Matt Hancock’s ongoing humiliation in the I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! jungle is bad news for lots of people, not least his long-suffering family and his mortally embarrassed children. His constituents in West Suffolk, who can watch their right honourable representative eat kangaroo penis (but probably not expect a reply to their letters), are also missing out. Hancock’s decision to head Down Under has also put paid to his dreams of a return to the cabinet. But there is one winner in all this: Boy George.

Hancock’s appearance on the ITV show has allowed his fellow jungle celebrities to take a moral high ground. None of us are perfect, of course. Few of us are without things to be rightly guilty about. But then, fewer still of us have chained a man to a radiator and been sentenced to 15 months for false imprisonment. For all of Hancock’s sins – and there are many – he would struggle to top that.

And yet Boy George – real name George O’Dowd – has been the first, and the loudest, stone-caster among all hapless Hancock’s fellow campmates. The former health secretary’s mere appearance caused George to become tearful and tell viewers he was no longer comfortable in the camp; a difficult hill to come down from. While some of the others had strong reactions (and were certainly not shy about expressing them), George instantly made his into a personal drama, speaking from that special patch of the moral high ground reserved for people who terrorise male escorts.

This stance has tended to obscure George’s better qualities: his convivial wit and gift for plain speaking were a big part of why the public took to him back in 1982. Instead we have seen the ever-present conflict between the pop star’s Edina Monsoon-style tapping and chanting and his crabbiness and bad manners (giving his loudest namu myōhō-renge-kyō first thing in the morning while the others were still asleep, nicking Corrie star Sue Cleaver’s towel and pretending he’d moved it to dry it). The sight of George’s understandable distress over his mother’s condition during the Covid lockdown might have also carried more weight if he’d added some thoughts on the human suffering he himself had contributed to.

As it happens I do think people should be given a second chance, to serve their time, get themselves together and to come back into the community to get on with their lives. You’d think that, of all people, George would too.

There is another curious aspect of George developing in the jungle. He is quick to damn Hancock, not simply for being a man who broke his own lockdown rules, which we can all understand, but merely as – shock, horror! – a Tory. That’s enough, apparently.

We’ve all known people like this; those who use disdain for the Conservatives – lest we forget, a bog-standard centre-right western political party – as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free morality card for themselves.

Even the amenable Seann Walsh – who was accused of gaslighting his ex-girlfriend after kissing a Strictly Come Dancing contestant when he was on the show – has been at pains to justify his budding friendship with Hancock by distancing himself ‘from this government’. The thinking seems to be ‘well, at least I’m not a Tory’, which absolves them their misdeeds.

George made his into a personal drama, speaking from that patch of the moral high ground reserved for people who terrorise male escorts

The truth is that both George and Walsh should be grateful that Hancock is in the jungle. If he wasn’t, both the campmates and the viewers might have noticed rather more about them.

We are only, of course, about a third of the way through the contest (or ‘this process’ as contestants always call such competitions). I wouldn’t put it past the genius of the I’m A Celebrity… format to show us something good in George that we’ve missed, or never registered before. It’s a rare contestant (though some have pulled it off) who can get through a reality show without the viewer thinking ‘oh I suppose they’re all right, really’.

Despite that bad press which says quite the opposite, this is the good that the best reality TV does. It is not the fall of Rome it’s often accused of. Instead shows like I’m a Celebrity… can be a civilising influence. They show that people – even Boy George, even Matt Hancock! – can be bloody awful, yes, but, at least at the basic social level, they aren’t so bad.

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