Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Former UK health secretary Matt Hancock will reportedly take part in the new series of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Matt Hancock has been suspended from the Conservative parliamentary party after signing up to enter the jungle for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! “This is a matter […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email A Conservative MP has been urged to apologise after he went on TV and named a hotel in his constituency where asylum seekers will be housed. Jonathan Gullis, who made […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email A global fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria victims has been plunged into disarray after the Foreign Office broke a promise to make a crucial donation. In September, ministers pledged […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Suella Braverman is being urged to explain whether she refused to book hotel space for asylum seekers because “they were in Tory voting areas”. The under-fire home secretary is facing […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Prime minister Rishi Sunak has made clear his disapproval of Matt Hancock’s decision to take time away from parliament to appear on TV’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of […] More
Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email A parliamentary investigation has found “no evidence” that MPs were bullied during last month’s chaotic Commons vote on fracking, the Speaker has said. Government whips and other ministers were at […] More
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. More
