Londoner's Diary
The trial of Matt Hancock continues on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. The hard-faced commandos on the show seem to particularly enjoy taunting the former health secretary, who was the face of lockdowns but broke guidelines to conduct an affair.
In the latest instalment, Hancock is taunted in a dark room by a female interrogator who refuses to let him sit down because “you’re a f*cking man aren’t you? A man who likes to put it about a bit? So stay on your feet.”
Of his affair, she asked: “With all due respect you’re not a good looking guy, are you? Pubes on your chest, moobs. So how did you do it, Matty babe?” and proceeded to call him “arrogant”, a “knobhead” and “a weasel-faced c***”. All of this was no doubt made worse for Matt by the fact the interrogator had a passing resemblance with Liz Truss.
Dominic Cummings, Hancock’s sworn enemy in government, enjoyed the spectacle. After catching up with the episode last night (when he probably should have been swatting up for his Covid-19 inquiry appearance today), Cummings said the SAS officer “speaks for England” in a Twitter/X post.
Team Matt are unimpressed. A friend of Hancock told us: "This post just shows what a nasty piece of work Cummings is, but we knew that."
More tantalising perhaps is Cummings' comment that the interrogator’s tirade sounded “remarkably like some WhatsApps at the time from women all over Whitehall”. If today's inquiry disclosures are anything to go by, it was Cummings using remarkably similar language to describe Hancock during the pandemic in his exchanges with then prime minister Boris Johnson. "I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or should believe on anything, and we face going into autumn crisis with the c*** in charge of NHS still," reads an August 2020 message to Johnson about Hancock, disclosed today.
