What does Matt Hancock want from us? The question arises once more after a video is posted to the former health secretary’s TikTok account. Behold, Matt emoting down a beach at sunset, miming passionately along a fraction behind the beat of I’m Just Ken, Ryan Gosling’s uber-beta big number from the Barbie movie. We live in a polarised world, so your reaction to this will be either “ooh, new CIA torture track just dropped” or “awww, there goes the world’s most adorable and vanity-free dad, just larking around in linen leisurewear his girlfriend has assured him is ‘such an improvement’. Matt’s job is beach, and he absolutely smashes it.”
Technically, of course, Matt has a side hustle as member of parliament for West Suffolk – but we already know the ill-fated Matt Hancock MP doll is set to be discontinued, next election. An event which often feels quite far away. But which, given it could precipitate a sharp increase in Matt churning out this type of stuff, is arguably bearing down on us much too soon.
Anyway, it was shortly after last November’s appearance on I’m A Celebrity – a three-week, £320,000 gig, undertaken solely to raise awareness of dyslexia – that Hancock’s spokesperson sniffed: “Matt has had lots of offers from agents wanting to represent him, but he’s turned them all down as he doesn’t want or need an agent.” He wants or needs something, however. And at some level, his decision to attach himself to the Barbie movie feels an inevitability. Hancock has long served as a sort of coathanger aerial, occasionally picking up broken snatches of The Discourse, and frantically repurposing them into content that would once have sat in deserved obscurity on the Matt Hancock app, but which now reach out into the cringeosphere to ends unknown.
Maybe Ken’s searing power ballad just speaks to him. Consider, after all, Hancock’s own belief that he would be a 10 anywhere but Westminster, a drab locale which remained stubbornly resistant to his transparent belief that he was born to occupy the Downing Street dreamhouse. Furthermore, it is a song about being stuck in the friendzone with Barbie. And Matt was famously stuck in the friendzone with his university crush Gina Coladangelo for more than two decades, before finally ascending dramatically to the next level during the pandemic. It’s still unclear if the sparks flew after Matt and Gina were brought together by the animal magnetism of the health department’s calamitous readiness approach, or just the sheer exhilaration of waving Tory donors in his WhatsApp contacts into the Covid contracts VIP lane. But, let’s face it, any of these would make incredible plotlines for future Barbie spin-offs, as Mattel seeks to build out a multibillion-dollar franchise universe in which we can all feel invested.
For now, the question of where precisely Hancock thinks he’s headed is a tantalising one. He bestrides the world of multihyphenates like a colossus. Some days he’s a crypto shill; others a reality TV dependable. Following the I’m A Celeb appearance, Matt’s next run-out will be on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, due to be screened later this year. The show’s chief instructor has offered something of a teaser of what to expect from Hancock’s stint. “We treat everybody the same and we really went at him,” as Billy Billingham recently remarked. “You might think that he’d be a cunt but for most of the time he wasn’t. But if anyone shows any attitude, they get it and when he tried it, he got fucking smashed. In the interrogation bit, he gets destroyed, absolutely destroyed. At the time I thought, ‘Oh, hang on, maybe this is a bit much?’ But no, he deserved it.”
As for what else he deserves, Hancock’s own view seems to be that an ongoing career in the public eye is at least part of the answer. Admittedly, agent or not, an evolution into telly personality feels like quite a tall order, given his public appearances are currently divided between the beach and the Covid inquiry room. Can you think of any other on-screen talent who has sought to make it as a light entertainment star while a full-scale public probe into their role in the handling/mishandling of a deadly pandemic ran literally concurrently?
Either way, the constant appearance of personal growth is the brand element Matt is most keen to push. “I messed up and I fessed up”, ran one prepared line on I’m A Celebrity, as he discussed breaking his own Covid rules. And yet, do recall that Hancock announced he only felt able to take the jungle gig because he judged, after the turmoil of the Truss premiership, “the government is stable”. What a very telling piece of self-regard – miscalculated, perhaps, but calculated all the same.
As are all his little bits of fun. The overwhelming message of Matt Hancock’s TikToks and deliberate telly humiliations is surely that this guy – this absolute good sport – could not possibly be the sort of person who’d be capable of negligence. This is not the sort of person whose department could be described by Dominic Cummings as a “smoking ruin” in the crucial early weeks of the pandemic. This isn’t the kind of man who’d boast about throwing “a protective ring” around care homes that were in fact left to their fate. No, this dear old Ken could not be capable of any of those things – let alone liable for them. Even when Matt is not taking himself seriously, you see, he is actually taking himself very seriously indeed.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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