‘Matt Hancock has shown ‘incredible resilience and bravery’ on I’m A Celebrity, says fellow Tory MP Theresa Villiers‘ is one of the most stupid things I have ever read. ‘Incredible resilience and bravery’, says Villiers. I can’t really compute any of that nonsense because these are not words I would use when describing a TV unreality show in which contestants appear to have to eat disgusting things and have shit tipped all over them. It’s not for me, but it is entertainment and given my TV choices, I am hardly one to criticise people’s TV choices given some of the brainless stuff I watch. My objection to Villiers’ words is that they are very offensive.
What is resilience and bravery? Nothing that Hancock has done in ‘The Jungle’. We all have our views on what constitutes resilience and bravery but eating a kangaroo’s penis does not come into either of these categories, at least not in my old fashioned world. I see these qualities in firefighters, police officers, our armed forces, in Kevin Sinfield who ran seven ultra marathons in seven days to raise money for the fight against MND and I see, or rather saw, those qualities in abundance in the late, now great Doddie Weir who suffered and died from it. These are just a few random ideas. You can think of many more.
Lest we forget, Matt Hancock, who was paid a cool £400,000 to appear in I’m A Celebrity (he isn’t), was the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during the Covid pandemic. Not all the deaths were down to him by any stretch, but tens of thousands certainly were. It was his decision to discharge thousands of elderly folk from hospitals to their death in care homes up and down the land, spreading Covid more efficiently than the virus could manage on its own. As the man in charge, he handed over £37 billion of our money to the dysfunctional track and trace system, run by his friend the Tory peer Dido Harding and how much money did he hand out to his friends for PPE, including the landlord of his own local pub, much of which was unfit to use? Then, to cap it all, after laying down the strictest rules that prevented people being with their dying relatives because of Covid, Hancock is then caught snogging one of his colleagues. This is no hero. Hancock is a man for whom the very mention of his name should encourage feelings of utter revulsion.
That Hancock got so close to ‘winning’ the show was driven in part by his very efficient PR team which got the vote out in vast numbers to vote for him, often time after time (which is entirely legal, by the way) and a full-on campaign on tik-tok. Hancock’s rehabilitation was almost complete. With his own book about the Covid pandemic about to be published, Hancock appears to have proved that you can’t fool all the people all the time, you can fool quite a few of them.
Doubtless, his spin team will be trying to get him on Strictly next year, perhaps even on one of the scores of TV cooking shows, where we can see ‘the real Matt Hancock’ and not the one we actually saw, presiding over the government’s disastrous handling of Covid.
Honestly, if Hancock had ‘won’, we’d have reached one of the lowest points in recent British political history. An absolute wrong ‘un who has not only cocked up the response to Covid, he left the NHS in ruins. Imagine him being the King Of The Jungle, whatever the fuck that means. He shouldn’t have got anywhere near a throne: he should be up before the beak.
I’m guessing that the loveable presenting due of Ant and Dec didn’t ask any serious questions of Hancock when he left the show last night. Nothing like, “What do you say to the families of those tens of thousands of people who died before their time because you were so useless?” In other words, he got away with it, bastard.
Thanks to everyone who didn’t vote for Hancock. For those who did, why not make a donation to a deserving charity – ooh, let’s see, how about one of the MND research/support charities? – and we can move on. Resilience and bravery, my arse.
