I have to confess that when I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here first aired 20 years ago, I really rather liked the format.

It was fun to see celebrities deprived of comforts and ‘forced’ to do humiliating tasks.

I say 'forced' but the only compulsion to eat unmentionable bits of animals was the hefty fee they would lose if they walked away from the show.

But like all shows of this ilk, once the novelty wore off I started to lose interest in it.

The celebs gradually slipped from A list, to B list, to C list and then to ‘I was a little bit famous once a long time ago but if I go on the this show it might revive my career’ or ‘no one’s ever heard of me but if I eat kangaroo anus people will know who I am’.

Which brings us to this year’s show. I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit I have watched every single gruesome minute of it while muttering expletives under my breath.

The reason, of course, is the inclusion of former Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock.

I really should know better than to watch a man so cynically trying to forge a new post-politics career for himself while trying to re-write history about his catastrophic handling of the Covid pandemic.

So while it might have been funny to see him retching while eating fish eyes or being covered in entrails, I’m not laughing.

The trouble is, the Tory government’s scandals come so thick and fast it’s difficult to keep track of them but I think it’s worth revisiting some of Hancock’s.

Think back to the first Covid wave in 2020 with elderly patients discharged from hospitals without being tested for the virus.

This is what the British Medical Journal (BMJ) wrote in April this year: “Government policy that exposed thousands of vulnerable elderly people in England to SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of the pandemic was irrational in failing to advise that asymptomatic patients sent to care homes to free up hospital beds should be isolated for 14 days, two senior judges have ruled.

“The decision that Matt Hancock, then health and social care secretary, operated an unlawful policy gives the lie to Hancock’s claim to have thrown a protective ring around care homes when the pandemic struck. About 20,000 care home residents in England died from Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020.”

Then we come to the shortage of PPE. Remember all those scenes of nurses having to use binsacks because PPE wasn’t available?

A year after the start of the pandemic, Hancock made the shocking claims that ‘there was never a national shortage [of PPE], thanks to my team’ and that there was ‘no evidence’ of healthcare workers dying due to lack of PPE on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

And yet we have the evidence of our own eyes that this was simply not true.

How about Test and Trace. Let’s go back to the BMJ which wrote: “England’s Covid-19 testing and tracing system failed to achieve its main objective - to break chains of transmission and enable people to return to a more normal life - despite an ‘eye watering’ budget of £37bn.

“The damning report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said that the contact tracing service was one of the most expensive health programmes delivered during the pandemic to nearly 20 per cent of the entire 2020-21 NHS England budget. However, after it was set up the UK still had two national lockdowns and significant case numbers.”

Then we come to the so-called Nightingale hospitals? They were conference centres converted into hospitals at a cost of £530m on Hancock’s watch.

They were just an expensive white elephant, a waste of money. Why? Because they didn’t see many patients and there weren’t enough staff to run them in any event.

Remarkably, Hancock survived this omnishambles. What finally did for Hancock as a minister was his extra marital affair.  

When footage was published of him in ‘clinch’ with his aide Gina Coladangelo in his office, he was banged to rights for flagrantly disregarding the social distancing regulations he himself had introduced. He was subsequently forced resign as health minister in June 2021.

And finally, let’s not forget, Hancock is a serving MP who has chosen to abandon his constituents in the middle of the worst cost of living crisis since in living memory.

So excuse me if I don’t find his antics in the jungle very funny. He should face a trial, but not the bush tucker kind.