On Wednesday, as the government reeled from the Allegra Stratton video, ministers began pulling out of media appearances. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, simply refused to do his morning studio round. But one Conservative MP was willing to sacrifice all dignity and defend Boris Johnson.
Step forward, Matt Hancock. Another man, conscious that Johnson had described him as “totally f***ing hopeless” during the pandemic, might have taken revenge. Not Hancock. “What I know is that the prime minister has said no rules were broken,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain, with every evidence of sincerity. “If there was a party.”
It’s been a mixed year for Hancock. On the plus side, Google has just named him as the most searched-for British politician of 2021. On the minus side, that was because of his lockdown-busting, marriage-ending, resignation-sparking clinch with his colleague and old university chum Gina Coladangelo, released by The Sun in a video that was as viral as Covid, and had much the same effect on your digestion.
But if you thought that meant you’d seen the last of him, you were wrong. Matt Hancock is the Terminator of British politicians. He can’t be stopped, he can’t be reasoned with, he doesn’t feel shame, and he absolutely will not stop, ever, until he’s back in the cabinet.
Since the summer he’s been on a rehabilitation tour, designed to help the public see the hero inside the lover. It hasn’t been smooth sailing.
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It started with a September article for The Mail on Sunday on vaccines. In brief, he likes them, and he doesn’t like antivaxers. He claims to have spent three hours writing it, which sounds plausible, and was paid £2,000, which is generous. He’s since done another, on the Omicron variant — it was too early to say what it meant, he revealed. Newspaper columns may have taken Johnson to the top of politics, but his were punchier.
The next week he tried movies, posting a 50-second video of himself meeting and bumping fists with his West Suffolk constituents, like a veteran returning from war. “We’ve got through it, haven’t we?” he told one. “Now coming out the other side.” There was upbeat music. “I’m alright,” he sighed wearily to another.
Was the video about lockdown, destroying your life in a public scandal or the exhaustion of an Alpine holiday with a new girlfriend? Perhaps, like great art, it had multiple meanings. What it wasn’t was subtle; after a few days of mockery, he deleted it from Twitter. Happily, copies were made.
Next, there was the Big International Job, a great way to show people at home how highly people abroad rate you. “Honoured to be appointed United Nations special representative,” Hancock tweeted in October. He was going to help Africa recover from the pandemic. Four days later, the offer was withdrawn. Hancock blamed a “technical UN rule” that MPs couldn’t be special representatives. Another factor may have been aid campaigners’ protests about his record on helping poor countries get vaccines.
A bestseller boosted Barack Obama’s career, and last month we learnt Hancock was going to write a “How I won the Covid war” memoir, describing his “heroic” role in the development of the vaccines. HarperCollins were said to be considering a £100,000 advance. “We have no knowledge of such a book and are not in talks,” HarperCollins replied.
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Setbacks, sure, but was Hancock defeated? Not a bit of it. It was time for a confessional interview. So he went on ITV’s Peston, where he talked about “the heat of battle”. It was starting to look like he thought he had actually been in a war. The 90 seconds he spent discussing his resignation were unilluminating. “I let a lot of people down and I’m sorry for the people that I hurt,” he said. As for getting back into government, “I’m not in any hurry,” he claimed. Sure.
The following week, getting his booster shot at Newmarket racecourse, he was apologising again, briefly and in vague terms. “People have been forgiving,” he said.
This week’s rehabilitation effort has been Hancock’s attempt to extend dyslexia testing for children. Suffering from the condition himself gives him a personal battle that he can talk about, as he did in a Sunday Telegraph piece last week, to make his journey from private school to Oxford to safe Tory seat look more like a struggle.
Not everyone is convinced. In a deadpan moment that should win him a Bafta, Phillip Schofield asked Hancock: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing rules?”
But the qualities that might succeed in getting Hancock back into cabinet are the ones he displayed on Wednesday: he is incapable of feeling shame, and he will do anything to advance his career. As Johnson runs out of allies, Hancock’s readiness to defend the indefensible may start to look very attractive.