The Courage of Matt Hancock

A Hero for Our Times

A year is a long time in politics. Well let’s face it, even a month can often push our memories and attention span to the limits as we try to orient ourselves in a world where 24 hour rolling news cycles and scrolling in search of novelty make it difficult to remember anything beyond the here and now.

So it may seem like time travel to go back to April 2020, when care homes across the country were effectively abandoned by the government as Covid ran riot across the country. By 24 April that year, 4,000 care home residents were dead, and the Manchester Evening News reported despairingly that ‘people are dying - while staff beg for help that never comes.’

This was a grim time, even grimmer than many of us knew, when patients were released from hospitals into care homes without having been tested for symptoms, to be looked after by care home staff who didn’t have protective equipment.

In some cases hospital patients actually tested positive before being sent to care homes, but the care homes weren’t informed. A senior nurse in a Manchester care home told the Manchester Evening News what happened as a result:

For those with COVID-19 it's a horrible, slow painful death. We have to lie to families and tell them they were settled, comfortable and peaceful. We can't tell the truth because it will break their hearts even more. They are short of breath, their lungs fill up and they are basically drowning. Some of them need suctioning to clear the phlegm and secretions. They have temperatures which create hallucinations, they are extremely agitated. They see people, animals, they try to grab out. They have abdominal pain. We try to settle them and comfort them and we just can't.

By June that year, 20,000 elderly and disabled care home residents had died after contracting Covid, even though Matt Hancock, the Minister for Health and Social Care, assured the nation at the time that the government had thrown a ‘protective ring’ had been thrown around care homes.

It turns out it had done no such thing. And in April this year the High Court found that the Department of Health and Social Care had broken the law through its failure to protect hospital patients who were discharged into care homes without being tested for Covid beforehand.

This followed a High Court ruling in February 2021 that Hancock had personally acted unlawfully by failing to publish details of PPE procurement schemes involving millions of pounds.

Such a record of lethal negligence, incompetence, and dishonesty ought to be a permanent stain on the reputations of all those who allowed it to happen. But these are not normal times, and this month the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who left office in disgrace having broken the rules set by his own government, underwent a metamorphosis that show how far from normal we have all travelled.

I’m referring to Hancock’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - that strange mixture of vicarious S&M and desperate fame-whoredom, in which the British public gets to humiliate and punish mostly B-list celebrities who actively seek to be punished in the hope of making money or becoming more famous than they are.

No one can be surprised that Matt Hancock would find this kind of ambiguity appealing. After all, this is a man who has already shown an ability to smirk and cry on camera at the same time.

The announcement of his appearance followed a public snubbing from Rishi Sunak, who ghosted Hancock while he waited near the front of the queue to shake his hand. There was no handshake and no job. Technically, Hancock was out for the political count, forced to act as a diligent constituency MP while bracing himself for the oblivion which is waiting for most politicians, and which perhaps could have benefitted the country more had it swallowed up Hancock much earlier.

But Hancock understood the times better than the times understood him. Many years ago, the great educationalist Neil Postman warned that American politics and education were being debased by television into a permanent form of entertainment that made serious public and political debate impossible.

As Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), ‘Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.’

Postman wrote these words in 1985, at a time when the cult of celebrity and the world of ‘good looks, celebrities and commercials’ was still in its infancy, in this country.

These were years when you could still expect politicians to resign, and when those who resigned in disgrace were expected to stay gone. In the late 1990s, some Tory politicians discovered a new way to recover from a wrecked political career. The pioneers were Christine and Neil Hamilton.

Celebrity Washing

In 1997 Neil Hamilton - a politician on the far right of the Tory party - was ejected from his Tatton seat as the embodiment of ‘Tory sleaze’, when he was found to have taken payments to ask questions in parliament on behalf of rich clients. That should have been the end of Hamilton’s career, but faced with her husband’s ignominious and shameful exit from politics, his intrepid wife discovered a way to turn ignominy and shame to their advantage.

Within a month of the Tatton defeat, the Hamiltons appeared on Have I Got News for You - the programme in which everything and everyone is always amusing, forever, and no one is ever beyond the pale.

This was the beginning of the couple’s transformation into ‘media personalities.’ At times they seemed to be everywhere. You could find them in pantomimes and chat shows and the Edinburgh Festival. They were interviewed by Louis Theroux.

They sang their own England fan song ditty for the 2006 World Cup. They reached the final on Masterchef and came third in - wait for it - I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. In addition to appearances on Loose Women and GMTV, Christine Hamilton even had her own BBC show, and became the face of British Sausage Week and a judge on Mr Gay Torbay.

They sought attention, and attention heeded the call. The more they appeared, the more their past faded into the distance. Who cared that Neil Hamilton had once wandered around parliament with brown envelopes stuffed with cash?

Instead of skulking in the dark, they became media personalities - ‘characters’ created by television for an age of television, who amused viewers with throwaway chat, and defiant and zany insouciance towards anything approaching a moral compass.

In short, they were ‘celebrity washing’, and that is clearly the trajectory that the Right Dishonourable former Secretary of State is now following. Politically, Hancock is finished, and he was already finished when he decided to walk away from a job that he is still being paid for, and accept £400,000 to appear on I’m A Celebrity and another £45,000 to appear on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.

There are those who think that this makes him a bit of a card - or something even greater. Tony Blair - a man so courageous that he once went to war because the most powerful country in the world told him to and because he knew that a lifetime of limitless wealth awaited him if he did - has praised Hancock for his bravery in disappearing into the jungle, telling an interviewer.

When you’ve been through the wringer as he has, and you know, as a politician who’s got to a certain level in politics, he’s probably got quite a lot of courage to go and do something like that. And I mean, people can attack him or whatever... But, you know, it takes a lot of courage to go do something like that. I wished him well from the outset.

Is it the Catholic in Blair that interprets Hancock’s willingness to eat animal anuses and have himself smeared in slime or covered in insects as some form of monkish penance or personal redemption? Would he like to go into the jungle too?

Whatever the answers, courage is not the issue here. You want to talk about people who have ‘been through the wringer’? Then consider the care home workers who watched people die and cared for them even at the risk of their own lives because of Hancock’s catastrophic mistakes.

If we want to speak about courage, we should be talking about the nurses who worked week after week in the same dangerous circumstances, without proper protection, while Hancock’s department handed out dodgy PPE contracts to his mates.

Now some of these nurses cannot even afford to feed themselves, yet how we clapped them when it suited the government to associate itself with them, and how quickly we forget them when it didn’t. Because collective amnesia is the aim of Hancock’s brazen celebrity-washing and there is nothing courageous about it.

This is a man on the game. A game that he is playing at our expense. A man - or should I say a media personality now? - with an eye for the endless grift and his own self-advancement, and the scruples of an alleycat.

Is it courageous to hire a PR team to lobby for votes on TikTok and give step-by-step instructions on how to vote so that you can win a reality tv show? No it isn’t, but in this country right now, let no one think that slime doesn’t pay. Hancock has a book coming out, and now that he has become a ‘character’ he will sell a lot of copies. And he will probably end up on Have I Got News for You, because for millions of viewers, he was amusing, and for millions of viewers being amused is the only thing that matters when it comes to politics or anything else.

Who cares if the families of Covid victims express their fury at Hancock’s appearance and demand his resignation? Like the care home workers and the nurses, they aren’t famous.

But Hancock is. And if his constituents decide to throw him out, as Neil Hamilton’s once disposed of him, he won’t care.

He might shed a tear in public, but he’ll also be smiling, because even as he listens the cheers of the opposition, he will also be hearing the chink chink of a cash register and the canned laughter from a tv show, and he will know, even if millions of us don’t, that in the end the joke is on us.