SAS ‘hero’ Matt Hancock trudging through rivers of filth? Change the channel – we’ve seen this one before

The first challenge faced by Matt Hancock with regard to Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins was to look deep inside himself and search for the courage to say “no” to yet another enormous paycheque just for making a complete arse of himself on primetime TV.

But having somehow failed that one, yet again, it would seem that the path was set.

The publicity shots have been released now, and there sandwiched between Arg from Towie and Montana from Love Island, in a spot that really could (and should) have been filled by Linda Lusardi or one of the twins off Fun House, stands the disgraced former health secretary looking as stony faced as his self-loathing perma-grin will allow.

All of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins has been “in the can”, so to speak, for some time now. Hancock was, indeed, excused from some of the tasks on I’m A Celebrity last year because he was still suffering from trench foot from his time filming Celebrity SAS in the weeks before, which is a sentence that somehow gets less dignified each time you read it.

So perhaps we should at least consider whether Matt Hancock might be unlucky to have not foreseen the consequences of allowing his reality TV career to have its natural chronology blown apart in this Pulp Fiction sort of style way.

By the time, for example, he tearily announced in the I’m A Celeb jungle that he was “looking for a bit of forgiveness”, but not realising that the path to forgiveness is not through monetising your own fecklessness and uselessness to the tune of £400k while you should be doing your actual, taxpayer funded job; by that time he had already submitted himself to this second act of national humiliation, which in fact came first.

The trailers appear to show the man trudging through a river of filth, which would have been a novel experience for him at the time, but one of which the British public is now already profoundly bored.

They show him having some kind of boxing match with former footballer Jermaine Pennant, though even the thought of Matt Hancock being physically beaten up entirely for the pleasure of the TV viewing public is, by this point, more wearying than it is cathartic.

SAS chief instructor Billy Billingham, who presents the programme, has already said of Hancock that, “Most of the time he wasn’t a c***”. We also learn that during the “interrogation” challenge, our hero is yet again reduced to tears. Has anyone cried on UK TV more than Matt Hancock? The only person I can think of is Ian Beale, and he’s lost five wives, four children and the same greasy spoon several times over. He’s also been shot, not merely punched by a bankrupt footballer.

“In the interrogation bit, he gets destroyed, absolutely destroyed,” explains Billingham. “At the time I thought, ‘Oh, hang on, maybe this is a bit much?’ But no, he deserved it.”

There’s no doubt he does deserve it, but do the rest of us?

And maybe that’s the gameplan. Maybe he’s worked out that by saying yes to absolutely everything, be it doing some kind of high-octane obstacle course with Gareth Gates, or eating camel d***, or handing over all of his confidential pandemic documents to a journalist, that when the time comes for his major showdowns with the Covid inquiry there’ll be absolutely no one left in the country who can take a second more of him.

If he cries in a pretend interrogation and has to go outside to be comforted by Melinda Messenger, then what can we expect from the real one? The one where he’ll be in front of a judge-led inquiry and really will have to try and explain exactly why it was that he evacuated untested hospital patients into care homes? But by that point – fingers crossed, eh Matt? – who’ll care? We’ll have already seen it a thousand times before.