‘Politics,’ as the old quip has it, ‘is showbusiness for ugly people.’ That quote was minted in the good old days when there was, at least implicitly, some clear blue water between the two things: it intended to draw an arch point of comparison between two quite different spheres of activity. Politics was momentous, solemn, and consequential; showbusiness was vain, silly and inconsequential. The quip points to a sneaking sense that, secretly, those in the former realm were actuated by less high-minded concerns.

These days, there is less and less sense, either among the general public or the practitioners of either art, that any such distinction exists. Both are now simply vehicles to attain the infinitely fungible currency of fame. That’s a slippage too far. Just because the modern media environment makes qualities valuable in showbiz – star-power, name recognition and charisma – valuable too in electoral politics, it doesn’t follow that the two activities are the same, that it’s all just a laugh and a giggle.

Fame is an accidental by-product of political life. It’s not the bloody point of it. And it seems to me that there is a deep and corrosive unseriousness about our tendency to suppose that it is. Matt Hancock in the jungle – mingling on a level with rugby players, comedians and cashiered pop stars – is only the crassest example of it. There’s no sense that the reasons that we recognise all these people might be different in kind.

The maddest and most telling part of the whole mad, telling project is Hancock’s stated reason for going into the jungle:

‘When I’m in camp, people will just see the real me. Survival in the jungle is a good metaphor for the world I work in. People will see me warts and all. See the human side of the guy behind the podium.’

It’s hard to know where to begin with that. Does he suppose that quite enough of the real him was not visible in all those stilted videos of him shaking hands with disconcerted passers-by and pointing to things? Does he suppose that we don’t imagine it was the real him we saw squeezing his girlfriend’s backside as if he was trying to inflate a blood-pressure cuff?

We only know his name because he was elected to do an important job

He seems to imagine that the image we have of him – ‘the guy behind the podium’, indeed – is of some remote, glamorous figure of authority rather than a very average sort of fellow in a job he’s ill equipped for. His human side? It’s all been his human side, as far as I can make out. I’m put in mind of David Brent’s fond self-image – not just a boss but a chilled-out entertainer. And I pass over the implicit self-comparison to Oliver Cromwell. Does he think we imagine that the ‘real him’, then, is well represented by watching him showered with creepy-crawlies and kangaroo penises while Ant and Dec point and giggle?

More to the point: what sort of narcissist supposes that anyone has the slightest interest in seeing the real him in the first place? We only know his name because he was elected to do an important job – which, in certain vital respects, he made a boggins of. I don’t set pen to paper, here, to relitigate the Covid epidemic – he was navigating uncharted waters at speed – but you might think there’d be at least a moment of sober reflection about the care-home thing, the contract-going-to-his-mate-in-the-pub thing, the rule-bending extra-marital nookie thing, and all the rest of it. His professional competence is the beginning and end of legitimate public interest in him.

Instead, he really does seem to think there’s some sort of deep continuity between serving in the cabinet and chewing koala-cooch on prime-time television – the continuity being that it’s him doing both things. Here’s the showbiz delusion in its pure form. He has become convinced that, deep down, his job is to be Matt Hancock: that never mind whether he’s being paid by the taxpayer or ITV or both, he’s earning his keep if he’s looking out at us from our TV screens.

It’s Kim Kardashian’s job, arguably, to be Kim Kardashian. It’s not Matt Hancock’s job to be Matt Hancock, though it may be his private curse. The voters didn’t elect Matt Hancock because they wanted to see more Matt Hancock on their array of Matt-Hancock-broadcasting technologies. We do like to be charmed by our MPs, but we elect them to serve our interests, not to peacock in the soap-operas of their own careers.

Showbiz is infinitely forgiving. There’s always the possibility of bringing a popular character back in a later season, there’s always a redemption arc…there’s always rep, or Cameo, or a season in panto at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford. If you punt a penalty over the crossbar in a crucial international match, they’ll book you for a Pizza Hut ad. If you make a truly terrible movie, or fall offstage drunk at a gig, or get in trouble with drugs, they’ll invite you on Graham Norton or make a documentary about your struggle. Why not? Nothing all that much is at stake. Once you’re a boldface name, you’re made.

Politics is surely not, or should not be, that forgiving. John Profumo spent a lifetime in quiet good works to atone for his shame. The mindset that brings Suella Braverman and Gavin Williamson back into the front line of public life again and again, that considered that it was time to bring back Boris not months after his own colleagues hoofed him out – professional disgrace something to be shrugged off with a few weeks on the naughty step – is pure showbiz. Williamson – with his tarantula and his smirk – is a showbiz character tout court. So, for that matter, is that high-camp performance artist Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s a mindset that says it doesn’t matter what role you take in the theatricals as long as you’re one of the main characters.

So now there’s Matt Hancock, who claims that he wants ‘a bit of forgiveness’ – and seeks it not through the patient, slow, humble attempt to make things right with the public by service, with his family by private amends, and with his political career by examining his mistakes and learning from them. Instead he seeks a quick fix, and what’s more one that turns the garden-variety notoriety of a failed cabinet minister into profit: a six-figure side-gig in the gaudy, sulphurously trivial theatre of reality television. Maybe it’s priggish of me, but I cleave to the old-fashioned idea that to be famous for ‘making a mistake’, as he puts it, should be a source of shame rather than an opportunity for fame.

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