Eating kangaroo penis on live TV will not be the first gut wrenching challenge of Matt Hancock’s career. At the end of a long day in September 2007, Matt walked into my office looking like his dog, cat and pet parrot had all been shot. He closed the door behind him and said: ‘We have a big problem.’
It was the eve of the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool and Matt, myself and the entire opposition team had been working around the clock to prepare a package of game-changing policies to announce.
The secrecy of those policies was mission critical. Indeed it’s fair to say that David Cameron’s ambitions to become PM rather rested on it.
As an adviser to Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, Matt’s job was to make sure the policies were ‘bomb proof’ – that the sums added up. And he was rather good at it. But in the pre-conference rush one of his team had emailed across the entire policy package and without a password.
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