I See You has a fantastic piece on Hancock today:
”I see you, Matt Hancock.
What an inspiring spectacle you are, a politician whose outward appearance finally matches his own performance. It’s hard to tell whether you’ve been parachuted into the jungle or simply been swimming on the Kent coast. Look, everyone! Matt Hancock is here to redeem himself, crawling through sludge and eating filth in his desperate need to win back the public’s approval. It’s the modern day Colosseum, where loathsome public figures can emerge like a phoenix from the bin fire of incompetence they’ve created for themselves.
What disturbingly short memories we all have. If it leads to a swathe of dementia diagnoses it’s at least better timing; I imagine those now applauding you wouldn’t have fancied being shipped off to a care home inside that ‘protective ring’ you lied through your teeth about. You just don’t have any time for the integrity of circles, do you, Matt Hancock? Whether they’re the imaginary ones you pretended to cast around the most vulnerable, or form the one around your wife’s finger, you plunge everyone within them into misery with your betrayals.
Funny, isn’t it? All the headlines and gossip column inches, and I haven’t yet seen a word about your dyslexia campaign. It’s almost as if this narcissistic self-flagellation you’ve inflicted on the nation was never about that. It’s almost as if it’s all been about the Matt Hancock brand, the desperate reinvention of a mendacious snake now determined to rebuild his shattered reputation. That it appears to be working for so many is enough to make me want to throw my hands up in despair.
This is the true art of being a politician, isn’t it? Your lot don’t rely on true scrutiny but are instead utterly dependent on the general public’s overwhelming ignorance. Even now, the comments sections are filled with obsequious lamentations about your right to ‘forgiveness’ for the mistake of cheating on your wife, as if the affair were even in the top ten of the most grotesque things you did throughout the pandemic. In one aspect at least, you and I are the same, Matt Hancock. I couldn’t give less of a shit about your wife either.
You didn’t ‘make the mistake of falling in love’ when you stood at that lectern and lied through your teeth to the country. Whether it was about testing new arrivals in care homes, the PPE procurement process and the shortages, or your legal obligations to publish the details of billions of pounds’ worth of Covid-related contracts, you were perpetually dishonest and pathetically inadequate. Your grubby little affair is barely a speck of red in that blood-soaked ledger. It simply forms the kicker to your all-encompassing lack of integrity.
Do the thousands of excess deaths and the utter corruption of the procurement process fall entirely on one man? No, of course not, but to pretend the sodding Health Secretary of the time bears no responsibility whatsoever is transparently absurd. It’s not for the viewers of ITV to forgive you, who are falling for the parlour tricks of a man so obsessed with himself that he’s never been able to recognise the gulf between the adonis he sees in the mirror and the limits of his own reality. It’s for the tens of thousands of grieving families that you so catastrophically let down.
Not that you’ll give a shit, Matt Hancock. You’ve always been ecstatic to clear the lowest of bars, and being more likeable than Chris Moyles is right down there with the very lowest of them.
That poor scorpion said it best. What a venomous little prick.
I see you, Matt Hancock. I fucking see you”.