interest in taking the simplest of Google searches to find out. It’s just not for me. It’s not that I am somehow above shows like this, of course I’m not, but it doesn’t do it for me. So I will watch something, or more likely these days nothing, else. But Hancock. That just feels wrong to me.
When I see Hancock anywhere on TV, it upsets me and makes me angry because it was on his watch that some 200,000 people died of Covid. Of course, not each individual death was caused by Hancock, but here’s the thing: Hancock and the government in which he played such a significant role are guilty of allowing people to die who would not, if they had done their jobs properly, have died at all. Back in 2020, the government dithered before locking down too late and then Hancock’s department – Health FFS – discharged many thousands of people into care homes where the virus spread rapidly and uncontrollably, killing many people. And then, as if to rub our noses in it, Hancock then broke the rules he himself had laid down by snogging his ‘lover’, a photograph which leaves me traumatised to this day.
Hancock pretends he is on the show because it’s the only way he can show politicians are normal human beings, to which I call bullshit. He’s there for one reason: money. Everything revolves around that. He’s getting a reported £400,000 to appear on the show and by a fortunate coincidence he is about to launch his own memoir of the Covid crisis in a book co-written by the far right ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott. On top of that, Hancock is still drawing his MP’s salary of £84,144 a year. Oh, and last year he claimed £40,000 in MP expenses including, and I am not making this up, £15 for riding his own bicycle. Matt Hancock is rubbing our noses in the penises, vaginas and testicles that he is then eating.
If I watched this show, I’d probably be even angrier, watching this freeloading toe-rag line his pockets with a large fortune just a few years after he was telling us we must not be with our sick and dying relatives. Remember when Professor Neil Ferguson broke the rules during the pandemic, Hancock was calling for the police to investigate? I’d like the Serious Fraud Office investigate Hancock. He’s a con man.
The producers will, quite understandably, be rubbing their hands together at all the publicity Hancock’s presence is generating. Higher viewing figures means more money in advertising revenue and everyone’s happy, right? Well, no, actually. Plenty of people are very happy to see celebrities covered in snakes and scorpions and being forced to eat things that appear to be inedible, but if that person is Matt Hancock, it’s a step too far.
I certainly get it that people see shows like this as escapist fun, a relief from the constant drudgery of real life. God knows I’ve been there, done that. But a senior politician who presided over the country’s disastrous response to a deathly virus raking in hundreds of thousands of quid is, in my opinion, truly shocking.
I’m not sure had I actually watched the programme that I’d feel any different about Hancock. I’ve never liked him anyway. Now, he sickens me. And there can be no rehabilitation in my eyes.
