Hancocked: Why the British media's self-satisfied circle jerk over Matt Hancock's affair will leave real questions unanswered...
... and why the Boris Johnson's spokesperson now believes "the Prime Minister considers this matter closed" is an incantation that makes things disappear.
Update: Matt Hancock has now resigned. The overall thrust of this edition, published on the morning before the evening that he finally went remains true.
This time. We are, so often, told that “this time” it will be different; that “this time” the hypocrisy, the blatant disrespect, the contempt for the public will tip the balance, that “this time” there will be a sacking, a resignation, anything that resembles a consequence for the actions of a politician whose brazenness is matched only by his incompetence. But “this time” is like last time and the time before and the time before that.
If the scandal that sinks Matt Hancock is snogging his aide with all the polished charm of a teenage boy drunk on his mum’s Malibu — an aide that he hired surreptitiously and then gave a salary without any shred of proper competition and no sign of a declaration of their personal relationship — it will once again show how shallow and broken British politics and political journalism are.
Hancock gave Covid contracts to his neighbour/his local pub’s landlord via cosy WhatsApp chats (the firm is now being investigated by the health regulator), forgot he was a shareholder in his sister’s business that also got public cash, oversaw the calamitous movement of covid patients from hospitals into care homes causing thousands of needless deaths, hired his best uni friend as an advisor, and received a three-word performance review (“totally fucking hopeless”) from the Prime Minister at the height of the crisis.
The Health Secretary has clearly been totally fucking hopeless for the entirety of his time in government, but it’s the revelation that he’s totally hopeless fucking that we’re supposed to believe is the greatest crime. That the brother of the aide-turned-arse-grabee, Gina Coladangelo, also works for a company that has pocketed public money during the pandemic is treated largely as a footnote.
Focusing on the breach of Covid rules — something that the Met police have already refused to investigate — rather than the corruption (or ‘chumocracy’ as many minimising voices in the media prefer) and the general chuckling tone about Hancock’s hand on cock moment threatens to turn the entire story into Carry On… Up The Covid or Confessions of a… Health Secretary.
In a variation on the “this time” line, Paul Waugh writes for the i newspaper that “this is Matt Hancock’s Barnard Castle moment”, referring to Dominic Cummings’ extreme eye test adventure in Country Durham. Waugh continues:
Hancock’s admission that he broke social distancing rules himself, during an alleged affair with an adviser he appointed to the Department for Health, now poses a serious political problem for his boss Boris Johnson. As Hancock digs in and refuses to quit, can the PM afford to allow him to do so?
If this is Hancock’s ‘Barnard Castle’ presumably that means we’ll have a week of media excitement and hyperbolic intensity while the government stonewalls, deflects and ultimately succeeds in sending the caravan rumbling on to the next story. Dominic Cummings didn’t leave Downing Street because of Barnard Castle but because Boris Johnson was done with him and he was unable to get on with Carrie Johnson and her shadow cabinet.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesperson believes the phrase “the Prime Minister considers this matter closed” to be a magic incantation that makes things go away because… it has time and time again. For all of the sound and fury of the press and wider media this morning — the portentous op-ed pieces about “what this means for Boris Johnson” and the “this time” lines — this government has seen over and over again that the modern media doesn’t stick with stories for long and that storms and anger subside.
Hancock’s hypocrisy in having castigated Professor Neil Ferguson for his own breaches of Covid regulations — even suggesting they might be a police matter — is mentioned all over the newspapers today, but the logic that says that will make a difference stems from the idea that members of this government have any sense of shame. They don’t. Led by Boris Johnson, a man for whom shame is as impossible as Prince Andrew claimed sweating was for him, the Tories know that people pointing fingers and demanding resignations get tired quickly.
The fact that Labour scrabbled around yesterday putting out several different lines before they got it together to demand Hancock’s resignation — and that Keir Starmer failed to demand it the last time the Health Secretary was on the ropes — further eases the pressure. Starmer is the kind of man who enters a boxing ring, goes for a big punch and topples over having discovered someone has tied his boots together while he wasn’t looking.
The Sun website has six Hancock stories on its homepage at the time of writing, including video of arsegrab-gate — the least erotic political image since the DUP’s Sammy Wilson first waved around his uncooked sausage — stalking of Colangelo as she left her home1, a follow-up story showing that she and Hancock have been seen out on cosy dates — there’s that brazenness again — and the predictable demands the ‘Boris’ sack ‘the shagger’.
In its comment section, it drafts in a daughter who could not hug her father as he lay dying to justifiably rage at Hancock and uses its leader column to tell the Prime Minister that “Matt Hancock let the nation down and his position is untenable”. You would think The Sun’s ultimate boss, News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks, would be more forgiving…
The one story you won’t see from The Sun is that one about how it got hold of the CCTV footage from within Hancock’s office; the video it’s touting, plastered with its watermark appears to have been filmed off a TV screen.
Was it sourced from a security guard with a grudge against a rude Hancock as the Westminster rumour has it? Or was the ‘whistleblower’ — The Sun’s grandiose word for ‘gossip with access to the security cameras’ — an aggrieved official or even someone given the nod by Number 10 to give the Prime Minister an excuse to sack the Health Secretary without looking like he’s still listening to Dominic Cummings?
It’s said that Hancock and Coladangelo were far less careful about concealing their relationship than the Health Secretary is when it comes to burying information about PPE contracts and other suspect uses of public money. It’s probably less of a case of whodunnit when it comes to finding out who leaked the story to The Sun than howmanydunnit and howmanymorevideoswillwesee?
The Sun has sent legal letters out to other newspapers and websites asserting its copyright over the stills and video of the handsy Mr Hancock.
It’s a move replete with big dickhead energy since The Sun appears to have acquired that material by let’s say less than legal means — though there is obviously a public interest defence — and both it and its parent company News UK are still neck-deep in phone hacking cases and other legal action about the alleged illegal acquisition of information.
‘Curiously’ Downing Street has said it has decided not to launch an investigation into who leaked the CCTV footage to The Sun even though they claim to know who did it. The Guardian reports:
Downing Street and Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have decided not to instigate any hunt to try to identify who passed the image taken from a security camera in his ministerial office to the Sun.
The decision was taken at a meeting early on Friday morning involving Hancock, the DHSC’s permanent secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, and the department’s head of security, hours after the tabloid reported and provided evidence of Hancock’s encounter in his office on the ninth floor of the department with an aide, Gina Colangelo.
Sources say that they have ruled out a mole hunt because if the person were tracked down they could then claim that they were a whistleblower who was exposing wrongdoing.
“Imagine if that person was dismissed for leaking what any employment tribunal that followed would be like for Matt Hancock,” said a source. “It’s hard to justify a leak inquiry when you’ve been caught brazenly doing something like this.”
Government guidelines on the use of CCTV say that businesses (and you’d assume government ministries) must:
tell people they may be recorded, usually by displaying signs, which must be clearly visible and readable
control who can see the recordings
make sure the system is only used for the purpose it was intended for - for example, if it was set up to detect crime, you must not use it to monitor how much work your staff do.
Hmmm…
In The Times, which pretends to be less prurient than its tabloid stablemate, Janice Turner writes:
Now from CCTV footage, we know that at 3pm on May 6 — 11 days before hugs were permitted, then only “cautiously” and outdoors — and while his colleagues were distracted by local elections, Hancock peered outside his office door and closed it. His hand on her bum, his bald spot cruelly exposed by the overhead lens, this image will render Hancock forever a punchline, a source of sexual revulsion and, worst of all, a shagged-her-over-the-photocopier cliché. Part of me feels that’s punishment enough.
… Yet in an age with few remaining sexual taboos, we have the Covid affair. What you’re doing isn’t merely adultery but against the law! You could be fined, arrested for that fumble. How erotic is that? Plus, as Henry Kissinger famously observed, “power is the great aphrodisiac”.
Now Hancock has apologised for his breach of lockdown rules. And put in those terms, a snog at a “work meeting” just a few days before we could hug our mums is not that grave. Strange how betraying your wife of 15 years, who bore your three kids, is less disgraceful than breaching the two-metre rule.
Clearly Hancock’s enemies extend way beyond Dominic Cummings, but in the electorate’s eyes he is redeemed by the vaccine programme. While the man who could sack him pores over that blurry CCTV picture, boggling about his own narrow escapes.
And that’s how the Health Secretary gets away with it. His actions will be boiled down to “a snog” and turned into a laugh, a jape, a bawdy punchline that will, in fact, end up giving the awkward oaf some measure of humanity.
Turner’s column — which oscillates between moral high dudgeon and 'who cares?’ shrugging — is in the same territory as yesterday’s radio show by her colleague Matt ‘Chuckles’ Chorley. He opened his Times Radio broadcast with some ersatz satire — the texture of comedic criticism devoid of any of the taste — and spent the rest of his programme playing Careless Whisper intermittently and reading out listeners’ suggestions of what Hancock could do next.
One option that wasn’t covered on the programme was that what Hancock should do next is not simply resign as Health Secretary but resign from parliament and public life entirely, wandering off somewhere to think about the many thousands of dead on this watch and the corruption he has presided over that wasted time and money that could have been used saving many of them.
Of course, The Daily Telegraph, once and future home of Boris Johnson, more animatronic philandering prick than man, is as untroubled by hypocrisy as the Cabinet. It deploys Allison Pearson to use the images of Hancock’s hands-on moments as a Rorschach inkblot that reveals that every conspiracy-flecked, fact-free rant she has published over the past years was right all along. In her typically-restrained way she writes:
“I hate him,” says one bride simply. I hate him too. How dare Matt Hancock think he can flout the rules with impunity, rules which have caused an ocean of suffering to the good people of this country who have strived to do as they were told by this utter charlatan. Hypocrisy is too small a word for this betrayal of public trust…
Now, with fresh and overwhelming proof of his unfitness for high office, it seems that the PM still won’t fire him. What more will it take? The statement from Number 10 said: “The Health Secretary accepts that he has broken the social distancing guidelines. The Prime Minister has accepted the Health Secretary's apology and considers the matter closed.”
Trust me, it’s not closed. There are millions of us, and we are raging now, and we will not allow it to be closed. If the Government permits one law for Hancock and “important people” and another for the rest of us then it is morally bankrupt. Boris must act this very day to restore the people’s faith, to prove that we haven’t been mugs.
Who does Pearson think her former and future colleague Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is exactly? He’s so morally bankrupt that his moral standing is below sub-prime. Matt Hancock is a mere pickpocket compared to the grand larceny perpetrated by the perpetually priapic PM.
There’s a similarly ludicrous display on the same pages by bizarrely accented fascist-excuser, Spectator editor and Telegraph columnist Fraser Nelson. He writes hyperbolically of crisis like clockwork every Friday and the Hancock story has given him the chance for an extra spot of dramatics. He writes:
The danger is that a void now emerges, and is filled by another narrative. Perhaps accusations of hypocrisy: plenty other ministers have been behaving in ways others are not allowed to. Michael Gove, it emerges, is on a VIP scheme where he doesn’t have to self-isolate if he’s pinged by Test and Trace. We may now start to hear about Tory sleaze: there are growing questions about how many people close to Mr Hancock seem to win NHS contracts.
The Hancock story is embarrassing, not devastating. But unless the Prime Minister can supplant this unfortunate affair with his own story – about how he’s going to use the vaccine success to deal with the web of Covid regulations that are no longer needed – then the affair may come to symbolise a government that is losing control.
The two genuinely true lines there are that there is hypocrisy and that Hancock’s ‘hands/face/place your hands on someone’s arse’ incident will not end up being devastating for the government. Everything else there is fireworks; sounds and lights that will evaporate quickly. Next week, Nelson will have moved onto the next ‘vital’ thing the government should be worrying about.
While we have to wait until Sunday for Sarah Vine’s intervention, The Daily Mail has Jan Moir and Amanda Platell columns on the… uh… affair. Both go for some good old-fashioned Mail moralising — Broken rules, Mr Hancock? What about your wife's heart? from Platell and Matt Hancock's not just betrayed his family, he's cheated on the whole country from Moir. The hearts and marriages broken by Boris Johson, not to mention the abortion he compelled one woman to have to avoid inconvenience for him, don’t get a mention.
Sasha Swire, she of Diary of an MP’s Wife pseudo-fame, also appears in The Telegraph, having seen an opportunity to flog the paperback. In the interview, scheduled before the Hancock story broke, she says of the man she refers to throughout her book as Matt Hands On Cock that “considering the PM’s own history I wouldn’t think it’s terminal”. But it’s a line she gave the interviewer, Celia Walden, before the latest Hancock scandal broke that's worth dwelling upon:
I didn’t write about people’s affairs… believe me a lot of affairs were going on.
The images of Hancock and Coladangelo’s — and the papers seem required to call it this… — “steamy clinch” were, according to The Sun at least, captured on May 6, while images of the pair at a restaurant in a follow-up story were snapped on May 23. The Sun seemingly had time to put together its ‘scoop’ and to pick the moment it sprung the trap.
How and when tabloid stories appear is not simply a matter of when they get their hands on the dirt. It’s well known that tabloids across the world keep the red top equivalent of kompromat on major politicians and big celebrities.
There is at least one other cabinet minister who is alleged to have been taking the michael when it comes covid rules and rumours about whose personal life have been pinging around for some time. But that person is more useful to several newspapers so is unlikely to get the Hancock treatment just yet.
It’s never wise to make predictions about British politics — they go off quicker than milk left on the side in high summer — but I suspect that Hancock won’t be sacked immediately or do the traditional ‘here is a gun’ resignation. However, the affair story will come in very handy for Boris Johnson when he finally decides to reshuffle his cabinet. Moving Hancock to some non-job or perhaps out of Cabinet entirely won’t be seen as him being influenced by Cummings criticisms and continued information drops. Instead, the very commentators losing their minds today will nod and ‘sagely’ say the PM has done the right thing.
Boris Johnson has never done the right thing in his whole life.
There are also the predictable pap stories following Hancock’s wife around.