Isabel Oakeshott doesn’t need to be a ‘nice woman’. 
She’s a journalist doing her professional job. She did it in the public interest which is a legal defence to an NDA. The Torygraph aren’t subject to an NDA.
davidallengreen.com/2023/03/ndas-and-the-public-interest-a-beginners-guide-for-matt-hancock-and-others/
I’d rather know what our elected politicians are like and how they were working, given this government’s shameful record on Covid and care homes and PPE which resulted in a horrific levels of excess deaths.
Matt Hancock could have avoided all this by not employing a ghost writer to rush out his self-aggrandising memoir before he steps down as an MP- he could have solely given his evidence to the ongoing public enquiry into how the government handled Covid.
But that wouldn’t have given Hancock the chance to make loads of cash above his MP’s salary and to try to rehabilitate his terrible public image and to seek to become a long term public figure in his own right, after he steps down as a MP. He’s been hoisted by his own petard.
Oakeshott wants scoops and is personally very proBrexit so I do wonder in my more tin foil hat moments if Hancock has been personally thrown under this bus timed right now, to distract us all from the Brexit induced economic doldrums we are in and the lack of (imported) veg in the supermarkets and the horrendous cost of living crisis? Plus the government’s hypocrisy in glorying in Northern Ireland having the same rights to the EU that the Tories have carefully and (understatement) harmfully removed from the whole of the UK?
If the new framework can be feted by the government as a new attraction of investment angle into NI, what grim reality does that leave starkly unsaid about the economic prospects of the rest of post-Brexit Great Britain?