Matt Hancock

You remember him…During lockdown, he was the one who insisted that his arms were around the care homes, night and day. Canny sceptics like John Crace in The Guardian, were impressed by his announcement at the covid briefings that they’d be honest about it if they got things wrong. At the time I thought he was crazy to trust Hancock’s word. You only got to be in that cabinet if you’d told lies about Brexit, so why should he suddenly assume that they would now be starting to tell the truth?

Nothing Hanock’s done since has raised him in our estimation. No, we didn’t really think he was being a celebrity in the jungle to promote the cause of dyslexia, and donating 3% of his fee to that cause justified our scepticism. But what we have now, courtesy of Isabel Oakeshott, is a detailed running commentary of just how vain, incompetent and deceitful he could be. He was, of course, an idiot to trust her with anything serious, but the important political question is how any Prime Minister could appoint such a fool, and then allow them to stay in office long after they’d demontrated their unfitness for the role.