While he may have cut to third place in this year's series of I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! Matt Hancock's short rise in popularity through TV seems to have peaked and began to fall once again.
While his brand-new piece of literature Matt Hancock's Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid initially entered the Neilson book charts at number 191 earlier this month, it since flopped so sharply that it’s no longer in the top 1,000.
Expected to be a Christmas hit in 2022, official sales figures show that the book sold just 3,304 copies in the first week or launching, dropping to a mere 600 in the second.
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The Mirror reports that one source said: “There are just so many better things to spend £25 on.” As it launched on December 6, the book which was co-authored by Isabel Oakeshotte, was universally criticised.
Reviewers dubbed the move an exercise in self-justification and score settling, with the MP trying to engrave the statement that the successful UK vaccine rollout over Covid-19 was single-handedly his work. All of the disasters of the global pandemic, including the tragic handling of care home residents, were somebody else's fault.
The delayed restrictions were blamed on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the terrible test and trace system was down to Public Health England and the failure to close UK borders was the fault of No 10. Comparing him to Alan Partridge, one reviewer said simply that 'his ego got in the way', adding: “Most people I speak to hate him.”
Another scoffed at his portrayal of himself as an 'undervalued genius' saying that 'vanity' was his major flaw. Hancock, who will next year appear on C4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins which he has already recorded in Vietnam, was widely criticised for bringing it out ahead of any official inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic.
He was also derided for not being able to write his own version of events by himself for the diary, which purports to give 'the inside story' from his perspective.
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