From Boris Johnson on Have I Got News For You to Ann Widdecombe on Strictly, television lets the most divisive figures reinvent themselves. Why do we let them get away with it?
As the celebrities are indeed got out of there (and hats off to Jill Scott – I said she should win) a new phrase is born: jungle-washing. It’s when you go into the I’m a Celebrity … jungle as a politician despised from every angle, and come out of it just a regular guy, trying his best. The mechanics are opaque: Matt Hancock didn’t do anything special. He is neither altruist nor schemer, tough guy nor gadabout; you couldn’t pin anything on him that’s remotely like a personality. And yet the viewers saw a person in there anyway, and he finished in the top three.
The entire offer of his presence on the show was that it would be a chance for some meagre revenge: for everything that could have gone better during the pandemic; for every excess death and dodgy PPE contract; for each hypocrisy; hell, for the rampant destructiveness of the past 12 years. Hancock’s bland, rosy face was just waiting there like a dartboard, but the darts never came.
