What does Matt Hancock offer the Conservative party? He’s a former Remainer who has stayed loyal in Theresa May’s Cabinet and so has a bit of a tricky pitch to make to a party furious about the outgoing Prime Minister’s failure to deliver Brexit. He also hasn’t got an eye-catching drugs story to get attention, for better or worse.
His solution this morning was to offer a slightly trippy leadership launch at which he went entirely overboard on the optimism, energy and bizarre motivational aphorisms. He told a slightly bewildered and haggard-looking press pack that “you are the future of Britain!”, gesticulated at the view behind him and declared “I look at the world around me and I think wow!”
The world around him was, incidentally, looking grey and drenched in the pouring rain. It was pointless, he argued, to be prime minister unless you knew your heart.
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