Uncandid Camera and Gove Us A Clue: The Hancock affair has now shifted to the stories behind the story
A daring Diane Abbott tweet, questions about the camera that caught that 'steamy clinch', and Hancock's off-the-books Gmail account...
With a water pistol and a glass of orange squash placed in front of him, Matt Hancock jumped before he wasn’t pushed, encouraged to do the as-decent-as-he-could-manage thing and well aware that there was more to come out. Now he’s leaving his wife — who is said to be suffering from Long Covid after he gave her the virus — and the press is being briefed about “a love match”. The soft-focus Sunday supplement interview is surely just around the corner.
For the newspapers, the almost Dodo-rare occurrence of a political resignation has meant they’ve had to move on to the next stage in the news cycle — the stories about the stories, the insider sniping, and the insinuations about other intriguing pairings and hypocritical choices.
Tim ‘Shippers’ Shipman, who specialises in quick turnaround narrative tales of behind-the-scenes machinations and recriminations, teams up with his colleague Gabriel Pogrund — more from him later — for a story slightly clumsily headlined Matt Hancock: puritan-in-chief who became the (ex) minister for hypocrisy and bearing the breathless intro:
The former health secretary shrugged off every criticism that came his way over Covid. But an illicit relationship with a glamorous aide has wrecked his marriage and his career…
Being able to use phrases like “an illicit relationship with a glamorous aide” is what Sunday newspaper hacks pray for daily. Shipman and Pogrund — which sounds more like a purveyor of over-priced grooming products than a journalistic super-team — write:
At tea time on Thursday Matt Hancock was on the floor of the Commons, defending the Department of Health’s decision to sell data from GP medical records to drug companies and universities.
… Hancock mounted a bravura defence of the plan in the manner that has become familiar to the public throughout the coronavirus crisis. He sat down at 5.27pm. At 6pm he took a call from The Sun, detailing a stunning data leak in the heart of Whitehall that has changed his life and cost him his career.
In a chat with Times Radio’s breakfast show, Shipman dripped a little more detail saying Hancock “took a call from someone very senior at The Sun newspaper”. Either he’s being very complimentary to Harry ‘Bunter’ Cole, the country’s most committed cuckold, or he’s suggesting that the paper’s editor, Victoria Newton, was the one to drop the tonne of bricks on the hapless handsy minister.
Where other papers not in the News UK stable — notably The Mail on Sunday, which we will come to — dedicate many words to understanding how The Sun got its hands-on CCTV footage from within a cabinet minister’s office, Shipman and Pogrund spend just 10 words on the fact…
The tabloid had been passed CCTV video footage of Hancock, 42, in his ministerial office, kissing and fondling a woman that he had put on the public payroll.
… which is hardly surprising. The Sun lost a legal case to Sir Simon Hughes just 17 days ago over illegal data gathering and the acquisition of the CCTV footage in the Hancock case while benefiting from a wafer-thin public interest defence still seems dodgier than a genuine authentic Rolex purchased in a pub carpark from a bloke who says he personally knows Mr R. Olex himself.
The Shipman/Pogrund piece is the usual melange of whispers from aides, ‘friends’, bloviating but anonymous backbenchers and cabinet sources, all either trying to stick the knife into the half-cooked Hancock or pushing markedly unconvincing mitigation.
This is a particularly telling section…
Most significantly, at least five close friends of Hancock had told him he would face a barrage of scrutiny that would have made it impossible for him to do his job. They included a serving and former minister, a former MP and other political associates. One said: “He needs to resign in my opinion, it’s just not tenable.” Another said: “I’m very sorry but I think he has to resign. Matt has been in charge of telling people they can’t hug loved ones at funerals while he’s been in a corridor snogging. It’s indefensible.”
A third said: “He should have gone on Friday. Now people will be spilling blood, looking at every decision he has ever made and every contract he has signed for something else.”
This, privately, is what had concerned senior figures in Downing Street. In addition to making Coladangelo a Ned, her brother Roberto Coladangelo is executive director of strategy at Partnering Health, which was awarded a £28 million contract last year for work for the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust.
Eyebrows were also raised when a former publican and neighbour of Hancock won a £30 million deal to produce test tubes. This remains a live issue for No 10, despite the resignation. “What they’re worried about in No 10 is the spectacle of all these contracts being bunged to mates,” a senior Tory said. “The Department of Health has been at the centre of that. That is showing up in the focus groups.”
… because it shows the real worry about Hancock remaining in post was not the charges of hypocrisy or the sting of public opprobrium but the fear that he would keep drawing attention to the cosy deals done under cover of pandemic panic, the so-called “VIP lane”, and the legions of Conservative Party donors, friends, and hangers-on who made out bandits while thousands died.
Look especially at that word “spectacle”. It is the “spectacle of all these contracts being bunged to mates” that is the concern not that the corruption has occurred at all. The dirty deals are not the problem, it’s the risk of light being shone into the even more sordid corners of the government’s expropriation of public money that had people worried.
The other tug-of-war at work in today’s “sources say” articles is between what friends Hancock retains — most of them him in various wigs — framing what he did as a mere “mistake” due to a “love match” and those who want to keep the attention on the wife and children he has betrayed.
While Hancock is said to only have told his wife about the affair on Thursday — the eve of The Sun’s front page story — the line being peddled is that he and Coladangelo are in love and will be “setting up a home”. Meanwhile, Shipman and Pogrund write:
In Suffolk, where their constituency home is, the sympathy is all for Martha Hancock, who considered her marriage happy and stable until her husband returned home after his call from The Sun on Thursday evening to say that he was leaving her. He had to wake up their youngest child to tell them that he would be moving out.
Martha Hancock’s anger was heightened because has she has been suffering from long Covid after a brush with the virus, which she is understood to have caught from her husband.
What allies Hancock retains are as cringingly puppy dog perky and tone-deaf as him. The Shipman/Pogrund article continues:
Despite friends calling for him to go gracefully, Hancock’s instincts until late this afternoon had been to fight on. “He wanted to finish the job,” said one ally. “It would be like quitting during the Second World War before the liberation.”
But other friends persuaded him that if he went immediately, he could return in a future reshuffle in the autumn or early next year. In his letter to Johnson, Hancock thanked the prime minister for “your unwavering support, your leadership and your optimism”.
Please sign my petition asking for just one major British news story that does not tangentially reference World War 2 for no good reason.
Elsewhere in The Sunday Times, Pogrund has a story on Hancock using a ‘secret’ Gmail account to conduct government business. He writes:
Matt Hancock faces an investigation after using a personal email account instead of an official address during the pandemic in a breach of government guidelines.
Since March last year the former health secretary has routinely used a private account to conduct government business, concealing information from his own officials and potentially the public, according to documents obtained by The Sunday Times.
It means that the government does not hold records of much of Hancock’s decision-making, including negotiating multimillion-pound PPE contracts, setting up the £37 billion test and trace programme and overseeing the government’s care homes strategy.
The disclosure of Hancock’s secret account appears in minutes of a meeting between senior officials at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in December. Cabinet Office guidance states that ministers should use official email accounts in order to ensure that there is evidence of important decisions and of proper internal scrutiny.
It’s a solid story based on government documents presumably slipped out by yet another official keen on seeing Hancock gone. It will have been in the works well before Hand to Cock jumped yesterday and awareness of stories like this coming down the tracks will have played a significant part in his decision.
The off-the-books Gmail account used by Hancock is not an anomaly. It is par for the course within a government that actively tries to duck scrutiny and transparency while publicly burbling on about its commitment to both principles.
As Pogrund also notes there is precedent for the Gmail ruse: 10 years ago, Michael Gove — more on him later too — and a promising young aide called Dominic Cummings faced an inquiry after it was found they were using a Gmail account instead of an official Depart for Education inbox. Gove was forced to hand over the emails.
While Cabinet Office rules state explicitly that “it is expected that government business should be recorded on a government record system”, the use of Gmail, WhatsApp and Signal (especially the disappearing message functions in the latter two apps) is rampant. Couple that with Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office being actively engaged in the frustration and suppression of Freed of Information requests and you’re left with a government that mutters about “sunlight being the best medicine” while doing its utmost to avoid ever having to take a dose.
The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled after the Gove Gmail case that private emails and text messages used to discuss government business are still subject to FOI requests, but it’s proved virtually unenforceable.
Politicians and their advisors just got sneakier leading to recent legal challenges by Foxglove, the legal campaign group, over the use of disappearing messages and encrypted apps to circumvent transparency and government records regulations. As The Guardian wrote back in March, some officials are even using ProtonMail accounts to avoid scrutiny.
In the comment section of The Sunday Times, Camilla Long asks “does no one care about decency any more?” which is let’s say a ‘bold’ position for her to take based on her public statements alone. She continues:
Why is personal character now so irrelevant, when it used to be what really mattered? … does Johnson want his government to become a nonstop dirty joke? Eventually, as with Trump, people will get tired of the sheer stressful noise.
You’d only have to look at the backstories of Long’s colleagues in The Times and Sunday Times comment section along with the archives of their bylined opinions to conclude that personal character is just as irrelevant there. Hop across to the titles’ sister publications, The Sun and Sun on Sunday, and that becomes even clearer. And if you really want to see hypocrisy and a lack of personal character, head for the News UK CEO’s office where Rebekah Brooks is still sitting pretty.
Over at The Sun, which revealed Hancock’s affair but is rather more circumspect about how it got that information, the minister’s resignation gets the front page and it rolls out the retro ‘90s ‘Love Rat’ tag. It also gives plenty of space to a story suggesting that the Prime Minister, whose own list of cheating and lying is so extensive that he’s less love rat and more love raccoon — a bin diving, trash guzzling disgrace, might have Hancock back.
In his response to Hancock’s resignation letter, Johnson drops a line that could not be more of a slap in the face to the families of the 130,000+ people who have died on his (and Hancock’s) watch: “You should be immensely proud of your service. I am grateful for your support and believe that your contribution to public service is far from over."
Sun columnist Tony Parsons puts on the tribune of the people costume to rage…
I first heard the term “party elite” in the old Soviet Union. I later heard it in the People’s Republic of China. A party elite is a class of arrogant big shots who get to wipe their feet on the little people, usually in a one-party police state.
But now we have a party elite in the UK. Because there is one law for them and one law for us.
How does Michael Gove get to watch the Champions League final in Portugal without self-isolating? Because Gove was on a “pilot scheme” that allowed him to test daily rather than self-isolate.
Why were so many Tory ministers — Hancock, Nadhim Zahawi, Gove again — in the VIP areas of Wembley for England v Scotland, when the ordinary football fan watched from home? The double standards are everywhere.
… but it’s just play-acting. The Sun and its parent company News UK benefit from the double standards endlessly. Rupert Murdoch flew into the UK to get his Covid vaccine on the NHS. The Sun will be back to ‘backing Boris’ and battering Labour when the Batley and Spen by-election results drop.
And the questions about Michael Gove are not confined to prancing around in Portugal or his place on a pilot scheme. Last night, Diana Abbott dropped an impeccably worded tweet commenting on speculation that Gove might have been in the frame to become Health Secretary (a job there is absolutely no chance he would have wanted):
She’s obviously been receiving the same DMs as I have. Or more likely she’s just been unable to avoid the rumours and revelations that bounce around those damn WhatsApp groups. There’s nothing that I can stand behind in this newsletter quite yet nor a bulletproof journalistic justification for doing so and Sarah Vine responded to Abbott’s tweet last night by professing ignorance at what the #backtobasics hashtag meant and claiming to be very unbothered.
But that said, I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that her column in today’s Mail on Sunday might be read on more than one level. Tackling the topic of political wives — without making direct reference to her own husband at any point in the piece — under the headline, The problem with the wife who's been with you for ever is that she knows you're not the Master of the Universe you purport to be, Vine writes:
The old ‘behind every great man there’s a woman drowning in dirty laundry’ is a cliche. But it’s true.
It is very hard to do these high-level, high-pressure, high-stakes jobs unless you have someone prepared to take up the reins in every other department of your life.
But the problem is that inevitably sets you on different tracks. You become so entrenched in your respective roles that you begin to drift apart.
…Climbing that far up Westminster’s greasy pole changes a person. And when someone changes, they require something new from a partner.
Namely, someone who is as much a courtesan as a companion, one who understands their brilliance and, crucially, is personally invested in it.
Not someone who thinks it’s all a monumental nuisance and wishes they would get a proper job that doesn’t involve people poking cameras in your face and commenting on your poor choice of footwear.
The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade.
She knows your fears and your insecurities. She knows that, deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe you purport to be. And some people don’t like to be reminded of that.
Forget subtweets, meet the subcolumn — a piece that claims to be about one thing and designed for a newspaper’s mass audience but appears, in fact, to be about something else entirely and targeted to one person in particular.
As I wrote yesterday, tabloid stories are tactical. They appear at particular times and in particular ways to serve particular purposes. And lots of stories that are equally as explosive as Hancock’s affair remain locked in a drawer. As long as a politician serves a purpose for a newspaper proprietor, their personal failings and peccadillos can be widely known but never reported.
Elsewhere in The Mail on Sunday, the paper’s Political Editor Glen Owen claims to have the inside story on how The Sun got the CCTV footage. There are diagrams of the Secretary of States’ office and a confident assertion that there was always a camera there to catch the ‘steamy clinch’, dismissing suggestions that one was placed there specifically to catch Hancock out. Owen writes:
The sting that brought down Matt Hancock was executed by a whistleblower in his department who contacted opponents of the Health Secretary's stance on lockdown to help expose his affair, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The footage of Mr Hancock kissing Gina Coladangelo was caught on a CCTV camera in his office on May 6, and secretly recorded by a member of his department's staff.
After allowing a month to elapse, the whistleblower approached lockdown sceptics and asked them to help sell the incendiary footage to the media.
He skims over who exactly those “lockdown sceptics” engaged by the leaker to get the footage to The Sun are and makes a big point of saying that The Mail was not one of the media organisations that were offered the leak.
There is no criminal probe into the leak at the moment (the Met says it’s up to the department in question) and there are contradictory lines in the press about whether an internal investigation has/will be launched. The Guardian said no, while The Daily Telegraph excitedly reported one was happening.
Owen’s piece quotes Mi5 saying “it would become involved only if there was a 'national security angle'.”
What possible ‘national security angle’ could there be in the leaking of footage from within a government minister’s office? Impossible to say.
Whether it’s the partial and partisan reporting on how the footage of fondling Matty Hands Cock came into The Sun’s possession or the legally precarious game of Gove Us A Clue? that’s currently going on, this story reveals through lack of revelations how the British media works.
Stories get published because they serve a purpose beyond the stated intention and others — though widely known to people who could blow the whistle — remain stuffed in filing cabinets for a rainy day when some leverage is required.
The facts that the UK is a nation where libel laws are notoriously ruinous and the government has made it extremely hard for people without piles of cash to use the courts don’t help. The ‘secrets’ that are sensationally splashed in tabloids are simply the ones we are allowed to hear; dog treats scattered to distract and delight for a passing moment.
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So here's something that continues to puzzle me: it was not a secret that Gina C was a close friend of Hancock's from uni days. Most of the favours she got from him were also in the public domain. Yet no fuss had been made until photos were released that showed that she now also had some sort of sexual relationship with Hancock. Why does this make the favours newsworthy and corrupt? Surely heaping favours on childhood friends is also corrupt? Was this left alone till now because:
A) Nothing is a story in the British press unless someone shags/snogs someone?
B) Heaping the good stuff onto your childhood/uni mates is so common at the moment that key media figures like, I dunno, Rishi Sunak best man and Spectator editor Forsyth don't want to draw attention to that, & would prefer the standard to involve shagging
C) Both the above
D) Something else.
Nor even a rhetorical question on my part, genuinely interested in thoughts !