Matt Hancock, the UK’s scandal-prone former well being secretary, is in search of an unlikely type of redemption making an attempt to win I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here – a gruelling, usually ugly actuality present set within the Australian jungle.

Hancock led Britain’s response to Covid-19 within the first 12 months of the pandemic, telling folks to keep away from others to guard the well being service – then obtained caught breaking his authorities’s personal guidelines when video emerged of him kissing and groping an aide he was having an affair with.

He was pressured to resign when The Sun newspaper printed the CCTV photos. This time, although, he is aware of that digicam is on, and is behaving in methods many will discover much more distasteful: consuming the uncooked nether components of camels, cows and sheep, amongst different issues.

I’m a Celebrity… sends a gaggle of well-known folks, usually C-list celebrities, to the Australian rainforest, topics them to trials involving spiders and snakes, and they’re eradicated one after the other based mostly on a public vote.

While many Britons have been disgusted by Hancock’s look, blaming him for obvious failings within the authorities’s early response to the pandemic, viewers have upended expectations by voting Hancock by way of to Sunday night’s ultimate. He is competing towards former England soccer star Jill Scott and actor Owen Warner.

The former well being chief has already seen the again of Culture Club singer Boy George and former rugby participant Mike Tindall, whose spouse, Zara, is the niece of King Charles III. Tindall physique tackled Hancock in one other of the present’s duties, and has been poking enjoyable on the former well being secretary’s politicking.

“He clearly wants to win,” mentioned Tindall, including that Hancock was consistently aiming his t-shirt with voting quantity on the digicam. “Once a politician, always a politician. Always polling for votes.”

Fellow politicians have been much less enthusiastic than the show-voting public. When it was introduced that Hancock would seem, he was slated by fellow lawmakers, together with many from his personal celebration, and he was suspended as a Conservative member of parliament.

His success appears to have carried out nothing to ease their ire. Speaking to Sky News Sunday, Cabinet minister Mark Harper mentioned: “I don’t think serving members of Parliament should be taking part in reality television programs.

“However well they do on them, I still think they should be doing the job for which they are paid a good salary — which is representing their constituents.”

Announcing that he was going to “step up,” Australian comedian Adam Hills, host of comedy current affairs show “The Last Leg,” went to Hancock’s constituency in eastern England last weekend and met with locals to hear their problems.

“I reckon I can do a better job in a week than he has done thus far,” Hills mentioned on the present.

Still, a political comeback for Hancock is just not out of the query. Conservative lawmaker Nadine Dorries was suspended in 2012 for showing on the identical present. Nine years later, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed her to his Cabinet.