Before today, to know true toe curling agony you had to read Wild Swans. Now you can just watch Matt Hancock on live TV

Why should Hancock care about some gotcha questions about Tony Abbott? Not when he faces more questions of life and death on a per capita basis than most other health secretaries in the world

I’ll have to level with you right from the start. This is the first time I’ve written a political sketch about something I’ve not actually seen. It’s not entirely my fault. I have tried at least six times now to watch Matt Hancock’s horrifying interview with Kay Burley on Sky News this morning, but on each occasion I have found myself physically incapable of making it to the end.

Before today, to know true toe curling agony you had to go to the trouble of reading Wild Swans. Now you just watch Matt Hancock on live TV, doing his hopeless best not to answer questions about former Australian prime minister, and apparent brand new UK trade envoy, Tony Abbott’s homophobic and misogynistic past. (Some might even say present, not past, but in Mr Abbott’s defence, he was born in 1957 and he’s never left there.)

My current personal best is 1 minute 30 seconds of the full 2 minute 11 seconds clip that has been widely shared online. For my final attempt, I even took my laptop down to my local police station where they were kind enough to physically restrain me. But at the point, on 1 minute 11 seconds, where his answer descends into an elongated grunt of vowels that can only be likened to the sound of the dying giraffe as heard in South Park: The Movie, it appears I went fully Matilda and shut down the browser window through the power of my mind alone.

Given the government’s current strategy is to take out the heads of every government department by flooding them with idiot ministers then making them carry the can for their own crushing ineptitude, it cannot be ruled out that there is strategy here also.

Most people consume the news these days via viral clip, not the programme itself, so if you make your broadcast interviews so soul-shreddingly horrendous that no one can physically watch them, you might just get away with it.

“He’s a misogynist and a homophobe isn’t he?” Kay Burley asks him.

“And he’s also an expert on trade,” comes the reply.

I can scarcely even be bothered to type out the analogies, other than to mention that during the 1970s there were many very expert TV presenters working at the BBC, and that Peter Sutcliffe had a clean driving licence.

Not that Matt Hancock will care. Once upon a time he might have given a toss about all this, but never has anyone been more fully post-toss than him.

A while ago, one of those little online games went viral, in which you answered a series of questions to find out which Succession character you are. But the point is that, really, we are all Tom Wambsgans, the beta male coward that’s just going along with it all.

And in this government, we are all Matt Hancock. He exists like the white man in old movies about Africa, the one without whose eyes the audience was considered incapable of understanding this strange new world.

One of the good guys, once, but in too deep now. Why should he care about some gotcha questions about Tony Abbott when questions of life and death are lighting up his inbox on a minute by minute basis. More life and death questions, on a per capita basis, than most other health secretaries in the world, but there’s not enough time to worry about all that.

Not when there’s some pipe dream to announce anyway. Operation Moon Shot, it’s being called – testing millions of people week in week out, getting the results back in 20 minutes, and so allowing life to go back almost to how it was before, even without a vaccine.

Sounds great, of course, but one does wonder if the moment at which the general public believed in this particular government’s ability to deliver the moon shot might have passed. Seeing Boris Johnson land a man on the moon is somewhat challenging. Seeing a rocket made of baked bean tins explode on the launchpad, and then Johnson emerge from the control centre a fortnight later to pin the blame on gravity for “not being supportive enough” is rather more straightforward to imagine.

But, in the meantime, we’ll always have Matt Hancock, at least for as long as you can bear to watch.