Voices: The chance to see the ‘real’ Matt Hancock? Oh Matt. We already have. More than you’ll ever know
The titles roll and out from what looks like a long drop toilet pokes the grinning face of Britain’s most hated man, there’s a dissolve cut and Mike Tindall is shaking his head and saying the words “bulls*** bulls*** bulls***” over and over again.
Within about two minutes, he’s singing Ed Sheeran acapella, saved only by the light-up nose of some kind of air raid siren disguised as a giant mole. Next, he’s in the pitch dark; shoving his hand in a basket of rats – and from there, things really started to go downhill.
Welcome to the jungle, Matt Hancock, and welcome the rest of the nation to quite possibly the greatest primetime weeknight TV viewing of our sad little lives.
The reason Matt Hancock is currently in Australia and not in the cabinet is a) because he evacuated untested Covid patients into care homes causing the needless deaths of thousands of people and b) because he declared extramarital affairs during Covid to be a police matter whilst having one himself.
And yet, and this really does illuminate the character of the man, at no point in an entirely torturous 90 minutes was there a single clear moment where he looked like maybe he’d made a mistake. That maybe this wasn’t worth it.
Because it really did get worse. Diving head first into a pitch-dark tunnel, having buckets of live maggots tipped over him and giant spiders crawl over his back while he rummaged around in the wet filth, trying to win dinner tokens for nine other people who aren’t even going to bother to pretend not to hate him was frankly the high point.
When he actually had to go and meet the others, that was when the horror really began. A lot of politics involves trying to see with foresight what will become obvious to everybody else with hindsight. It’s by no means easy, but when news of Matt Hancock’s four hundred grand holiday in the middle of a sitting parliamentary recession catapulted a national hate figure into a symbol of pure revulsion, it’s arguable Hancock himself should have worked out exactly what his new friends would think of him.
Most people in I’m A Celebrity talk about how hungry they were; about how there wasn’t enough food to go around. And it is from that vantage point that one should view Boy George’s decision not to eat any dinner at all, rather than have to sit around a campfire with Matt Hancock. Commendable behaviour? Maybe. But one does wonder quite how the currents of public opinion have converged to a point at which the Good Guy is the one who went to prison for handcuffing a sex worker to a wall.
It was, at least, pleasant to watch a series of celebrities, ITV News’s Charlene White to A Place in the Sun’s Scarlette Douglas, take it in turns to ask him the rather obvious question: “Why are you here?”
It’s important, apparently, that the world see that “politicians are human beings”; that they can have the scales peeled from their eyes and see that arguably the least impressive major politician in modern British history has not descended from some otherworldly realm. That the guy who demonstrably didn’t have a clue what he was doing, not least with regard to managing a pandemic, but also to knowing where the CCTV cameras are in his own office, might actually be, you know, just a regular guy.
White and Douglas could only stare into space as they heard the Hancock monologue. Not least as they know the truth better than almost anybody else; that the reason anyone goes on I’m A Celebrity is because an offer of a very large amount of money arrives, and with it comes an obligation to make a complete arse of yourself, and thereafter follows an internal struggle as to whether the number is large enough. And whomever you see thereafter, chowing down on ostrich anus or dipping their head in a bucket of eels, has comprehensively lost the battle with their own sense of shame.
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Naturally, it’s slightly different if you’re Matt Hancock. His payday is not the consequence of his own graft or talent, be it in sport or acting or comedy or whatever. He’s four hundred grand up for absolutely no reason beyond his own incompetence.
And what lies ahead is a payback of sorts. Tomorrow night, it has already been confirmed, he’ll be dangled into some kind of underwater den with a load of crocodiles. And the night after it’ll be exactly the same. And the one after that. And the one after that.
And frankly, what’s the point in moralising about it? You might as well try and enjoy it. Not that it’s any kind of comeuppance. He’s already enjoying it a lot more than anybody else. The chance to see the real Matt Hancock? Oh Matt. we already have. More than you’ll ever know.
