Matt Hancock's off-putting TikTok is giving me the IckTok
Matt Hancock wants you to know he is just a regular guy, and his latest TikTok is a testament to that. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a video of Hancock walking along a beach, lip syncing to I’m Just Ken from the Barbie soundtrack, complete with little accompanying dance moves. It’s chilling stuff.
The response has been, on balance, vitriolic. But did Hancock genuinely think this bum-clenching video would land in any other way? Is he so out of touch that he thought young people would find it zeitgeisty and relatable, or does he have some sort of masochistic desire for public humiliation?
It’s all part of the persona Hancock has adopted since he went on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity and lost the Tory whip: Matt, Man of The People. “I’m a normal person now, I’m not a ConservativeMP,” Hancock said in a speech in May, pint in hand. It’s a line he’s been touting around. His advice for MPs on how to appeal to young people is to “just like, just be normal, like the people we represent”.
It’s all part of the persona Hancock has adopted since he went on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity and lost the Tory whip
I met Hancock recently, at the National Portrait Gallery’s swish summer party. Everyone was dressed up in suits and frocks. I spotted him wearing chinos, an untucked short sleeve shirt, and, that bastion of the yummy mummy, a pair of white Veja trainers. When I asked him to talk me through the outfit, he said that suits were for “teachers and politicians”. I couldn’t help wondering, have you forgotten that you are still an MP?
In the world according to Hancock, the key to being normal and appealing to young liberal voters is posting TikToks and wearing trainers. But as the target audience, I can say it all just makes him seem like an unserious person. No one wants robotic politicians who appear incapable of human emotion. But we also don’t want them to be frivolous aspiring micro influencers.
If you look past the IckToks, Hancock says some relatable things: young people are sick of politicians fanning the flames of the culture wars. They care about housing, the environment and the cost of living. It’s obvious stuff that seems to go over the heads of many of his former colleagues. But this is lost in a bin fire of social media stunts and a tiresome insistence from Hancock that he is, after all, just like us.
Claudia Cockerell is a diary reporter
