It’s the new touchy-feely government. One that will smother you with promises of love even if it can’t keep you alive. There was no coincidence in the government ending its 201-day boycott of ITV’s Good Morning Britain on the first available day after wannabe hardmen Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain had been kicked out of No 10. Nor was it a coincidence that it was Matt Hancock who was the member of the cabinet chosen to be the GMB whipping boy. To smile insincerely and nod his head from time to time as Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid humiliated him for more than 20 minutes. The health secretary is Boris Johnson’s go-to Door Matt. A person who commands almost as little authority inside the cabinet as he does outside. The harder he tries to become one of the in-crowd, the less respect he gets from his colleagues. The pathos is almost unbearable. He is the loser’s loser. “Where have you been?” Morgan asked. Door Matt insisted he had come on to the programme at the first moment his diary had allowed. He had been working so hard that he hadn’t had a spare minute for ITV. Morgan bulldozed onwards, determined to make up for lost time. Had Hancock supported the GMB boycott? “I’m here to answer your questions now,” Matt continued, apparently unaware he had omitted to answer the first one that had been asked. The two presenters then took turns to act as the battering ram, with Morgan at one point reading out a 90-second charge sheet of the health secretary’s failures over the past six months. Why hadn’t he resigned? That was just cruel. Everyone knows that Boris gets far more pleasure out of having someone he can bully in charge of the department than finding someone able to run the NHS. Door Matt tried to think of one or two things that had gone right on his watch, but little came to mind. Reid gently asked him if he was prepared to admit to having made any mistakes. For a moment it looked as if Hancock might burst into tears, but he pulled himself together and trotted out something about funerals. Really? With the UK having locked down too late, old people kicked into care homes without a coronavirus test and the UK having the highest death rate in Europe, the health secretary’s one regret was that he hadn’t allowed more people to attend funerals? The interview – AKA the pile on – continued in much the same way, with Door Matt defending his right to exist while failing to answer direct questions on anything, including whether he regretted tweeting his support for Dom’s right to roam back in May, as the list of government failures mounted. And all Hancock could do was stand – bizarrely, he appeared to have been filmed in the street outside the BBC – and take it. Praying for the seconds to tick down until he was off air. Eventually, he heard the magic words that his ordeal was over. “It’s been lovely to be on,” said Door Matt. “He said, lying,” Morgan replied. A Door Matt’s gotta do what a Door Matt’s gotta do. Weirdly, though, the health secretary would be back on tomorrow were anyone to ask. His mixture of low self-worth and masochistic tendencies are a powerful cocktail. Hancock was on much more secure ground at the Downing Street press conference later in the afternoon. Largely because he always appears most in control when he doesn’t really have anything new to say. So after insisting that it was still far too early to read anything into the fact that the number of infections had not decreased since the second lockdown was introduced, he merely reannounced various announcements that had been made earlier in the day and the day before. The creation of two new testing mega-labs, the building of 40 “long Covid” clinics and the promising results of the Moderna vaccine. “We have today secured 5m doses,” he said proudly, as the rest of us wondered why Kate Bingham, the head of the vaccine taskforce, had failed to spot Moderna as one of the six most promising drug trials. Presumably, one day we will get an answer from the taskforce’s PR consultants who were hired on a £670k contract. These were still early days, Door Matt murmured. But we must nurture the candle of hope, he said, sounding like an Elton John tribute act. Most of the questions were directed at the science, where Hancock was happy to defer to the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam – or JVT, as Matt matily called him – and Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser for NHS test and trace. JVT called the Moderna trial “the second penalty in the back of the net”, apparently unaware that winning the game will at some point rely on Covid-19 missing one of its own spot kicks, while Hopkins said there was nothing in principle wrong with the country returning to regional tiers of lockdown on 3 December, providing that the parameters of each tier were rethought. Which sounded like another national lockdown by another name. But all that was for the future – a couple of weeks is a lifetime to Hancock these days – so Door Matt was just happy to waffle about the nature of love in the time of cholera and hope in the time of hopelessness. His one awkward moment came when he was asked about Johnson “bursting with antibodies”. Along with any number of other, even less attractive spontaneous emissions. The prime minister self-isolating was a sign that the rules applied to everyone, he said, overlooking that if Boris had obeyed the face mask and 2-metre rules when meeting Conservative MPs then he almost certainly wouldn’t have needed to self-isolate in the first place. As Hancock brought the presser to a close, he allowed himself a rare smile of satisfaction. The briefing hadn’t exactly been a triumph, but neither had he crashed and burned. Which these days counts as a win. And his day had certainly ended better than it had started. • This article was amended on 11 August 2021. An earlier version said the vaccine taskforce’s PR consultants were “awarded” the contract by Kate Bingham; as Downing Street stated at the time, the contract was approved by officials at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, acting under delegated ministerial authority.