Well reader what a week it’s been. As we speak a giant Trump baby balloon is floating across Westminster and I think we all agree that this is indeed the most incredible of scenes.
It turns out football is not in fact coming home just yet but as Diary has France in the Civil Society Towers sweepstake it’s made a swift pivot from devastation to prancing around the office chanting ‘allez les bleus’. But before the dream was dashed the clever social media folk at Bloodwise got together a social media campaign urging people to wear a waistcoat a la Gareth Southgate and donate, which made social media just a bit more pleasant for a few short hours.
But most importantly this week civil society lost one of its biggest champions in Parliament and Diary's greatest source of content since Brooks Newmark.
Yes, if you cast your mind back to Monday evening everyone’s favourite cabinet minister with responsibility for charities, one Matt Hancock, the creator of his very own social network and bizarre champion of vellum (#vivavellum anyone?).
So this week Diary pays its own unique tribute, with our highlights from his short but oh so sweet spell overseeing charities.
19 February 2016: It all began with #vivavellum
This wasn't the first time that Matt has overseen the charity sector. Back in 2016 he was minister for the Cabinet Office when it had responsibility for charities, where he started an unlikley hashtag that Diary has never let anyone forget.
Hancock stepped in to save the “millennium-long tradition” of printing Acts of Parliament on vellum (parchment made from lamb or goat-calf skin), because, you know, priorities.
On 10 February, the House of Lords – not exactly a branch of government known for being particularly hip and up-to-date – decided that documents of state should henceforth be printed on boring, seemingly new-fangled, wood-pulped, garden-variety paper, in order to save £100,000 a year. Hancock and his merry band of Cabinet Office antiquarians have since stepped in to save the day.
“Recording laws on vellum is a millennium-long tradition and surprisingly cost-effective,” said Hancock in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. “While the world constantly changes, we should safeguard some of our great traditions." This story has done nothing to dissuade this column of its conviction that Matt Hancock is not actually a real person, but instead a composite creation of the Cabinet Office to be wheeled out whenever they make an unpopular or unfathomable decision; it is good to know that taxpayer’s hard-earned money will continue to go towards the brutal butchering and skinning of farmyard animals for, essentially, stationary.
It may also come as a crumb of comfort to those in the charity sector to know that, no matter how many times the Cabinet Office fluffs its lines when it comes to the voluntary sector, at least its not actively skinning, stretching and writing on street fundraisers. Diary can’t help but feel for the kids here in all of this, though. Much like a marathon, it’s fair to say that these changes are going to be hardest on the calves.
22 April 2016: #Vivavellum – the re-envelluming II
Good news first off this week for fans of antiquated printing materials and the skinning and stretching of slaughtered young animals – Matt Hancock and the Tory party have saved vellum! Yes, earlier this week, the House of Commons voted to continue the age-old tradition of printing and recording for posterity all laws on vellum.
The House of Lords had originally voted to move to plain old paper, as a way of saving the public purse over £100,000 a year. Enter our hero Matthew Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, paymaster general and all-round Conservative stooge; who took it upon himself to single-handedly save the tradition and, by extension, the entire vellum-producing industry.
And some people have the gumption to suggest that the Tories aren’t the party of the working class and of small business… Pipe down Port Talbot, the government’s getting to you! So, vellum’s back baby! Almost as if it never left. Hancock’s said that he’ll find a way to make the whole thing a bit more cost-effective. No harm, no foul, right? Unless of course, dear reader, you’re in fact a baby sheep or lamb in which case, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!
Also, kudos on learning to read. Who cares though, right? Well, this column wouldn’t normally, if it hadn’t been for the fact that both Matt Hancock and (somehow even worse) one Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, hadn’t taken to Twitter to grotesquely laud this pointless victory over the commoners with perhaps the most Tory hashtag to ever grace the medium since… well, #HappyBirthdayYourMajesty.
The fact that the two overlapped with one another on the same day is almost too much to bear. During the Commons vote, Matt Hancock tweeted a picture of himself ostensibly standing amongst rolls and rolls of vellum parchment reading something – in a Manilla folder mind, no doubt printed on A4 sheets of PAPER!
#VivaVellum? There is literally no reason why vellum needs its own hashtag. The practice of writing on vellum and of tweeting are so far removed from one another in terms of the history of the printed word as to be completely alien to one another. As if to rub salt into the already egregious social media wounds, Rob Wilson – he of the humanising neck beard and the orange socks – then also tweeted using #VivaVellum.
Just… no words. Haven’t they got anything better to do? Is this what our taxpayer money is going towards? Won’t somebody please think of the kids!
12 January 2018: A Matt Stat Attack
Hancock seems to have been with us forever, but truly his relationship with Diary is all too brief, beginning only on 12 January. At the time we discovered many entertaining facts. He's the only sitting MP to have ridden a professional horse race winner. He was also part of a cricket team which played a match on an Arctic pitch. Literally, Matt Hancock played a game of cricket in the Arctic.
Then there's his charity fundraising.
"I have dressed up as a sumo wrestler, carried a pedometer for a week and even lost two stone to race a charger around the Newmarket July course," he told the House of Commons. "Charities channel the best of our instincts against the worst that life can inflict, whether that is sickness of mind and body, entrenched poverty or natural disaster."
A SUMO wrestler reader. There are no words.
2 February 2018: App Hancock!
It was early this year, when, like the rays of the rising sun on the first day of spring or a cold change on the hottest day of the year, Matt Hancock launched his own personal app.
“Hi, I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app.” With those few words, Matt Hancock’s app opens to a video of him, smiling and intensely annunciating his every word like the lead in a secondary school production of Hamlet. Or at least we presume it still does. No idea if it's still open.
“It’s a chance to find out what’s going on both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary,” he continues (wonder if he'll update this now he's gone). “And most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.”
He may have done so unwittingly but it is a fact indisputable that Matt Hancock's app has saved social media. Not all heroes wear capes, in much the same way that not all Hans necessarily need to be solo.
While the app was clearly designed predominantly with Hancock’s constituents in mind, it quite quickly became a refuge for the Westminster press pack to share their favourite Matt Hancock memes, salty gifs and generally take the piss out of the whole enterprise.
6 July 2018: Parkour me another one
And last (and probably least) just a fortnight ago, Matt Hancock did parkour.
Now, for those of you not aware of what parkour is, it’s that thing you’ve probably seen incredibly thin people in baggy sweatpants doing on videos before. The thing where they run around urban environments vaulting off walls onto smaller walls, hauling themselves up walls and window embrasures and just generally doing things that make no sense, given one could just walk normally, or take a lift. It is also, ludicrously, French.
Matt, nous t'aimons beaucoup.
What's your favourite Hancock moment? Answers on parchment made from lamb or goat-calf skin please.
