Knighthoods, surely? Plum seats at the coronation? Maybe a palace or two? Sorry, readers – I’m just thinking of the best way Ant & Dec can be rewarded for the television coup of the year. Sod Paddington. TalkTV can take a hike. And move over Channel 4’s My Massive something or other – there’s a new Cock in town. Or should that be jungle?
Yes, Matt Hancock – the former Health Secretary, crypto bro, and self-appointed voice of Britain’s dyslexics – has agreed to appear on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here, the only decent thing to come out of Australia since Shane Warne. Hancock had the whip withdrawn almost immediately. Unlike Nadine Dorries in 2012, he does at least know he is no longer a Conservative MP before he arrives Down Under.
The voters of West Suffolk have every right to feel peeved. Although their MP has said he will be contactable for urgent constituency business – as one would expect from the forward-thinking star of the Matt Hancock app – he will now be gorging on witchetty-grub rather than representing them in parliament. Some might say these activities are more similar than immediately apparent.
But his constituents should pause before doing to his office what millions of viewers are about to be doing to ITV’s phonelines. Don’t forget that MPs go abroad all the time on ‘fact-finding missions’ to Val Torrens or ‘trade delegations’ to Dubai. Hancock, by contrast, is going to camp with Boy George for a week or two to promote – he says – his backbench campaign about dyslexia. As long as he donates his fee to charity, is this really any great travesty?
The good people of West Suffolk should look to the wisdom of Andy Drummond. Drummond is the deputy chair of their local Conservative association. Here is a man who has devoted chunks of his life to the idiosyncratic cause of getting Hancock onto the green benches. His response to being told the sum off his efforts was his MP jetting off to Oz? That he looks forward to seeing Hancock ‘eating a kangaroo’s penis’ in front of millions.
Reader, so do I. Whatever the rights and wrongs of lockdown, as part of that generation of pupils and students who lost a year of their life to Covid, I am more than happy to see Hancock humiliated. It’s karmic. Every rat that nibbles his ears, every ant that crawls into his boxers, every sheep’s eyeball that he has to munch: each is a little compensation for those long lonely days we spent locked up.
As the proud holder of an A-Level in English Literature, I can also appreciate that going on I’m a Celeb is the natural culmination of what we shall call Hancock’s narrative arc. Not only because he missed out on Strictly by a few weeks, but because he entertains in a way most MPs do not. Hancock has their dauntless ambition and occasional lack of self-awareness. Yet he twins it – like a slightly balding, crypto-shilling, aide-snogging Icarus – with a capacity to fly too close to the sun.
When he resigned from the Cabinet last year, the nation guffawed as he flagrantly broke the rules of social-distancing, matrimony, and French-kissing. Since then, SW1 has remained gobsmacked by his ever-more-outlandish efforts to return to government. Swimming in the Serpentine. Scaling mountains and running marathons. Writing his tell-all book with Isabel Oakeshott. Hancock has a desire to remain in the arena of which Teddy Roosevelt would have been proud, if a little confused.
Nonetheless, two rebuffs in recent weeks – from Truss’s scepticism towards his pitch for a Cabinet reshuffle, or Sunak’s apparent coldness towards him outside CCHQ – and a failure to return to government must suggest to Hancock that his ministerial career really is over. So he is devoting himself to the causes that most matter to him: dyslexia, the people of West Suffolk, and himself.
As a man who once cancelled Christmas, Hancock can appreciate that we need a few shafts of light as we approach these dark winter months. Today’s announcement was one. For that, he deserves our thanks – and the swift return of the whip.