Long before SARS-CoV-2 was a twinkle in the eye of a Wuhan cave bat, Hancock worked on the student radio station at the University of Oxford.  A contemporary, Gina Coladangelo, reminisced that Matthew read the sport “because he wasn’t good enough to do the news.” Another remembered Hancock as the “butt of everyone’s humour”. He wanted to go to Westminster and be an MP.

He nearly blows himself up. Guildford, 2001. Young Matt does an election leaflet for the Tory candidate Nick St Aubyn. Instead of saying that St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community, a 22-year-old Hancock writes: “I want to untie the community”. The leaflet lands in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn loses his seat by 538 votes.

Shortly after becoming a junior minister, Hancock compares himself to Pitt the Younger, Disraeli, and Churchill; their achievements are quite well known, but he will make history on his own terms in 2018 when he becomes the first MP to launch a personal app: The Matt Hancock App.

Its creation leads to the memorable onscreen prompt “Matt Hancock would like to access your photos”  — and he appears to get them even if users deny the ‘The Matt Hancock App’ access to their libraries. A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office admits, “We are checking reports about the operation of The Matt Hancock App”.

In a party where the average age of a member is 57, Hancock appears young and bright. He is marked out by the early patronage of Osborne, who says of his protege: “In a political system that is full of Eeyores we could do with a few more Tiggers.”

That nickname fits well. Tigger Matt has the tamped energy of the short man, over-exercised. Enthusiastic; readily and sycophantically agreeable. His colleagues mock him — Matt Wankcock and Matt Handjob will be insider nicknames for him — but they are usually reluctant to fire him, even when it makes sense to do so.

***

As the Conservative Party tortures itself in 2019, Hancock decides he would like to be leader. Or raise his profile. So he attacks Boris Johnson and a hard Brexit: “To the people who say fuck business, I say fuck fuck business.”

He fuck fuck’s himself into sixth place in the first ballot of the party’s MPs. Then he withdraws; he spends a month on television and radio praising the new leader… Boris Johnson. Hancock expects a promotion for his breathy verbal parkour. He keeps his job as Health Secretary instead.

To run the NHS is no Conservative’s idea of a dream. Neville Chamberlain was the last Tory Health Secretary to become Prime Minister. The service itself is a patched-up patchwork, a tax sink, an organisation colossally vast and maddeningly confusing. Hancock’s real brief is to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall apart when people are looking.

The pandemic is the greatest health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought that an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. Fate, or a lab-leak, means that soon everybody will look at the NHS.

***

A relaxed, Prime Minister-less COBRA meeting is held at the end of January 2020. After chairing it Hancock tells reporters the risk Covid posed to the public was “low”. On the same day a study published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet suggests SARS-CoV-2 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 50 million people.

The risk to the UK is deemed so low that on 24 February the Government supplies 1,800 pairs of goggles, 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China. Looking back at meetings that month, one senior Department for Health official remembers thinking “‘Well, it’s a good thing this isn’t the big one.’”

***

A clip of Boris Johnson, patiently explaining possible Covid strategy to fellow scientific luminary Phillip Schofield goes viral. “One of the theories,” Johnson had said on March 5, was that “perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking many draconian measures”.

Loo paper soon begins to disappear nationwide. Hancock is rolled out — he was always being rolled out, like a new carpet to be trodden on — into a breakfast TV studio to deny that the Government wanted to massacre the Grannys. “Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus.”

Then Neil Ferguson releases his controversial paper. It claims hundreds of thousands will die if Britain is left to take the virus on the chin. Sage advises the Government to embark on a full lockdown that day.

It arrives on 26 March 2020, as Covid cases double every 72- hours. Between 89% and 94% of the public support lockdown. And the Grannys? Care home deaths accounted for 40% of Covid-19 deaths in England and Wales during the pandemic.

***

Like other ministers, after the passage of the Coronavirus Act, Hancock develops war fever. “Our generation has never been tested like this”, he writes to a nation frantically, pointlessly washing its hands. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz… they pulled together in one gigantic national effort.” The allegory is both ugly and lazy, but Britain is a country where poppies are made to wear poppies.

***

Prince Charles opens the first Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in London. He says the Nightingale “will be a shining light”. The hospital is constructed in nine days, and holds 500 extra intensive care unit beds. (For every hundred thousand members of the population the UK has 7.3 intensive care beds — less than Spain, Greece, and Estonia. This lack of provision will mean more deaths.)

More Nightingales open across the country. They cost the taxpayer 500 million pounds. Only three of the seven hospitals end up treating patients. They are described by one MP as a “massive white elephant conjured up by Matt Hancock to create a good headline”.

***

It’s not really worth it, going outside. A family of five is sent home by the police in Conwy after being caught having a day at the seaside. They scuttle back to Merseyside. Police in Derbyshire “divide opinion” when they use drones to film people walking in the Peak District. A “major incident” is declared when thousands travel to Bournemouth beach, to swim, eat ice cream, and burn in the sun. (Belatedly, it is revealed that the “major incident” did not lead to a spike in Covid cases.)

Speaking to Andrew Marr, a concerned Hancock threatens to ban outdoor exercise. “Let’s not have a minority spoiling it for everybody.”

***

Nothing works properly. The Test and Trace App doesn’t work. PPE doesn’t work — because it’s all out of date. Protecting care homes doesn’t work. Dido Harding doesn’t work. The Civil Service literally doesn’t work. Big-hitter commentators start saying that the entire British state doesn’t work. It is described as “simultaneously overcentralised and weak at its centre”.

But ‘The Matt Hancock’ app still functions. In May 2020 the Telegraph reports that it is becoming a “virtual home for online pranksters and trolls”. Posts to the ‘Have Your Say’ section include drawings of cocks, general abuse, and a date invitation for the (then) married Health Secretary.

When ‘The Matt Hancock’ app is updated a year later, access to the ‘Have Your Say’ section is hidden. One of the last posts read: “Is there a portal on here where I can be awarded a Government contract for an area I have little experience of scale please?”

***

Hancock always looks caught between a giggle and a sob. A new round of Covid restrictions makes casual sex illegal. Or at least that’s how Sky News’ Kay Burley interprets the guidance when she interviews him about it. “You are saying that no social distancing is needed in established relationships,” she notes. “But what about people who are not in an established relationship?”

The Health Secretary, embracing his role as national sex cop, confirms that Government rules do ban shagging someone who is not your normal partner. Apropos of nothing, he adds that, fortunately “I’m in an established relationship”.

A few weeks later, the Times reveals that Gina Coladangelo was appointed to a £15,000-a-year advisory PR role in the Health Ministry. The appointment was never declared. Coladangelo and Hancock are described as “close friends”. A source tells the paper: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”

***

He appears to cry on television when the first Pfizer jabs are stuck into the arms of two pensioners: Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare. “It’s been a tough year for so many people,” he sobs, rubbing his waterless, unreddened eyes.

The Government spends £12 billion on vaccines. Total pandemic spending is estimated to reach £372 billion. Research finds that under-30s will be disproportionately forced to bear the brunt of these costs. They are described as the “packhorse generation”. The median age of death from Covid is 83 years old. There is no national discussion, parliamentary inquiry, or interest from the Government in working out how the old can make it up to the young.

William Shakespeare dies naturally within a few months of taking the vaccine.

***

In January 2021, a week after the virus death toll tops 100,000, a focus group asks some ordinary people questions about the Health Secretary. A man called Jason compares Hancock to Ian Beale from Eastenders — “He wants people to feel sorry for him.” Asked what sort of car he would be, mother of two Donna suggests that he would be “something that breaks down.”

***

During a committee hearing Dominic Cummings says that Hancock should “have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly”. Cummings then puts a WhatsApp screenshot on his blog that shows the Prime Minister describing Matt as both “hopeless” and “fucking hopeless”.  When he is interviewed about the message, Hancock says: “Boris has apologised for the way that came over.”

***

The story and the footage and the photo are exquisitely simple. After nearly 18 months of tiers, colour-codes, R-numbers, powerpoint slides, and graphs, here is something everyone could understand: a hand on an arse.

Yes, Hancock’s downfall was exquisitely simple. His affair with Gina Coladangelo was unambiguous. It made sense like fairy tales make sense. The Princess in the tower must let her hair down. The wolf is wearing sheep’s clothing. The apple offered by the witch is poisoned. The politician who spent the pandemic agitating for the harshest restrictions, who would describe Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown sex fiasco as a “matter for the police”, who ensured that the public could be fined for sitting on park benches, who threatened them with 10-year prison sentences for breaking quarantines, this ogre of the new common sense, would — of course! — be breaking all his rules.

The press is devastating, and relentless. With a deep understanding of public humiliation, the Queen describes Matthew as a “poor man”. He resigns, his only consolation being one of the most Googled news stories of 2021.

***

Hancock keeps coming back, like Covid. His head pops out of the ground. Phillip Schofield asks him: “Was it your dyslexia that meant you misread the social distancing guidelines?” The nation laughs, bitterly. It is reported that, off air, Hancock “almost seemed euphoric… He didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the joke.” He has returned to his student days, but made them the business of the entire country. He buys stonewashed jeans, and new turtlenecks. He does podcast interviews, and goes to the BRIT awards. He says he is writing a book for Harper Collins. Harper Collins says he is not writing a book for Harper Collins, and Hancock never mentions it again. A role with the UN is torpedoed, and a comeback video — unanimously described as “cringe” — is swiftly deleted. It is impossible to tell, as with England’s experience of three lockdowns, whether he is enjoying all this, or if he is the saddest man in the world.

***

Everybody wanted a lesson from the last 24 months. Neat, comprehensible wisdom. An intelligible narrative. They wanted to say that it finally proved that Germany was a better country than England, or they wanted to say that our vaccine programme proved the EU was useless. They thought England’s experience of Covid could tell us about the national character, the flaws in our state, or otherwise be used to justify every kind of pet project, ideological hang-up, or personal vendetta. There was no narrative line. All that the pandemic proved was that what happened a hundred times before in history could happen to us too.

***

The number of children referred for specialist mental health help rises above one million for the first time in 2021. Cases involving those 18 and under increase by 26% during the pandemic. The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns it is “becoming an impossible situation to manage”.

People, including Hancock, like to talk about learning the lessons of the pandemic. So we can prepare better for the next one. They don’t realise that between the million mentally hamstrung teenagers, the NHS waiting list hitting 9.2 million within two years, an endless backlog of cases in criminal courts, and inflation, that the pandemic hasn’t ended yet. It’s barely started.

26 March 2020 — 26 March 2022

A teacher saw you coming out of The Crown. He wasn’t even on the other side of the street, but right there in front of you as you walked out of the pub. He reported it to your house master, who called you through into his study. Just TD it. Give no ground. “But Mr O’Hanrahan saw you as broad as day,” he says. Look them in the eye and say with total assurance: “Nope, sorry, it wasn’t me.” If you can find some way to believe in your own words, so much the better.

Forget our post-truth era. Boorish public schoolboys have been at this for generations. The school authorities didn’t quite know what to do with the TD. And nor does the former Director of Public Prosecutions, for that matter.

On the matter of Downing Street Christmas parties, Boris is doing a classic TD. It’s my party and I’ll lie if I want to. Everyone knows what he is up to. But there is always just a little anxiety when you say something like the word “lie”, especially in print. Can you soften it a bit, comes many an editor’s cautious reply? Just say it a little differently. That’s why the TD is so effective. It bludgeons people into submission.

This situation is not complicated. Christmas parties were not allowed. They were illegal and people were fined for holding them — yet they clearly had one at Number Ten. It makes no difference if the social distancing rules were kept. The Prime Minister has now ordered an inquiry into the matter, which is very strange. Who needs to have a high-level inquiry into whether a party took place in your own house?

It’s not just that he broke the rules; he broke the rules that he himself had made. One rule for them, another rule for everyone else. On the very same day that Boris’s mates were knocking back the mulled wine, there were people out in the country who were being denied the opportunity of holding the hand of a dying relative because they were keeping the rules. One day, this will bring him down. Like at Belshazzar’s feast, the writing is on the wall. Mene, mene, tekel, upharshin.

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The leaked footage of Allegra Stratton, the then Press Secretary to the Prime Minister, chuckling to herself at the ridiculousness of trying to defend the patently indefensible was the final straw. You could see the TD being formulated in real time. “Err, err, what’s the answer?” she asks around at fellow aides, looking completely stumped. “I don’t know,” says one. “It wasn’t a party, it was a cheese and wine,” says another. But the TD only works when it is rock solid. This TD is now broken, exposed, busted. It’s one thing for a 16-year-old schoolboy to do it. It’s quite another for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

It’s often the things we like about our politicians that bring them down. Tony Blair’s belief that he could do anything was hugely attractive, right up until the point when he invaded Iraq, his can-do attitude slipping over into a monstrous kind of hubris. With Boris, many of us warmed to the merrie England Cavalier. We were all in on the joke. And those who weren’t were Puritan kill-joys, the grim faced ranks of Labour moralists, always shouty-angry, always wagging their fingers. Who’d want to party with them anyway? That’s the perpetual problem of the Left: a preference for morality over joy.

Still, it’s totally fitting that Boris will be brought down by a party. I will always be grateful to him for pushing Brexit though. And there was much to appreciate in parts of his Covid response, particularly the fast roll-out of the vaccine. Credit where it is due. But the party is over. Even your own supporters don’t believe you, Boris. You can hear it in the voice of every Conservative wheeled out to defend you. When the TD crumbles, everyone around is left exposed. You have taken us all for fools. It’s time to go.

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Boris’s apology for his Press Secretary’s behaviour only highlighted his leadership failure. In the world of our Prime Minister, it’s always the fault of someone else, someone junior. And so, surprise, surprise, Allegra Stratton has been thrown under the bus. How long can Boris expect to rely upon colleagues if he treats them like this? And how long will they keep on trying to defend him in public when their efforts are so transparently risible to everyone else?

The Conservative Party needs new leadership, because things are only going to get worse as trust continues to decompose. And the next election is only getting closer. Many in the party believe that Boris is a proven election winner and that it would be madness to come over all January 1649 right now and, as it were, do the Puritans job for them. But the leader of the Cavillers has now been found out and swift action is necessary.

The Tory Party has a ruthless genius for re-invention. Now is the time to cut out the lies and find some honourable new leadership. Boris has served his purpose. So it should act soon to get ahead of a downward curve. Sell, sell, sell. Certainly, it will be more lucrative to do so now than in a year or so.

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At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Keir Starmer was right to remind us of that photograph of the Queen sitting alone at the end of a pew at her husband’s funeral in Windsor. That is what leadership looks like: to share in the situation of the people that you seek to lead.

That, by the way, is the reason for the incarnation, for Christmas. God shares in the human condition — however hard, whatever the suffering. That is what a Christmas party should be celebrating. The Queen gives us servant-hearted leadership. But for Boris, leadership is entitlement. It’s time for him to go.

It had been announced that Freddie was HIV positive — a sombre moment. The next day, I was curled up with a blanket watching the television. The news came on; Freddie was dead. Bohemian Rhapsody started to play. I’ve never been quite certain whether I cried so much because I had a fever of 102 degrees, or whether the floods would have come anyway. It meant a lot.

In 1991, HIV/AIDS had been part of our lives for 10 years. There had been plenty of deaths. Many of those deaths had happened in groups of people less likely to make themselves known to us — it was cutting a terrible swathe through Africa, for instance. Haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users who contracted HIV remained, for the most part, as statistics. The public face of the disease in the West — the individual and conspicuous cases — were gay men, and in particular those gay men who were already in the public eye.

Denholm Elliott, Ian Charleson, Tony Richardson. Kenny Everett, Derek Jarman, Sylvester, John Curry, Bruce Chatwin — the list of British deaths alone is long and sobering. It was Freddie’s, though, that made the biggest impact. He seemed so embedded in British life, from the unprecedented impact of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 to the unforgettable turn at the first Live Aid in 1985.

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He had achieved this status, too, despite being very unusual: unmistakably gay, Parsi, with a musical persona marrying debauched lechery, sustained tragic grandeur (Barcelona!) and extreme silliness. Everyone loved him. To us as gay men, he might have indicated that you didn’t need to fit in. You could be whatever you were, and that would make perfect sense. Perhaps that was an illusion. After all, Freddie never exactly came out.

Thirty years on, I start to wonder just how much HIV/AIDS shaped the lives of people like me. I was relatively lucky; by the time I was becoming sexually active, we knew about safe sex. Lucky, too, to live in a country where the advice from quite early on was to use condoms, rather than to adjust your morality or to attempt monogamy. Gay men born five or 10 years before me saw most of their friends die; I lost perhaps a dozen, no more.

All the same, we lived in a world where a fundamental truth was influencing all our actions, and it was this: You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds. It has an inevitable effect on what you do. In recent years, friends in their twenties and thirties have sometimes asked me whether I ever thought of having children. It never crossed my mind as a reasonable possibility. It wasn’t until the late Nineties that I even gave way to a long temptation, and got a dog — I mean, dogs can easily live 15 years. It might turn out not to be fair.

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Looking back, there might have been other consequences to this looming terror. One of them might have been a general state of mind that can only be summed up as “Fuck it”. You might as well do what you had in mind. Shame more or less disappeared as a state of mind. I knew a lot of straight literary people who anguished and writhed and wasted time over the question of whether they should or should not write a novel, taking it for granted that they’d live another 60 years. Fuck it. I wrote one, then another, then another. People younger than me were dying of the virus, after all.

There were other consequences of that fuck-it mentality. Gay society took on a dangerous and reckless flavour, with the first all-night clubs like Trade — there was one point in the Nineties where we worked out that you could go to one dance club after another without a break between 10pm on a Friday to lunchtime on Monday. Some queens really did it. The mood of outrageous bad taste was universal. One of Derek Jarman’s last paintings was called Arse-Injected Death Syndrome. “Bad news,” a dear friend said to me once. “I’ve got the fucking Death Clap.” And burst out laughing.

Maybe, too, the sense that you might be dead in five years brought people together, to disagree and argue and yell, but with a sense that your different opinions were all in the same bundle. A lot of my generation find it pretty weird that speakers for what is now called the LGBTQI community seem obsessed with determining who can be admitted to their ranks, or excluded. It wouldn’t have seemed a very pressing question in the Eighties and Nineties, and we haven’t forgotten how important the support of lesbians was to gay men during the crisis. It went a long way towards unifying a community.

By the turn of the century, things were changing. The new century went on; we started to hear the words “living with HIV” as an accurate description, and not as a hopeful euphemism. The habit of hedonism remained; the urgency of protest receded. Gay Pride renamed itself as Mardi Gras; it turned into a parade of LGBT-supporting businesses, anybody gay and lesbian without an official wristband confined behind barriers.

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We might, after all, live as long as anyone else, and people started to marry, to adopt children, to stay in boring jobs, to talk about pensions and property. I got married to my boyfriend; I paid off my mortgage; we got a small Schnauzer called Greta, who is still going to be here in 2035, as I hope to be. The friend of mine who told me he had “the fucking Death Clap” is, for all purposes, perfectly healthy.

Freddie goes on, not as a martyr, but as a marvellous, unique presence who did something never seen before and never really attempted since. Quite a lot of him has since been toned down; when the jukebox musical We Will Rock You opened, it was striking that it turned Freddie’s music into the backdrop to a straight romance between a couple of kids. Freddie was outrageous in a way that might not be permitted now; a six-minute pop song with casual incorporations of the Islamic imprecation “Bismillah”; the Tom of Finland image with moustache and crotch-clinging trousers; the Live Aid performance, including the borderline sexual harassment, live, of the onstage cameraman.

His outrageousness was extinguished by a disease, but the presence of that disease fed and spread something of the same outrageousness: that desire to say “Fuck it” from time to time. I think any gay person who lived through the ten years between the discovery of HIV/Aids and Freddie Mercury’s death — lived though it as a sexual being — will always have been shaped by it. Maybe always set slightly apart from what followed, too. If they lived.