‘Roll up! Roll up!’.
That used to be the call when the circus came to town. Now it’s ‘Tune in! Tune in!’ or, more likely, ‘Log on! Log on!’, and the show doesn’t contain sword-swallowers, lion tamers, tightrope walkers or red-nosed clowns. Instead the entertainers are people whose names you vaguely recognise. The Big Top isn’t striped or made of canvas, it’s a canopy of sub-tropical rainforest trees with names like Giant Brush Box and New England Blackbutt. And these days we call it I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here, now back in its traditional stomping ground of New South Wales after a two year sojourn in Old North Wales.
It’s still a circus, though, wherever you put it. And it still has its chortling ringmasters in the form of presenters Ant and Dec
The show returns to our screens tonight and this year it has a whiff of the carney freakshow about it thanks to the late inclusion of everyone’s least favourite former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock MP. You remember him. Readers of the Sun certainly will. ‘Snogs in office, cheats on wife’ ran the brief but devastating headline when he was caught on CCTV last summer having, er, Covid discussions with Gina Coladangelo. She was a well-connected lobbyist and former Oxford University buddy then working as an aide in the Department of Health and Social Care. If you remember the leaked CCTV images you’ll know that, while indeed very social, what the couple were doing in his office involved absolutely zero distancing.
Hancock, who had mustered only 20 votes when he stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party two years earlier, resigned in June 2021 amid ridicule in some quarters and stone cold fury in others. It was the usual story: one rule for us, one rule for them. We’ve heard it a lot over the last three years.
Since then the honourable member for West Suffolk has been on the backbenches, though you may have glimpsed him in the crowd as Rishi Sunak arrived triumphant at Tory HQ last month before heading to Downing Street to feed the cat and run the country. In that order. Hancock was the one he appeared to snub as he was dolling out handshakes, fist bumps and matey hugs.
If this was a gangster movie, the poor chump would be sleeping with the fishes by now. As it is, he has run off to join the circus and will soon be sleeping with insects instead. The kind which bite you in both the safe seats and the marginals.
Among his fellow jungle dwellers for the next few weeks are Boy George (a 1980s pop star with a waspish tongue), Mike Tindall (a rugby player with a royal wife), TV presenters Scarlette Douglas and Charlene White, about whom I know zip, ex-DJ Chris Moyles (scared of heights, apparently), comedians Babatunde Aléshe and Seann Walsh, and England footballer Jill Scott. She learned the hard way that most of us can lip read when a camera caught her Anglo-Saxon response to a hefty German challenge in the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final. Google ‘Jill Scott potty mouth’ for more on that. For what it’s worth, my money’s on her to win.
Soap star Danny Miller (no, me neither) has drawn on his deep knowledge of herd mentality (he’s in farmland TV soap Emmerdale, apparently), plus the fact he won last year’s competition, to tell the nation Hancock is in for a hell of a time. This much we could probably have figured out ourselves, but it was good to have his thoughts on the matter.
“I think he needs to just accept the fact that he is going to be everyone’s toy,” Miller said on Good Morning Britain with what I hope was an impish grin. “I think the public are going to say: ‘This is what we are going to put you through’ … and when they are done with him, they will just get rid of him.”
Translation: Hancock is likely to be the person most often chosen to endure the Bush Tucker Trial, in which contestants are invited to eat (going by previous examples) a meal of insects, fish eyes, Tarantulas, pig testicles, kangaroo anus or bull’s penis in order to win proper food for their team. Unlike the last two Prime Ministers, the trialists are voted for by the public. So you see Hancock’s dilemma. And when the public has tired even of that sorry spectacle, they’ll vote him out. Discard him like a broken toy. Turn him into the Truss of the sub-tropics.
So why is here there? Good question. It’s often the case in politics that there’s a stated reason and then there’s a real reason. Or, in plain English, there’s the pig testicles a politician talks and, behind it, the truth that talk obscures. On top of that, there’s the pig testicles they claim is the real reason for something but which may not be. Subterfuge layered on subterfuge, to the point where nobody knows what is ‘real’. A bit like a Christopher Nolan film but with cheaper suits for the male leads.
Make what you will, then, of Hancock’s claim that (according to an article he wrote in the Sun) the ‘real’ reason for him going on the programme is to “talk directly to people who aren’t always interested in politics, even if they care very much about how our country’s run”. To show his “human side”. To use reality TV to “deliver important messages to the masses”. And, finally, to raise awareness of dyslexia. He was diagnosed with the condition aged 18.
Wait, there’s more. By implication, then, the ‘real’ reason has nothing at all to do with (a) him “losing my marbles” as he so delicately puts it (b) the £350,000 cheque he is expected to trouser for his ritual humiliation on television (c) the opportunity it offers (albeit scant) to restore his reputation, or (d) the fact that fellow MP Nadine Dorries went on the show in 2012, signed a six-figure advance for a three novel deal a year later and, despite one of said tomes being described by critic Christopher Howse as “the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years”, managed to wangle a cabinet post as culture secretary in 2021.
No, nothing at all to do with any of that.
Dorries, by the way, did have the whip removed for her decision to swap surgeries in her Mid Bedfordshire constituency for a chance to spend a few days in the jungle with Eric Bristow and Limahl from Kajagoogoo (who wouldn’t?). She was criticised by her constituents and her fellow MPs. And she was censured for not revealing her fee.
Hancock’s decision to join the I’m A Celebrity circus has been met with similar sanctions, though he has said he will declare his fee. But as a measure of the esteem in which the former health secretary is held locally, one of his constituents told the Daily Mail he was very much looking forward to watching him “eat a kangaroo’s penis”, this being yet another reference to the Bush Tucker Trials. Unfortunately for Hancock, that constituent was Andy Drummond, deputy chairman of the West Suffolk Conservative Association, not a mob Mr Hancock would be advised to displease too much.
A bit like a footballer going out on loan, a politician going on a reality TV show is never a convincing career move whatever they or anybody else says. But we’ll watch with interest how Matt Hancock fares – even if the most likely outcome is pity at his debasement and shame at our enjoyment of it. Until then, let him eat grubs.
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