When I was a teenager lurking in the weirder corners of the pre-Facebook internet, it was common to find fan fiction – Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Doctor Who – written in the faux-diary format. It would include lines like “Day three: Have agreed to carry Ring to Mordor. In hindsight, probably a bad move”.
This is, in essence, how Matt Hancock has approached his new book. The former health secretary’s loftily titled Pandemic Diaries are actually nothing of the sort. Hancock tells us so in the prologue: “Of course, I didn’t have time to keep a detailed diary in the midst of the maelstrom, nor would it have been right to do so.” So – and forgive me for being pedantic here – why call it a diary? Why go further and present this account (“meticulously pieced together” not from an actual diary but from a hodgepodge of formal papers, notes, voice memos, emails and interviews after the fact) in a form that misleadingly begins, “Wednesday 1 January: I woke up in Suffolk after a quiet New Year’s Eve”? Why would a politician who left office in disgrace after lying to his family and the country try to rehabilitate himself with the public by publishing a memoir in a form that is, in itself, a lie?
Content from our partners
