Matt Hancock beware – politicians have a patchy track record on reality TV

Bar some honourable exceptions, it’s just clowning in the twilight – often pitifully, writes Sean O’Grady

Matt Hancock and a kangaroo (Yui Mok/Belfast Zoo/PA)

You get the distinct impression with Matt Hancock that he’s basically giving up on his political career, which is understandable, but also not understandable.

It’s quite understandable in the sense that this career really hasn’t really recovered from his office affair; and his messy resignation, when Boris Johnson wanted to keep him on only to be able to use him as human shield later on, didn’t add to Hancock’s prestige. He does look dead in the water – but just contemplate the unlikely recent comebacks by Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak.

Even with all the unprecedented ministerial churn during our current permacrisis, though, Hancock never got the call to return to the cabinet, or even the government. No sinecures were offered, so far as we know, and his latest attempt at a return as chair of the Commons Treasury Committee has also flopped. As if in a fit of particularly self-destructive pique, Hancock has taken himself off to the jungle to make a fool of himself in I’m a Celebrity… Get me out of Here! He’s been suspended from the Conservative parliamentary party, and his constituency party in Suffolk is openly contemptuous.

Bridges have been burned. Hancock pleads that it’s charitable work, to raise awareness about dyslexia, but the fact is that there are plenty of other ways for him to raise a few quid, and he could have done so at a time when parliament wasn’t sitting and the good folk of Newmarket and its environs didn’t need their interests protected by Hancock’s presence at Westminster.

Still, the damage is done, as it has been with others, and he’s hardly the only politician to turn up on I’m a Celeb. Nadine Dorries went through a similar period of censure after volunteering for the bushtucker trials in 2012, but, admittedly after a long period of penance and the indulgence of Boris Johnson, she became a disastrous culture secretary in 2021. Other parliamentary figures who’ve put themselves through the possibility of swallowing marsupial genital offal as a means of easy self-promotion include Edwina Currie (2014) who did carve out a successful media career for herself; one-time Lib Dem young meteor Lembit Opik (2010); and former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale (2017), who said she wanted to “take on the myth” that politicians are “old, white, male, pale and stale”. Which she didn’t.

The general rule, albeit an obvious one, is that it’s best to go into showbiz after a political career rather than before or during one, but it’s a confusing picture. Ed Balls found a sort of fame on Strictly Come Dancing and now mixes that sort of stuff with serious punditry alongside George Osborne on The Andrew Neil Show. George Galloway’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, dressed in a scarlet body stocking and doing a cat impression, didn’t help him hang on as a Respect MP in the subsequent general election, but also didn’t prevent him from being elected for a different seat a couple of years on.

The always professional Penny Mordaunt hates the way her political rise has been accompanied by the image of her in a swimsuit after an appearance on the ITV show Splash, a diving competition, but in the context of reality TV it’s difficult to avoid. Hers was an exemplary foray into light entertainment, done for charitable armed forces causes in her Portsmouth constituency, and it positively boosted her profile and career.

For the rest, it’s just clowning in the twilight, and often pitifully. One thinks, for instance, of Ann Widdecombe holding her own so gamely on Strictly, back in 2010. A brief comeback as a Brexit Party MEP in 2019 beckoned, distantly. Neil Hamilton, for example, took his disgraced reputation and his charismatic wife Christine into a self-confessed desperate quest for appearance fees after he lost his seat in 1997, before eventually discovering a form of redemption via UKIP (of which he is now actually party leader).

Low points for the former minister of state at trade and industry and his missus included: an edition of When Louis Met..., when the pair underwent the usual Louis Theroux treatment and Hamilton admitted that he and his wife were mere “professional objects of curiosity”; Neil in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Christine was the face of “British Sausage Week” in 2005. The only way, as they say, was up. Hancock, take note.