There was something poignant about the BBC radio profile of Matt Hancock broadcast last year. It started with a university friend of his, Gina Coladangelo, explaining how his parents had separated when he was “very young”, but that they had both happily remarried.
He grew up in Cheshire, and went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a first in the politicians’ degree – philosophy, politics and economics – followed by an MPhil in economics at Cambridge. He worked at the Bank of England, on the housing market, and then became an adviser to George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, in 2005. I first met him then: he was energetic, clever, and – as Osborne put it – a bit Tiggerish.
It was presumably around this time that he first encountered Dominic Cummings, who had been chief of staff to Iain Duncan Smith during the latter’s brief tenure as Conservative leader. Whenever it was, Cummings seems to have formed an early and abiding dislike for someone who was very much a conventional politician.
