Matt Hancock would do anything for love – yes, even that

It is rare, perhaps unheard of, for a podcast to leave its listeners in actual, physical pain. But as I type, and I do not exaggerate, I really can feel the hot twinges of strained muscle in both sides of my neck. A direct consequence of being unable to stop wincing with stunned embarrassment for a full hour and 43 minutes.

Matt Hancock’s appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast really had it all. And by all I mainly mean the turtleneck, the jeans, the Adidas three-stripe trainers, the absurd product placement for weird liquid hydration gels and the overwhelming, crushing agony as it rolled on and endlessly on toward the last syllable of recorded time.

What is Matt Hancock, MP for West Suffolk and absolutely nothing else, doing on a podcast for CEOs is your entry level WTFgasm here. But to scroll down the list of previous guests is in some regards a relief. The former health secretary is by no means the first non-CEO to feature. Indeed it is not immediately clear when the last actual CEO did appear. Instead, Hancock joins a long list of self-help book authors you’ve never heard of, plus former The Saturdays singer Rochelle Humes.

Perhaps the former secretary of state for health had had a look at the previous guest appearances list himself. It would party explain why he chose to dress up like the one you’ve forgotten from the band you’ve forgotten from one of those Bravo TV boyband reunions. And it may also partly explain why, when asked why it was he broke the lockdown rules he himself had made, he actually replied, very nearly verbatim with a lyric first sung by Lee from Blue.

“Look,” he said, while tapping the heel of his Adidas sambas down on the carpet and jiggling his crossed and denimed legs. “If loving my special adviser with all my heart’s a crime, then I’m guilty.”

Well, not quite. But you get the picture. But he really did say the words, “I broke the rules because I fell in love”. And just for that, just for that one glorious absurdist moment, the remaining 103 minutes were almost – almost, well actually nowhere near but anyway – worth it.

It’s not entirely clear what the listener is meant to take away from this startling confession. That the animal passions lighting up inside the health secretary during a pandemic in which more than 150,000 people died – many of them needlessly – simply made it impossible for him not to snog his aide in his office?

Does he imagine there were not very large numbers of people who fell in love but who also managed to do their loving within the rules? At one point last year there were eight “save the dates” pinned to my fridge, despite having been invited to only two weddings, both of which had been postponed four times.

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Both the happy couples will be disappointed to discover, at this late stage, all they had to do was ring up the venue and point out that, actually, we’re in love, and all the restrictions would have been lifted in a flash.

The promotional teases for the podcast show Hancock’s now partner, Gina Coladangelo, loitering around, picking up the weird liquid gel bottles, and generally making it known she is now working as some sort of Hancock brand ambassador. Would it be unfair to speculate it is perhaps her who is dressing up the former health secretary like a 10-year-old boy cheating on World Book Day by turning up as Steve Jobs?

Before all this happened, ie when Matt Hancock still had a proper job, she first worked for him unpaid, and then later for £15,00 a year pro rata. If it is now down to her to come up with some way of charting a route back to the big time for the turtle’s head in the turtle neck, then we must hope she’s charging a lot more than that. She’ll certainly have earned it.