It didn’t matter that Matt Hancock didn’t win the I’m a Celebrity award – he got exactly what he wanted

It’s like a nationwide Milgram experiment, only we do it every year and we don’t really learn anything from it.

This year’s edition of ITV-sponsored 90 Minutes of Hate has a bit of a curve in the form of a human Hummel figurine of Matt Hancock, who shocked the British public by a) not once calling his plug friends His camp is “poor” and b) does all the work to the season finale.

There are some highlights from this season that don’t involve Hancock – Chris Moyles’ prank on innocent Owen Warner is pretty funny, and Charlene White seems to position herself as the villain of the camp before Hancock comes along – but what if We honestly this year’s outing is a bit of a man show.

It’s really not surprising; Matt Hancock is an incumbent MP who left his constituents to eat an anus crawling on TV, and whose act as health secretary during the worst public health crisis in the country. The UK in living memory is involved in the deaths of more than 200,000 people. If people were more concerned about Boy George being a bit antisocial then honestly we would have to clean up the country and start over.

It makes television boring, doesn’t it? I think people were probably expecting Hancock to step in and be immediately knocked out by Sue Cleaver, but alas.

Instead, what we got was a bunch of people trying their best to ignore the elephant in the camp; or worse, gradually came to the conclusion that the elephant was misunderstood and maybe people were being too harsh on the elephant, even though the elephant had outsourced important PPE contracts to his own kind for a while. deadly pandemic and then broke his own lockdown rules. he can cheat on his wife with subordinates.

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If we’re being completely honest, Hancock played an absolute blind in this whole reality TV gamble, even when he didn’t win. He could very easily resign from politics in disgrace and disappear into the night, and go back to his previous job, I suppose, a haunted ventriloquist.

But no, he told himself, I wouldn’t. I’m not going to completely destroy the country and then have the courtesy to disappear into space so people never have to think about the pain I’ve caused them again. What am I, David Cameron? No, he said, I’ll be on TV. I’ll put myself in the newspaper. I would eat a camel’s penis while sitting across from the quietly angry Boy George.

It’s win-win, because that’s just the nature of reality TV. You can bring out the vulnerable, human side of yourself, triggering everyone’s innate urge to forgive, or you become a pantomime villain and get invited to Loose Women.

Either way you get a book deal if it does, and certain newspapers will cover everything you do until the day you die because you’re a former reality TV contestant and I I’m afraid it’s just the law.

Hancock went the way he used to, with the initial cold reception of the campers quickly giving way to sincere hearts about how, hey, we all make mistakes (sometimes mistakes). big, huge mistake with terrible consequences).

He and Seann Walsh quickly became friends, giving the show a fun little backstory as they teamed up on quests together and played the show’s version of the marriage game (in which Hancock guessed) that Walsh’s secret crush at Disney is Bambi, for that reason I can’t explain what feels like the most Tory answer he can think of).

He also takes on those Bushtucker Challenges like a champ, exhibiting a cold, almost sociopathic attitude, ready to humiliate himself to entertain us, even while Ant and Dec are in the middle of nowhere. hurls the 10 plagues of Egypt on his head in the finale like the avatar of a vengeful god.

Is he awkward and weird? Sure, but that’s the point. Matt Hancock has somehow made himself human – and I hesitate to use the word but – lovable. His answer to the question of “dream dinner party guests” is predictably uncanny, with him choosing Pocahontas – a real person who exists and appears on money – as his taste. his fictitious guest. He shared private text messages between himself and Boris Johnson with campers, like a girl sleeping through the night nervous about asking the guy she likes.

But that’s part of the charm, and it’s helped a lot of audiences come to him. Sure, Ofcom has received almost 2,000 complaints regarding Hancock’s appearance on the show, but the point is: only half of them objected to him being aired in the first place. The rest were from people who complained that he was bullied.

bullied. Matt Hancock. Conservative politician. A survey for Savanta ComRes for Yahoo News UK created a word cloud of all the different ways people chose to describe the former health minister. Sure, you have the words “idiot”, “tw*t”, “unreliable” and “useless” standing out, yes, I hope so too. But you can also find “funny,” “brave” and “human,” as descriptors, going from amusing to controversial.

During the confrontations that arose in the camp, viewers have consistently sided with Hancock, seeing him as some sort of underdog in a world where Boy George seems to rule with an iron fist. He lost to Jill – who really deserved to win after cutting her tongue while using it to remove a star while covered in rats – but does it matter? He was successfully rehabilitated, or at least, normalized his behavior in front of a large British public.

I don’t know if Hancock has some grand plan to advance his career or he just really wants to put a spider in his face, but his success in I’m a Celebrity is a testament to that. evidence of the British tendency. to avoid interpersonal confrontation at all costs has impeded Great Britain as a country. That we put politeness above accountability and that we would tolerate even the most cruel, damaging political choices if the person making them “appears to be a decent enough person.”

Hancock’s time in the woods is another step on the path to the Conservatives’ outrageous hyper-normalization. He’s a test of exactly how obscene we’ll all learn to live with before actually standing up and saying no, this is the limit. He is a pair of shiny keys, dangling in front of a gullible voter to distract them from the fact that their country is falling apart around them.

But hey, at least we’ve seen him eat sheep’s vaginas.