So, here's 'the thing'... my big takeaway from the Matt Hancock thing, and its something nobody is saying.
Matt met both women at Oxford. He was the sports reporter at the radio station, Gina was the newsreader. Maria is the daughter of an aristocrat.
Have you by any chance seen Peter's Friends?
So much of British political life is the 1%, their friends, lovers, rivals - all the people they met at school and university. They don't seem to meet other people, it's just an endless la Ronde of the right people who went to the right colleges where every last bit of them was pickled in time and class and steeped in privilege.
Why make other friends and colleagues when you could simply have your school and university friends forever? They are the only people who really matter, right? Your friend at eighteen when you saw that Tarkovsky retrospective at the Film and Television Museum? Definitely those were the credentials you need to run the health service.
Plus, now you know that this is probably some path less travelled psychosexual drama of a teenage Alan Partridge, recapturing his glory days when he should have been fucking saving peoples lives and not fucking fucking the girl he fancied at uni.
Alan Partridge indeed.
They do not want him sacrificed.
He is the ablative armour for the inevitable inquiry. That's when he was destined to be scapegoated, to shuck blame from Boris. Someone other than Johnson is removing all the pieces from the board. To expose the Sun King.
The unpopular advisor? removed.
The bumbling health secretary? removed.
And replaced by somebody who stood up to him. I mean, SOMEBODY bugged Hancock's offices. And that person obviously isn't speaking out.
Government doesn't have the luxury of blaming the corpse on the front lawn unless they publicly put it there. I remember Tony Blair's first PMQ where the opposition - who had until the week before been in charge for seventeen years stood up and said "when is this government going to do something about the appalling state of Britain's schools?"
And it was just reported - straight - by the press. No mention of the mendacity or the seventeen years.
Hancock and Cummings were always expendable. But there is no meat shield now. Just a touseled haired target of opportuinity