Cometh the hour, cometh the man. There was a brief moment after Matt Hancock recovered from coronavirus when he appeared to be a man of principle. That proved to be nothing more than a chimera. Now he has revealed himself to be the most abject of career politicians, who will literally do and say anything to save his job. So there was no one Boris Johnson could have trusted more than Matt to have taken the Downing Street press conference on the day after Dominic Cummings had been granted the freedom of the No 10 rose garden – there’s a code for special advisers specifically saying they should not make public statements – to annihilate what was left of his credibility. Needy Matt is the health secretary with the perfect grasp of the public good. When it came to a straight choice between sticking to government health guidelines or protecting the career of Boris’s boss, it was a no-brainer. Who cared if thousands more might die because they couldn’t see the point of sticking to the rules if Dom didn’t, providing Downing Street’s very own Prince Andrew was still in post? Long live the People’s Government! Oddly, we haven’t heard that slogan much lately. Can’t think why. How did Matt let it come to this? What makes the tragedy so riddled with pathos is that Hancock deep down knows he is so busted. That he has traded what passed for his self-respect for loyalty to two men who think morality is for suckers. You can see it in the terror in his eyes and the increasing shirtiness in his responses. He is now so brittle, he could shatter into a thousand tiny fragments at any moment. I give it five days at most. Because not only has his track-and-trace app proved to be totally useless, but he’s also only got five days to meet the arbitrary target of 200,000 tests a day that Boris set when under pressure from Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions. So far, we’re on under 110,000. It’s just not going to happen, Matt. And the public won’t get fooled twice with fake testing targets. As it is, Laughing Boy Dom has already as good as turned the country feral. Having basically admitted he had nothing to say about anything, Needy Matt first took a question from a vicar in Brighton. That won’t be allowed to happen again, because Martin asked if everyone who had been done for travelling with children could have their fixed penalty notices rescinded. Matt’s eyes widened and darted about in panic. “Er…” he said. Perhaps that might not be such a bad idea. He’d have a word with the chancellor. It was now clear that there was no law Classic Dom might have broken over the past 20 years that the government wouldn’t be willing to review, just to keep the de facto prime minister in his job. That dope Dom might have smoked at university? Maybe it was time to have drugs legalised after all. That time Dom had driven at 35mph in a 30mph zone? Maybe it was time to up the speed limit so that kids could learn to keep their wits about them in urban areas. That blogpost on pandemics Dom had said he wrote a year ago which it has now emerged had been updated a few weeks back? Actually, scrub that: duplicity has already become an accepted practice in the current administration. Having rewritten half the penal code, Matt got down to the real business of defending Dom’s moonlight flit to Durham. Classic Dom had absolutely followed the guidelines to the letter. The instructions couldn’t have been more clear. In the event of your partner getting coronavirus and you finding yourself in exceptional danger of having to be responsible for childcare on your own – just imagine! – you were expected to go into work the next day to pass on the infection before driving 260 miles north to your father’s estate. It had been so sad Dom had only been able to stay in a concrete outhouse – so that you could overload the NHS services somewhere else when your son got ill. It would also be now mandatory for everyone to drive to Barnard Castle as part of the DVLA eyesight test for a nice family day out by the river. And there was no question of his wife being allowed to drive the car at any point even though she had frequently written about having done so. The Cummingses’ car was a manual. Which meant it had to be driven by a man. There was also no need for Dom to have at any time told anyone where he was, because he was the nation’s leader and he could do what he liked. Needy Matt was adamant, however, that the little people should continue to obey the government’s instructions on self-isolation and freedom of movement because they were both too stupid and not important enough to be allowed to use their own judgment. “People must keep their resolve,” he pleaded tetchily. All other questions were basically dismissed. Robert Peston was sawn off at the knees before he had even completed his question and other journalists were given brief non-answers and no follow-ups. The 71% of the country – including the ever-so-brave Jeremy Hunt, who had written to constituents explaining that though Classic Dom had broken the guidelines on three occasions he was basically too timid to raise it with the prime minister – who thought Cummings was an establishment elite chancer were basically just wrong. And that was an end to the matter. The important thing was that he and Dom should remain in their jobs. It was just that Matt’s job description had changed over the course of the brief 30-minute presser. Needy Matt had become Door Matt. A useful idiot to be walked all over, because there’s no way the Dom story is going away. There is no happy ending. The government is hopelessly compromised. As is Matt. The hollowed-out health secretary without qualities. No integrity. No competence. No anything. Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.