Matt Hancock appears to have developed a public humiliation fetish

Not that long ago, it was generally assumed that eating camel penis in front of 8 million people while simultaneously begging them for forgiveness was something Matt Hancock only did because he just couldn’t say no to the money. Now, I’m not so sure

Maybe he’s just a pervert. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe during his time in public office, Matt Hancock developed some kind of fetish for public humiliation – presumably as some kind of psychological coping strategy – and now he just can’t stop himself coming back for more.

Not that long ago, it was generally assumed that eating camel penis in front of 8 million people while simultaneously begging them for forgiveness was something Matt Hancock only did because he just couldn’t say no to the money. But now I’m not so sure.

What if he really did that because he worked out that it would open the door to quite possibly a whole lifetime of further humiliation opportunities, and the temptation was just too great?

Because now, every time he goes on TV, as he did again this morning, the humiliation is on another level than he could ever have dreamed of. Not only does he know that a) he’ll be asked exactly why it was that he thought he could get away with arguing for police action against people having affairs during Covid even though he was having one himself, and b) he’ll have absolutely no answer at all (other than a series of soft, whimpering noises).

He also knows that c) he will be asked why it was that he thought it was OK to make £320,000 profit out of a level of fame he would not have achieved had he not been found to be having an affair during the middle of a pandemic during which he was the acting secretary of state for health.

If humiliation is what you’re into – which he must be – what more could you possibly ask for? Well, actually, there’s more. Generally speaking, Matt Hancock is not regarded to have done especially well at the extremely difficult job of running the department of health in a once-in-a-century respiratory pandemic.

And presumably, he will also have known, when he accepted the invitation to appear on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, that its main presenter Kate Garraway has had her family’s life destroyed by her husband Derek’s debilitating long Covid that has now been going on for almost two full years, and so it would be her asking him the questions to which he knows he is unable to provide an answer.

So why did he do it? “I’m only human,” he said (and not for the first time). He was guilty, he said, of “falling in love.” And presumably, he was only human for wanting to go on I’m A Celebrity because of the “opportunity to communicate with all sorts of new people”. It definitely didn’t have anything to do with that other, rather normal human temptation of being paid £320,000 for a two-week holiday in Australia.

Could it be, in fact, that Matt Hancock really isn’t only human, that he’s absolutely nothing like the rest of us? Because what someone who’s “only human” might do is not agree to go on TV to be interviewed by a woman whose husband spent more than a year in intensive care without his family being able to visit him; especially when you know you’re not capable of answering any of her questions because you’ve already given your answers before and nobody believed them then, either.

Perhaps it’s commendable in some ways to face the interrogation, but what a human might do, in those circumstances, is just say “no” (even if they’ve got their own utterly self-serving book to promote).

The reason Matt Hancock is doing this, by the way, is because he really feels he has to get his side of the story out before the Covid inquiry begins, which is as tedious as it is delusional. It’s close to a certainty that the inquiry will find him to have been utterly wanting; that the decision to evacuate untested hospital patients into care homes caused thousands of preventable deaths.

But it’s also, somewhat comically, almost certain that he’ll still mainly be remembered for two bits of grainy CCTV footage: one crawling through an underground burrow having cockroaches tipped over his head while grabbing a star out of a box of rats, and the other in his office in Westminster, closing the door behind him and grabbing his adviser’s backside.

He probably knows this. It’s why he mumbles, hesitates, blinks and espouses the same degrading verbiage he always does, before going home and saying a big fat yes to absolutely everyone who asks him to do it all over again.