He may have made the final of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here but Matt Hancock’s short-lived TV popularity hasn’t translated to book sales.
His tome Matt Hancock's Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid entered the Neilson book charts at number 191 earlier this month and has since plummeted so sharply it’s no longer in the top 1,000.
Released in time for Christmas, official sales figures show it sold 3,304 copies in the first week - and just 600 in the second.
One source said: “There are just so many better things to spend £25 on.”
When it came out on December 6 the book, co-authored by political journalist Isabel Oakeshotte, was universally panned.
Reviewers said it was an exercise in self-justification and score settling, with Hancock at pains to point out that the successful vaccine rollout was single-handedly down to him.
All the disasters of the 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 “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.
