Matt Hancock’s epic career fail was so obvious, I can’t help feeling sorry for him

The former secretary of state is once again the laughing stock of Westminster, writes Marie Le Conte. Did he really think he could one day be prime minister?

Matt Hancock was never taken entirely seriously, a fellow MP nicknamed him Matty Moo Moos (PA)

I was going to start this column by comparing the arc of Matt Hancock’s career to a Greek tragedy, but it did not feel quite right. Instead, the past decade of the former secretary of state’s life can be best understood as one of those stupid YouTube videos.

You have definitely seen one of them; they usually involve a man setting out to do something idiotic – skateboarding down long a ramp, jumping from a roof that is too high – and very predictably injuring themselves as a result. You end up feeling a bit sorry for them, not because they hurt themselves, but because it was so obvious that things were going to end badly for them. Could they not see it? Did they not care? What is wrong with them?

In Matt Hancock’s case, the transparently poor decision took place in the summer of 2019 – but let’s take it from the beginning. Hancock was elected as a Conservative MP in 2010, having previously been chief of staff to George Osborne. He became minister for skills shortly after that, presumably due to his closeness with the chancellor.

In those years, people laughed at him. Fellow Tory MPs saw him as an overly ambitious brown-noser, and people in the industry did not take him very seriously. There was, for example, the small matter of the garish maroon jumper he was rarely seen without, but which sadly got eaten by moths. At one event, he was giving a speech when a college’s head hopped onstage and handed him a new jumper; she made him put it on there and then, like a child who’d forgotten his PE kit. Statesmanlike, it was not.

Still, he kept going; after skills came small business, industry and enterprise, then energy, and so on. In 2015, he started attending cabinet as minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General. In 2016, Theresa May came in and demoted him back to minister of state for digital culture.

This is when the wind started to turn, slowly; the job offer had clearly been a bit of a snub, but Hancock took it and ran with it. He worked hard on his brief and was not entirely loathed by the industry, which is no mean feat when you are a Conservative culture minister. When he was promoted to secretary of state in early 2018, it felt deserved.

This wasn’t the main change, however; at the time, it looked like Hancock had finally started to embrace his inherent dorkiness. Aware that people would laugh at him anyway, he – at least seemingly – decided to make people laugh with him instead. There were silly photoshoots and social media videos; there was the Matt Hancock app, which gave Westminster some well-deserved entertainment.

In what were tumultuous years for the Conservative Party, he largely kept his powder dry, and did not behave the way some of his colleagues did. He was a Remainer turned soft Brexiteer, and he was there to do his job. He still wasn’t taken entirely seriously – fellow MP Nicholas Soames kept nicknaming him Matty Moo Moos, for example – but fewer Conservatives in Westminster recoiled at the mere mention of his name.

Though his run for the leadership in 2019 felt like an overreach, it wasn’t a complete embarrassment. He campaigned on a platform of returning the party to a reasonable centre ground, and it looked like an honourable first try. Rumour had it at the time that some Tory big hitters had promised to back him then not stuck to their word, but it didn’t really matter. A Remainer was never going to win that contest anyway.

What followed was Hancock’s sliding doors moment; the point at which the stupid man in the YouTube video grabs his skateboard with a naive grin. Mere days after attempting to paint himself as the anti-Boris candidate, he announced that he would be backing him instead. The conversion was Damascene; within what felt like minutes, he started appearing on television, radio and anywhere else who would have him to defend the man he so clearly disliked.

It did not have to be this way, of course; Hancock was only 40 at the time, and could have chosen to sit it out for the foreseeable, then make a return once the coast was clear for centrist Conservatives. Instead, his ambition got the best of him, and once again people laughed at him, and not with him.

That he debased himself to such an extent only to keep his job as health secretary does feel like he triggered an ancient curse, given what was to come. Much ink has been spilled on the events of the past two years, so we can safely skip them, though you and I both know they were not happy ones for Hancock.

Openly mocked in anonymous briefings by those in government and mistrusted by those outside of it, Hancock already looked like he was running out of road before what took place last weekend. The CCTV footage was the final nail in the coffin but let’s be honest – would he really have gone much further even if The Sun hadn’t published its story? Was Johnson ever going to promote him? Were Conservative MPs ever going to pick him as their leader?

Here is the tragic truth: he sincerely believed that they would. Days before Hancock’s affair became public, I spoke to an MP who knows him quite well, and who reported that he still thought he could be prime minister. The news wasn’t delivered to me with a smirk, but instead with some pity. Matt Hancock, around a week ago, still believed he could be next in No 10 Downing Street. How?

In 2013, this newspaper published a piece that called him “the future Conservative leader”. In it, he was asked about both his time training as a jockey and his future in politics. “It’s not for the fainthearted,” he said. “Winning a horse race is about timing, and a lot of politics is about timing, too.”

Had he remembered this six years later, he could still be a well-regarded and fairly young backbencher biding his time. Instead, he jumped off the roof and broke his leg. It is hard not to feel a bit sorry for him; it was so obviously going to go wrong. At least, I suppose there is a life lesson in this for all of us: you cannot take yourself more seriously than other people do. Oh, and if people are going to laugh; make sure they are laughing with you.